Podcast Advertising Grows Brand Awareness

This well-known tech company wanted to develop a reputation as a trusted, top-level domain in the bot development space. Their website was still in its infancy, competing against well-recognized and established brands. While they published content regularly, their lack of visibility as a newcomer required an approach that cultivated and nourished their organic search momentum.

To generate brand awareness in the bot development niche, our team built a podcast advertising strategy around our target persona – a business owner and a bot enthusiast named Greg.

To confirm we were targeting the right persona, we first ran a test campaign with a $10K budget. Once we started to see results and gained a better understanding of podcast listeners in this space, we refined our campaign strategy, doubled the budget, and tripled our number of sponsorships (from 15 episodes to 42).

Our overall strategy included:

• Prospecting – To ensure we were targeting Greg to the best of our abilities, we searched for podcasts in the business and development niche.
• Budgeting – After establishing what it would cost to sponsor podcasts within our niche, our team ran a cost-benefit analysis and determined which podcasts were going to result in the best ROI.
• Defining KPIs – The success of the podcast advertising initiative was measured by downloads per episode, direct and referral traffic, and user engagement.
• On-Air Messaging – To foster brand awareness and build trust, talking points were crafted for podcast hosts to reference during the sponsorship announcement. Each talking point tied directly back to the mission and vision of the client’s site.
• Landing Page Design – Custom ‘welcome’ landing pages were designed and developed for each sponsored podcast. These landing pages not only helped us segment and understand where listeners were coming from, but they also created a unique environment for first-time visitors.

In total, the podcast advertising initiative generated 800K episode downloads, which resulted in an uplift across our organic metrics:

• 127% Higher Average Time on Site (125 seconds vs. 55 seconds)
• 40% Higher Pages Per Visit (1.97 vs. 1.41)
• 24% Lower Bounce Rate (59% vs. 78%)
• 7% Higher Return Rate (6.83% vs. 6.38%)

Additionally, these results were achieved without any product or service discount offers to podcast listeners, a tactic that is typically used to engage listeners and drive them to the website.

Furthermore, the podcasts we worked with linked to sponsors within their show notes, which were part of a larger link building and content promotion initiative for the brand. Nearly every episode we sponsored was syndicated, resulting in 400 followed and 200 no-followed/no-index links. The followed links generated from these initiatives were part of a broader push that led to a 222% increase in organic traffic over a seven-month period.

Organic visitors during podcast campaigns one (9.5 weeks) and two (13.5 weeks):