6 Podcast Promotion Tactics: Paid Advertising

After launching a podcast, it’s no surprise that you’ve started to look into ways to grow your audience. Podcast marketing is no easy task. It takes time, strategy, budget, and lots (we mean lots) of testing. 

Throughout this article we’ve broken down 5 advertising platforms that you can use to promote your podcast and grow your audience. Let’s dive in:

1. Podcast Addict 

Podcast Addict is an app offered on Google Play (sorry Apple users, this one isn’t for you)! This listening app is a great option to promote your podcast and grow your audience. You can either purchase the main advertisement slots on the homepage which are usually between $1,000-2,000 USD or you can buy an ad slot in a specific podcast category. 

Podcast Addict will indicate the categories that you’re able to advertise within based on your podcast’s RSS feed. For example, if your show is about cooking, they’re not going to let you advertise in the technology category. This helps to ensure that your show is being shown to a targeted audience who are more likely to be interested in your content. With each ad that you purchase, Podcast Addict gives you the predicted impressions and clicks that you might receive. You can use this information to better prepare and strategize launching your ads. 

Metrics Provided: 

1. Impressions 
2. Clicks 
3. CTR (click-through rate) 
4. Subscriptions (on Podcast Addict) 

2. Castbox 

Castbox is a free podcast app for both Android and Apple users with over 95 million volumes of audio content. Although advertising on Castbox comes at a higher price, it’s an effective way for podcasters to grow their audience. Campaigns usually start around $2,000 USD and run for an entire month. For this platform, you work directly with a team member at Castbox and apply to be featured on their general banner or in the “Editor’s Picks” section. 

If you’re accepted into a Castbox ad, you will be given the predicted number of impressions and downloads that may be received during the campaign. You can also target your ads based on geography. For example, you may want to run an ad in the United States but exclude Canada. 

Metrics Provided: 

1. Impressions 
2. CTR 
3. Download Increase 
4. Subscribers 

3. Spotify Advertising 

Spotify Advertising allows you to advertise 30-second audio ads throughout the Spotify app to non-premium users. Unlike on Castbox and Podcast Addict, you don’t have to be a podcast to advertise on Spotify. There is a minimum spend of $250 and you can run your campaign for as long or as short as you want, depending on your budget and the results that you want to see in a single day. 

The platform has pretty good targeting options, allowing you to select the age, gender, and country, as well as more specific areas like audience interests, real-time contexts, music preferences, and more. They also offer resources to help you produce your ad if you do not have the time or capabilities to do it yourself. 

Metrics Provided: 

1. Reach 
2. Completion Rate 
3. Ads Served 
4. Audience Metrics (age, gender, genre)
5. Clicks
6. CTR

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4. AudioGO 

Whether an individual podcaster or brand, AudioGO makes it easy to create, schedule, and run audio ads on podcast networks through their self-serve advertising platform. Some of their partner networks include leading brands such as iHeartRadio, Spreaker, Kast, Podcast One, and Audioboom.

The platforms targeting is based on specific audience bases, allowing you to select your desired listener's location, demographics, interests, user profiles, music preferences and over 20+ podcast genres containing more than 7,500 shows across networks. Similar to Spotify Advertising, they require a minimum of $250 for your campaign to run. In addition, AudioGO also has an in-app creative studio that'll cut 30-second spots for $10 and in less than 24 hours, all that's required is a script and your choice of voice actor and background music.

Metrics Provided: 

1. Real-Time Campaign Progress
2. Impressions (daily, overall, & by music genre)
3. Reach
4. Listen-Through Rate
5. Campaign CTR
6. Unique Listeners Reached
7. Daily Clicks

5. Megaphone 

Megaphone, now owned by Spotify, gives you access to the Spotify Audience Network. This network is an audio-first marketplace for advertisers to reach targeted and engaged listeners at scale. The platform gives you access to Spotify’s network of podcasts and allows you to advertise to listeners wherever, whenever. 

Unlike Podcast Addict, Spotify Advertising, and Castbox - Megaphone is a marketplace. This means that you’re purchasing ads that will be heard within an actual podcast episode rather than in-between episodes/music or featured on a banner-style ad. With Megaphone, you launch a campaign, set up your targeting, and your ad will be heard by the audience segment that you’ve selected. Targeting is based on the audience, not the podcast.

For example, you and I could both be listening to the same podcast, but I’m in the United States but you’re in Europe. The advertiser only wants listeners who live in North America to hear the ad, so although we’re both listening to the same show, I’ll hear the advertisement but you won’t. This sort of targeted advertising can be very useful to you as a podcaster if you have specific locations where you have high listener engagement. 

Metrics Provided: 

1. Along with basic campaign metrics, Megaphone has calculated the lift in website traffic, purchase intent, information seek intent, recommendation intent, and more for various industries so you can discover how others in your space have performed with the platform. 

6. Acast 

The last advertising platform we’re looking at is Acast. Similar to Megaphone, Acast is a podcast marketplace. The platform provides access to over 25,000 shows and more than 300 million listeners every single month. With Acast, you either provide your own audio to be inserted into podcasts or you can work with their team to create content. 

As an advertiser, you work with Acast’s team to identify the podcasts that are most relevant to your content and who you’re trying to target. An interesting thing that Acast does once you’ve begun advertising within a show is that they can actually add your advertisement throughout the show’s back catalogue so that if a listener selects an episode that was released before you started advertising with Acast, it will still be heard. 

Metrics Provided: 

• Acast provides tracking and attribution information to all advertisers so you can effectively measure how many listeners you’re obtaining from your ads and where they’re coming from. 

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Podcast Promotion 

This article dives into just 5 potential advertising platforms to promote your podcast, but there are so many more out there. Take the time to research all of your options, set aside a budget, and then test! A particular platform might work really well for one podcast but not for yours, it all depends. Don’t get discouraged if one platform doesn’t work for you. If that happens, wrap up your campaign and move on to another.