Spotify advertising can be a great way to not only grow a brand but also grow a podcast audience,
At Quill we use Spotify advertising for the vast majority of our clients. We love it for a variety of reasons but the main one is that you’re advertising to users that are already on their preferred listening platform. When it comes to advertising on the Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagrams of the world, you’re asking users to discover the podcast and then click off of social media into a listening platform to tune in.
That’s a pretty big ask.
Overall we’ve found that advertising a podcast on social media tends to be good for awareness but Spotify tends to be better for both awareness and actual clicks. Spotify ads show up on free accounts only though, and you may be thinking, don’t the vast majority of people have a premium account at this point? Yes, many people do, but there are still over 155 million free accounts that you can be advertising to.
One thing that I will quickly note about podcast advertising in general is that it’s not really possible to track clicks to downloads (yes, annoying). So while Spotify tracks clicks for you, you then have to monitor how your downloads fluctuate during the periods you’re running ads.
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s dive into creating your Spotify Ad:
To begin, you need to make a Spotify advertising account in Spotify Ad Studio. This is pretty self-explanatory, just head over to Spotify Ad Studio and click “Start Now”.
Now we get into the creative part. Time to bring your ad to life!
With Spotify advertising ads can be a maximum of 30 seconds in length so you have to capture listener attention and get your message out there quickly. This is usually the formula that we follow when creating ad scripts for our clients:
And that’s it! Once you’re done with your script, time yourself reading through it so you have an idea of how long it’ll be when you decide to record.
Once your script is good to go it’s time to record! At Quill, we record and edit all of our ads in-house, and you’re more than welcome to do the same. If you already have your podcast setup, it’s pretty easy to get your ad recorded and edited.
But, if you don’t have the resources or capabilities to record and edit your ad, Spotify has a tool in Spotify Ad Studio that does it all for you. Basically you feed them your script and the background music you’d like, and then professional voice actors will record the ad. They’ll also cover the mixing and mastering of the ad once it’s recorded.
Now it’s time to share your ad with the world!
From your dashboard in Spotify Ad Studio, you’ll be asked to create your campaign. Within your campaign, you’ll have ad groups (similar to Google Ads). You can set your ad groups as different items -- maybe by episode, or based on your targeting parameters. It’s all up to you.
Spotify has a minimum of $250 USD that you need to set for a campaign. From here you can increase the budget however you want. We usually recommend having our clients start with the $250 budget and increase based on performance, since at the end of the day, Spotify Ads aren’t going to work for every single podcast out there.
Once you reach this step you need to start considering who exactly your audience is and who you want to be targeting.
Spotify Ad Studio lets you target based on:
Once you’re done with targeting, approve the ad and send it out to the world! You’ll receive a confirmation email once Spotify has approved your ad.
Once your ad is approved and running, it’s important to regularly check in and analyze performance. Spotify reporting allows you to do just that.
Spotify provides you with information including:
You can also export and download some of the metrics you gather from Spotify. If you navigate to your ad set, there’s an arrow next to “download data” within the ad set’s report tab. This function allows you to export your ads information!
And that's it! Pretty easy, right?
If you have any questions about launching your Spotify Ad or bringing your podcast to life, get in touch with the Quill team!
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