Best Practices for Promoting Podcasts: Podcast-to-Podcast Campaigns
Here at Realm, we love audio storytelling. In our Medium posts, we’ll share industry news, insights, and metrics from our own Realm channel and advice from our team on strategy and tactics.
Note: We’ll be holding a special Reddit AMA for all things marketing on Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023. Find out more here.
Today, the marketing team at Realm is excited to share some of our best practices for marketing and promoting podcasts and growing a podcast brand through podcast-to-podcast promotion. For a bit of background, Realm has released over 40 original narrative podcasts and has partnered with over 80 other shows to grow our network and build our podcast brand over the last two years. We focus on scalability and sustainability as we grow a network of high quality content.
While there are countless ways to structure marketing and promotion campaigns for media properties — PR, events, social media ads, etc. — it’s typically easiest to convert an audience if they are within the same medium. For example, your Facebook ads will work best to drive engagement to a page on Facebook or an event that you’re promoting there. YouTube ads will work best to drive video views on YouTube. From those starting points, you can lead the audience back to the product you’re trying to promote, but it’s a multi-step process and can be very expensive to manage at scale.
When we promote Realm podcasts, we employ many initiatives to drive audience. But one of the most directly attributable, scalable, and cost-efficient methods we’ve found is through podcast-to-podcast promotion. Today we’ll provide some tips based on our learnings thus far in this space.
Tip #1: Establish benchmarks before investing in paid campaigns
When we first launched our Realm network in April 2021, we launched the channel with 10 original podcasts. Before investing in paid campaigns, we needed to understand our own listeners and the power of our existing network. To do this, we focused entirely on cross promotion and ad swaps with other shows and networks with similar content.
Realm in-network cross promotion for dynamically inserted ads showed that 2.4% of all listeners on our network who listened to a cross promotion went on to listen to the Realm show they were advertised.
Ad swaps with like-minded networks also performed well, with about 0.26% of the other network listeners converted to Realm shows. This is an average across all the ad swaps we ran, but there was a lot of fluctuation based on show size and frequency. Side note: Chartable has some incredibly useful charts in understanding the “sweet spot” of size and frequency as you consider where to focus your energies.
Through these early tests, we learned that the Realm network is a strong tool for us to drive audiences from one show to another, and gave us some conversion rate benchmarks for future cross promotions. We also learned that targeting other like-minded audiences worked really well—ad swaps with other networks was a great way to build our early audience and form relationships with similar creators. From this, we created a baseline for what to expect in terms of audience growth through cross promotions and ad swaps.
If you run a network, be highly intentional with your cross promotion and track everything! Encourage each producer to record their own ad read. Lean on the human/personal element, not just what the show is. We found much higher engagement and conversion from creative that focused on the why and who of the show, not just the what. It’s unlikely that listeners will remember complex plot points from an audio ad, but they will remember the vibe of the ad and the feeling they got when they heard it. It can be a great avenue to grow your listener base. If you just have a single show, track down other shows and networks that have like-minded content and pitch ad swaps. These benchmarks show your baseline ability to grow without investment into paid campaigns.
Tip #2: Then, test small, targeted campaigns and perfect those
After our initial tests and benchmarking with free ad-swaps and cross promotions, we moved on to experimenting with small, targeted campaigns on other fiction podcasts.
From these campaigns, we saw a conversion of 0.78%, at a cost of $1.00 per download. In comparison to industry standard conversion rates of 0.3% to 0.6%, these were promising results. We learned that we had targeted the right small audiences for these early campaigns. If your early conversions on these tests are not strong, you may need to go back to the drawing board on who you target as a like-minded small audience. It might also be worth digging into your own audience demographics—the data may surprise you! If you are set up in Chartable, that can be a good place to learn about who’s listening to your shows. But we’d also recommend surveying your fans through your own audio ad campaign, social posts, etc. This can help you hone in more effectively on where to focus your promotion.
These conversions were so strong, we thought about just doing more and more of these hyper-targeted campaigns. However, performance marketing 101 tells us that high conversion rates on small campaigns probably won’t scale to the level we need, and that as audience size grows, conversion rates naturally decrease. If you get 70% of a base of 100 people, that’s amazing! But it’s only 70 people. We needed to scale up our targeted paid campaigns to larger audiences to meaningfully grow our audience numbers. These smaller tests showed us that we were looking in the right places to target an audience we thought would like our Realm shows and gave us a best-case scenario for paid campaign benchmarks.
Tip #3: Now, broaden your scope and target larger audiences
This will be the hardest tip to follow thus far — you’ve tested your ability to promote your show(s) through cross promotions and ad swaps and you’ve located and perfected targeting small audiences through paid campaigns. Now you need to drive bigger, adjacent audiences to learn about your content.
We hypothesized that true crime fans would be a complementary target audience for fiction podcasts, because they have high engagement rates and enjoy narrative storytelling. And, of course, the true crime listener market is large, so we knew we’d be able to reach a larger audience while maintaining a sense of content affinity. Fiction podcast listenership is growing quickly and today it’s about the size that True Crime was three years ago.
Over the course of 12 months, we ran run-of-network campaigns across two major networks’ true crime categories. The true crime audience converted at a rate of 0.19% and cost $2.37 per download. These were certainly promising, though $2+ per download is still a hefty price tag. When possible, narrow tests to even smaller show groupings where you believe the audience has stronger crossover. Along the way, offset this cost-per-download with cheaper or free promos so your overall cost-per-download is more efficient.
We also ran an audience-targeted campaign as a programmatic test for a Realm show that was related to a well-known TV property. This audience converted at a rate of 0.09% and cost $12.02 per download. Programmatic campaigns are definitely interesting if you are highly confident in exactly who and where your audience is. For more nascent categories like fiction, this can be challenging because of the lack of data and trends that aren’t based on single, long-standing properties. Additionally, within a given category, there can be massively different audiences show-to-show. We’ll continue to investigate this avenue of paid promotion, but at minimum spends of $25k for a single piece of creative, this can be a risky area to explore.
Tip #4: With all this data, you can now build a tool to guide effective spending and track your current campaign efforts against historical results
Using all the data we collected from these tests, we built a tool to guide effective spending and audience targeting. When we are looking at growing an audience for a given show, we can plug in our targeted growth rates and budget to see how best to spend our efforts. Using historical data, we can get an idea of the size of growth expected from the combination of cross promotion, ad swaps, small targeted campaigns and large audience campaigns, and then add to this mix other sources, like our community channels and O&O platform promotion. Campaigns should still be tailored to each show, but with this tool we now have an evidence-based strategy for spending our marketing budget to reach download and monetization goals.
How you build this tool and use it comes down to your needs and strengths — it could be written out on a piece of paper or built into a calculator, as we have done. Regardless of the level of complexity in your approach, we can say with certainty that gathering this data will tell you how your targeting is working, where to improve, and see how your running campaigns stack up against those you’ve run in the past.
Conclusion
Treat your marketing and campaign efforts like a scientist and employ the scientific method, even when you are doing things like ad swaps, because every data point you gather along the way will help create a more efficient and affordable path to growth for your show(s). But balance that analytic approach with intentional and engaging creative messaging — there is no effective campaign without the right creative.
We hope this issue was helpful in giving you a framework for marketing and promoting your podcast or network through podcast-to-podcast campaigns.
More to Come!
Stay tuned for more articles like this one by subscribing to get updates on new posts. We’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, or if you just want to chat email us: medium@realm.fm
If you’d like to advertise on Realm’s network or set up ad swaps, please get in touch with us at https://realm.fm/advertise
