✊ Is paid podcast promotion the ultimate growth hack? (Or a bottomless money pit...)
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Hi friends, Picture this: You've been producing your show for a couple years, posting about it regularly on social media, guesting on other podcasts, and running regular collaborations & cross-promos with other shows. In short: You’re doing all the right things. And yet… You’re stuck. While your organic marketing got you a base of listeners, it's no longer having the impact it used to. Faced with this frustrating reality, it's only a matter of time before the question pops into your mind: “I wonder if it's worth paying to promote my podcast to get it in front of new people?” The question is perfectly logical. The problem (it appears) is a lack of exposure to enough of the right people. And whether it’s Meta, Google, YouTube, podcast apps, or ads placed directly on other podcasts, exposure to the right people is exactly what these platforms offer the potential to do. And, in many cases, they’re scary (and I do mean scary) good at it. With the right product, business model, targeting, and ad creative (ie. your copy, ad read, images and/or videos, etc), many businesses grow to 6, 7, 8, or 9+ figures of revenue and/or valuations on the back of paid advertising. In other words, paid growth works. But… There are a handful of problems to solve to unlock it. Problems which podcasters in particular should be mindful of. The first problem has to do with diagnosing their current marketing bottleneck correctly. See, in my experience working with literally hundreds of shows, 95% of them have less of an exposure problem than they do an Attraction and/or Retention problem This means that even if they get the show in front of tens of thousands of highly-aligned people, relatively few of them will click through… let alone click play… let alone stick around and become regular listeners. The result is a hugely inefficient advertising campaign where each genuine, long-term fan of the show costs hundreds of dollars to acquire. Which brings us to the second problem: Return on ad spend. Businesses that thrive on paid advertising work because they have a very clear (and highly optimized) path to recouping their ad cost… ideally, within a short amount of time. In other words, they spend $1,000 this month and within a few weeks have made back that $1,000 and more. In podcasting, however, it's tough to make the numbers work. If you’re working with sponsors at a $25 CPM rate, each listener is worth $0.025 per ad impression. Which means that even if you have enough sponsors to fill three ad slots per episode, each listener is still only worth $0.075/episode… Which means that even if you acquired that listener for a bargain rate of $2 from your advertising, they would need to listen to 27 episodes before you broke even. Based on the data I’ve seen, it’s likely that only 5-15% of a show’s total listenership will ever listen to that number of episodes, which means your actual payback period will be much longer… if it ever materializes. Now, if you have a high ticket offer your podcast is designed to sell—valued at $5k or $10k, for example—the math is significantly better. BUT… Advertising your podcast directly is a much less efficient way of getting customers than it is to advertise another asset, say a lead magnet, or a low-ticket gateway product. And then there's the final problem: Advertising is really f***ing hard. Doing paid advertising well requires you to:
Yes, advertising will guarantee you visibility… But your creative must capture the attention and then compel someone (who is likely inherently skeptical of ads) to click through. In other words, it's no accident that a sizeable percentage of the most talented creative people in the world work in the advertising industry. So yes... Suffice it to say, I'm highly skeptical of advertising as a channel for podcast growth. That said… I also believe there are some sneaky, underrated, under-utilized, and even unknown ways to use advertising to grow both your podcast and your business. These tactics require a bit of creativity and a clear strategy behind them. But done well, they can have huge payoffs in the long—and perhaps even short—run. In this week’s episode of Podcast Marketing Trends Explained, Justin and I dig into the details of paid advertising, sharing our advertising adventures, cautionary tales, and some surprising tactics for how to make paid growth work for you. You can add the episode to your listening queue in your favourite podcast app or watch on YouTube. Have you tried paid growth strategies for your show? If so, hit reply and tell me where you've spent your ad budget, how much you spent, and the results—in terms of both listener growth and ROI—along with anything else you think I might be interested in. Oh, and if you want my help designing either a paid or organic (or both!) growth strategy for your show, check out the info below.
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