Podcast Landscape: Aligning Brands for Success
From stars like Conan O’Brien to the random person you met at a party that records an extremely niche podcast in their basement, podcasting offers a little something for everyone.
With hundreds of millions U.S. listeners a month, podcasts have firmly established themselves in mainstream media and show no signs of slowing down. Not only is listenership skyrocketing, but compared to the U.S. population, podcast listeners are more affluent, more likely to be employed and more educated.
With genres ranging from business and technology to sports and comedy, the question remains: How can businesses find podcasts that align with their brand and convert listeners to sales?
As hundreds of brands try their hand at podcast advertising, more often than not, those initial tests never truly evolve into a profitable or reliable advertising channel. However, brands that have cracked the code continue to see organic growth and reap the benefits. It is easy to see the positive influence of podcast advertising firsthand and think, “How hard could it be?”
Without fail, in-house decision makers test podcasts they are familiar with or shows they find at the top of the podcast charts (oftentimes their favorite shows), and time and time again, these campaigns end after the initial test phase. There are a plethora of factors that contribute to successful podcast campaigns, and our team of experienced podcast professionals takes all the guesswork out of it. Here at Pixly, our team has over 10-plus years of experience creating successful podcast campaigns, from video game developers to meal-kit delivery services to everything in between.
The Tools and Experience Needed for Success
After exhausting time and money in market research to determine your target audience, finding those perfect podcast audiences seems like a simple task. However, with tens of thousands of podcasts to choose from, but little to no audience information readily available online, this can prove daunting. Finding podcasts in specific genres that align with your brand sounds like a recipe for success, but without knowing these specific audience demographics or performance history, can present serious roadblocks.
Endlessly doing cold outreach to gather these metrics is not only a time suck, but often results in fruitless endeavors. Pixly has cultivated invaluable relationships, both directly with talent and the managers that represent them. These relationships provide us and our clients a wide array of benefits, such as quickly vetting for host interests, preferred rates, gathering audience demographics, geographics and psychographics.
The Power of Influence
Shows that align seamlessly with brand values and target audiences are far from guaranteed to show strong performance and hit desired KPI goals.
Given that every show provides unique value to listeners, it only makes sense that audiences' consumer propensity varies from podcast to podcast. There remains a large distinction between podcast hosts that provide great content and those that have premium engagements with their listeners and influence their audience to take consumer action.
Sometimes, shows and hosts that may not initially appear aligned with a brand emerge as top performers. This is because their influence and connection with their audience outweigh the importance of the specific brand they promote. At Pixly, we utilize various services and tools to gain insights into performance indicators, advertisement frequency on specific channels and other metrics. This allows us to select and test shows that are more likely to succeed.
Genuine Integrations Means Positive Results
In our strategy at Pixly, we start with the basics, sourcing and vetting talent through direct contacts and network partners for shows in desired client demos and ones that have seen continued strong performance in the space for similar brands or services. Vetting talent is often an afterthought, but we firmly believe that performance starts at this stage.
The bottom line is: Audiences have faith in hosts and view them as trusted sources, so it is imperative to ensure all hosts feel strongly about the product or service they are promoting. Genuine enthusiasm from hosts leads to stronger ad reads, which in turn leads to more interest, visits and conversions from the audience. From there, we negotiate pricing, availability and determine the best testing frequency to set the campaign and each show up for optimum success.
In short, as the podcast landscape continues to grow and the number of podcasts soars, sourcing and finding the right podcasts to collaborate with becomes that much more difficult. Leveraging our diverse background and years of experience, our team has access to the biggest names in the space and the hidden gems that continue to crush KPI goals for any product they promote.
Podcasting has the ability to reach audiences that traditional channels cannot, and we here at Pixly are on hand to set up your campaigns for continued success. Take all the guesswork out of it, and leave the rest to us. We look forward to helping you turn podcasting into your top revenue channel in the near future!
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