The Power of the Podcast: Unlock Your Brand's Marketing Potential

Is Your Branded Podcast Worth It? Let's Talk Real ROI

• Pedal Stomper Productions - Josh Troche • Season 2 • Episode 6

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Return on investment (ROI) is the elephant in every marketing room—and when you're running a branded podcast, it's the question you have to answer. In this episode, we tackle the ROI of branded podcasts from every angle: the hard data, the soft signals, and why it doesn't always show up on your bottom line right away.

You won't get vague fluff here. We'll walk you through how to track meaningful engagement, ditch vanity metrics, set strategic goals, and actually measure if your podcast is moving the needle for your brand.

Learn why your podcast might be working even if your bank account hasn’t noticed yet, how to set realistic and measurable goals, and how your podcast builds the long-game of brand equity and customer trust.

Key topics covered in this episode:

  • Understanding Marketing vs. Tangible Assets: Why ROI feels elusive when measuring the success of branded podcasts.
  • Setting Strategic Goals: The first step to tracking ROI effectively and aligning your podcast with broader business objectives.
  • Identifying Vanity Metrics vs. Real Performance Indicators: Focusing on metrics that truly reflect your podcast's impact.
  • Leveraging Listener Retention: How to interpret and use retention rates to gauge audience engagement.
  • Driving Website Click-Throughs: Utilizing actionable calls to action (CTAs) to measure listener interest and interaction.
  • Building Social Shares and Brand Advocates: Encouraging listeners to share your content and become ambassadors for your brand.
  • Integrating Effective Calls to Action: Techniques to seamlessly incorporate CTAs that resonate with your audience.
  • Gaining Insights from Analytics: Going beyond surface-level numbers to understand listener behavior and preferences.
  • Utilizing Direct Listener Feedback and Communities: Engaging with your audience to gather qualitative data on your podcast's impact.
  • Podcasting as a Relationship Builder: How consistent, valuable content fosters long-term relationships with your audience.
  • Consistent Touches vs. Viral Dreams: The importance of regular engagement over seeking viral success.
  • Real-World ROI Examples: Case studies demonstrating how marketing touchpoints add up to tangible results.

In our news segment, we discuss the possibility of YouTube latest venturing into dynamic ad insertion for podcasts. This new feature could allow host-read ads to be dynamically inserted and swapped out within individual YouTube videos, providing podcasters and video creators with greater flexibility and monetization opportunities. We explore how this development could change the game for your branded podcast. 

🚀 Whether you're a small business owner or a marketing manager, this episode serves as your roadmap to understanding the real ROI behind your branded podcast—and how to make it work harder for your business

If you're looking to talk podcasting and get more information on how to make your podcast shine, our 30-minute "no pitch" podcast consultation is right for you!  Click the link to sign up for a time. 
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Book your time in our state of the art studios: https://www.pedalstomperproductions.com/podcast

Join our Discord Server and let's chat about your podcast https://discord.gg/CWk9aUuNtM

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Return on investment is such a big key to any business. And if your podcast is a branded podcast and part of that business, that's going to be a question that's going to come up. So how do you answer that question? And how do you make sure that that question has the right answer for your business? That you're going to find out here in just a minute. Stay tuned. We are back in action after last week. I got to tell you got away from me a little bit. There's some really good news with that, though, as we've brought on a few new podcast clients that are going to be doing more branded podcasts. So I'm really excited to get into those getting those final steps kind of in order for them has been a big to do. And yeah, but I'm really excited about it. One deals with country music, another one deals with real estate. I mean, we're all over the place with these branded podcasts and I'm absolutely here for it. Hopefully you are too. To me, it shows part of the versatility with it. That being said, let's talk about Return on Investment in your podcast because I talk about this with marketing. Marketing can be such a difficult thing to talk about when it comes to investments, because if you make let's say you make widgets and you buy a new widget maker, you can go out onto the factory floor or whatever. And you look at that widget maker, you can touch it, feel it, taste it, smell it, whatever you want to do. You can go out and see that widget maker, and even if it's not working, you're like, hey, the widget maker, it's sitting here, it's it's there. It's on the factory floor. Look, today, if you're a chef of some sort, maybe it's an oven. You've got a new oven. The problem is, is you have to do the marketing in order to need the capacity to use that oven. And in many cases, I know a lot of business owners feel like, hey, I just wrote a check for ether. I mean, I wrote a check for nothing. I what is this doing? What's so tough is to say in a business you look at, like the widget maker or the oven and say, look, I can put something in that and it's going to give me something directly back and you can quantify that. It's a little tougher to quantify things in marketing. Or is it? That's what I kind of want to try and dispel here in this podcast. Figuring out the return on investment for your branded podcast. It doesn't need to be a mystery. It doesn't need to be these. Is it working or is it not? There's you can't answer a math problem with yes or no. There should be numbers to this. And that's some of the things that we're going to talk about. The first thing that I want to talk about in the, in the key of making sure that you're going to get the return on investment that you've put out there, start with strategic goals. I mean, it's pretty obvious when you buy the widget maker of the oven, your goal is to make more widgets or to bake more or whatever. That's that's obvious. That's the goal with marketing people, just like more business. And it doesn't work that way. You can't just say more business. If you could, I would just start dumping money into that machine because, you know, it's basically a money printing machine. The more money you dump in, the more money it's going to print for you. Right? It doesn't quite work that way. We need to figure out what our strategic goals are in the marketing that we're doing. If you say, look, we want to drive traffic to our website, we want to drive more email subscriptions. We want to drive people to a specific sale or a specific item. Those are those are all great, great, great goals to have. And those are strategic goals that you can accomplish. Once again, it puts a number at the end of something. It puts something attainable at the end of something rather than just the mystical magical wave your wand more business thing which we know you have to be specific. I've talked about this in so many other podcasts that we talk about being specific, about what you're talking about, about where your niche is, where your business fits is huge. So why wouldn't you be specific about the marketing that you're doing? Why wouldn't you have specific goals for that other then business? Because that's not really a goal. It's made up of a lot of components on how you're going to get to that goal. Those are the things that we need to achieve. So the thing that too many people focus on when it comes to that is they look at vanity metrics and vanity metrics drive me absolutely nuts. People are like, yeah, I got a thousand views on that. Great. Who cares? I have never walked into the bank and said, hey, I've got 1000 views. Can I put those? Can I deposit those today? No, it doesn't work that way. I got 600 downloads. Awesome. I'm going to take those to the bank. No you're not. So it. Those vanity metrics don't really do anything. And the problem is, is if you don't have that strategic goals, you're just looking at vanity metrics. How many downloads did we get? How many views did we get? Now don't get me wrong. Those numbers are good and those numbers are important. But let's focus on things that we can actually like work on rather than just like we got people. Listener retention is one that I always want to talk about. When do people start to dip away out of your podcast or out of your branded content, whatever that is? If you're doing it in reels, you can go in and look and say, okay, when did people finally start to swipe out of that? How long did they wait to do that? Same thing in YouTube, same thing in podcasts. You can go in. Granted, you are going to see there's going to be the start and then there's going to be a heavy dip. A lot of people are first off, a leaving right off the bat, I get it. They need to see the first couple of seconds before they realize, is this for me or not? It's going to happen. That is why a great hook is such a big key. But you're going to see a pretty steep drop off. But then that line should have this nice. Just taper down. It should be this smooth line that goes down and gradually kind of down and to the right, so to say. I mean we talk about stock market. It should just go up into the right. This is going to go down into the right because people are going to taper off. It's just a natural thing. I've made it through YouTube videos where I get three quarters of the way through phone rings. Dinner's ready. Whatever. Something's going to distract people as they go along through it. So you're going to have this natural attrition. That's fine. What you don't want to see is you don't want to see another drop off. An example I'll give of listener retention with this. I worked with a podcaster who had a great podcast. He spoke about some really good HR topics as he went on. He would also bring in an interview. What he noticed is he's like, yeah. He goes, man. He goes at the 12 minute mark all the time. He goes between like 12 to 15 minutes. He goes. It seems like people just drop out of my podcast. And I went back and I listened in between 12 and 15 minutes is when he started his interview. And I'm like, well, people don't like the interviews. Just do your do your normal, normal stuff and drop the interviews. So we'll show you what people do and don't like. If you see a steep drop off in your episode, go look at that point where there was a drop off. What happened there? What did you change? What did you different do differently that caused people to be like, I'm out of here. Something else that you want to look look at is you can use tools to figure out website click thrus. If you're talking about a specific product, have that in the show notes, have that in the description, have that on your Instagram page, whatever it is. See how many times that gets clicked through. That's going to tell you if that's effective. If if you get 100 people clicking through on that boy that was that's that could be a great number for you. If you get one person clicking through, that still could be a good number for you depending on what your goals are. If you get zero people clicking through, then you have to go back and say, okay, did we do this effectively? That is how you're going to look at that return on investment. The other thing that I'm going to talk about too is social shares. If you can find a way to get your audience to share your brand. Holy cow. Is that amazing? You're you're creating fans of your brand and you don't need to just think like Nike. Obviously Nike has these brand for this brand following another one, Harley Davidson, John Deere. You see these people that are just love these brands. The podcast can help you to build that brand for you. That the people are going to be a fan of and that people are going to share with their friends. That to me is huge because once again, that's that's your word of mouth advertising. There's no there's still no stronger recommendation than a recommendation of a friend to go look at something. If you set things up and you're looking for those social shares, that's a great thing that getting those is a great thing. Now once again, we're going to I want to go back to the first step. You have to start with strategic goals. Which one of these things are you looking for. Are you looking for that website website click through. Are you looking for that listener retention? Are you looking for those social shares? Pick something like that to work with moving forward. I want to talk about calls to action. It's something that a lot of people miss on. We even do it occasionally too. It's something that you want to make sure you've got that good, strong call to action, something that's integrated, something that's smooth, something that people don't realize about. I mean, I see so many cases. I talk about our No Pitch podcast consultation. We talk about that is that's that, hey, that there's something that we do that you can go sign up for. It's a call to action. It's it's it's a buried one. It's an integrated one, but it's still there. The other thing is, is once again, put links with stuff. Hey, go visit this on our site. Go go go. Check out this piece on our site. Make it so you can track that. According to the podcast, unique URLs available all over the place, it's easy to set some of that stuff up. Promo codes are also another way to do it. We hear it all the time on podcasts. Go to XYZ website. Order the thing. Tell them I sent you and you get 10% off. Or use my discount code to get 10% off. That is literally tracking how effective that podcast was at driving business to your site. If they use that code, obviously they they heard it that that place, you're going to be able to use that as a marker to say, how effective was this specific podcast? This is obviously something to use in your branded podcast. If you listen to the show, we're going to offer X percent off of Y service. Sign up for it on the website today. Make sure you have that call to action in there. The other pieces to that are the subscribe to like the follow the call for reviews that call for like Google reviews. All those types of things get people to interact with it. The other piece, too, that I want to want to talk about too, when it comes to the metrics, IT analytics aren't just they're not. They're not just numbers. It's not that line that goes up to the right or down to the down to the right or whatever. There's insights in there. You need to spend the time to figure out where people are coming from, where are they? What are they listening on? Are they listening on their phone? Are they listening in their car? Are they listening on their computer? You get a pretty good idea of what people are doing when you start to dive into that. You also start to see what content resonates the most. For us, it's been a lot of the solo content that's talking about some of these, like how to how to move your branded podcast forward. The data should help to inform you on what you need to be doing to to target your audience, what you need to be doing to gain that audience, and what you need to be doing to make sure that you're focused in on that piece. When I look at the demographics that watch and or listen to the podcast or the clips or any piece of this, it gives me a very good idea of who I speak to. And I was very sure that those were the people that I was aiming for. This, to me, tells us we've got the right messaging. Don't just put your message out there and assume that it's going to the right people. You need to make sure that the data is backing that up. The algorithm will tell you who this is going towards and who is liking this stuff. If the people that you're trying to get in touch with aren't the ones that are watching you, then you probably need to change your messaging a little bit. Something to keep aware of on that. Direct listener feedback is another thing, and this is why I encourage people to start communities. This is why we started our discord community also. We want to have that social media interaction. We want surveys. We want polls. We want to put things out there like that that will help you grow that, that community with it. We're going to get into why you want to do that here in a second. That one piece of that is that you're going to get these insights from people. What do they want to hear on the Business Fix podcast that I recorded with Chrissy Meyers, when we were constantly asking business owners what questions they have, what things do you want to hear? What what would you like us to discuss and try and answer for you? It's that feedback. If you can answer something directly for someone that makes a world of difference, especially to if you can call them out on that and say, hey, Bob sent in a question about XYZ and you actually address that. You've got a listener and a community member for life. Now, when I say that for life, make sure that you're using the podcast as a relationship builder. The thing that I find so tough is what people do is they say it comes to like all sorts of video podcasts, all sorts of other things. They create content and they use this, build it and they will come philosophy and it does not work. It just it just doesn't work. That way. Now the podcast is a relationship builder. Think of it as your consistent touch. It is the way that you are going to reach out to people on a weekly, every other weekly, whatever your basis is. You are going to hit those people all the time. What I find interesting about this is I am going to use a Realtors as an example on this, because everyone of us is driven down the road and we've seen a real estate billboard, someone. It's got the realtor smiling, face just beaming there. Typically a professional photography, something about selling a home. Has anyone ever driven down the road and looked and said, oh, you know, I want to sell my house. I'm going to call that person on the billboard. Probably not. I mean, there's there's a non-zero chance here that happening, really, but it's not the typical way that that happens. What does happen is they saw that realtor on Facebook. They saw that realtor once on Instagram. They saw that realtor smiling face as they were driving down the road, taking their kids to soccer practice. They saw that realtor at an event. Suddenly they've seen that realtor 7 or 8 times and then all of a sudden they're like, hey, I need to find a realtor. Guess what? Guess who's going to come up in their feed? It's going to be that person. That's going to be who they think about. It's not the realtor they've just seen one time on a billboard. It's going to be the one that they've seen 7 or 8 times in 3 or 4 different places. Those are the those are the real keys to stuff like that. Is is it gives you that additional touch point. Most people don't realize that even before they buy something simple. They've seen it typically like 5 or 6 times. You need to get those touch points in to make sure that when someone's ready to do something, they think of you. Podcast is a great way to do that. So if you think of the podcast as that relationship builder, that is huge. It because it is it is about nurturing relationships. Not like I mean, I get so many people that are chasing this fame. They want to be viral. They want to be the next. I mean, they want to be the next, Peter McKinnon. They want to be the next Garyvee. They want to be the next. I mean, any one of these big, like, huge Mr. Beast they want, they're like, I'm going to go viral. No you're not. You need to be consistent and you need to consistently reach out to your people. The odds of you going viral are very similar to the odds of you winning the lottery. So I want you to really look at this as consistent quality over like viral potential, because that's what you're going for is you're going for those touch points to make sure that your customers have seen you enough times that they're like, oh yeah, yeah. And I mean, they may see you seven times as like, I think I saw someone once, and that is when they're going to be picking up the phone to go to your website, call you, text you whatever it is. However, they need to get Ahold of you to to order something, to do something to feel comfortable with you. That is huge. The other piece to that is we've talked about, know, like, and trust before you are building that. So is that something that's a tangible piece of the ROI that fits in? I say it's tougher to justify, but would you be worse off without it? I definitely think you would. The other piece that I want in that building community type of thing is we talked about that sense of community. If you can get people talking about you, other people are going to listen to that. Once again, word of mouth is huge. If I can get someone to recommend me to someone else. There's nothing bigger than that. If a friend says, hey, I tried this or you, I watched this, you should watch it. Guess what? I'm probably going to watch it because in most cases, those people are. They've already filtered through all the bad stuff. They're not going to be like, hey, this sucks. You should watch it. They thought it's good enough to recommend to you. We talk all the time about the amplification of your podcast, of how it's versatile enough that it can be used in so many different ways. We help so many different companies with cutting these up into snippets that are intentional about just putting out your message. So whether go to Instagram, whether it go to Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, all these social channels, we can cut your podcast up into and and create this constant contact that you're going to be reaching out to people with. Once again, we talked about touch points. If you release something every day, that doesn't mean everyone's going to see everything that you say every day. What it is going to do is it is going to put you out in front of people enough that it is going to raise your status in, in their, in their pecking order. So when they when it comes time for them to do the thing, when it comes time to place the order. Pick up the phone, whatever it is. They've seen you enough times that they are now comfortable with you. The other piece to that is we. We often use podcast subjects to help you build that email, or to help you build that blog post to to, to create that other content that's going to support you. The website SEO, the, email, like I said, that as that comes out, email lists are becoming more and more valuable again. The fact that you can build consistent content to go out into an email for people and be useful to them, not just this loud bullhorn of selling information that they can actually use and apply in their daily lives, whether it be business or whatever. You're able to build some of that content and some of that material to really get that out there. The other thing that you can really look at with this is the true return on investment of a podcast is to me, it's it's really realized over time. I tell so many clients, when we start out, I get clients who are like, yeah, I want to do a podcast. And I'm like, okay, are you looking for like the next like two months or are you looking to do this over the next 2 to 3 years? And they're like, no, we just want to start. We want to get this going now and we'll we'll decide another month or two. I tell a lot of people, if you're going to do a podcast for a month or two, I mean, you can build some promotional material out of it. Great. Podcasting is not this fast. Like we're throwing a match on this fire and it's going to light up. That is not how podcasting works. Podcasting is a slow burn, and it's it's very much that's supporting material. I want to I want to take a step back now after we've talked about that long term brand equity, because I mean, that's really what you're building is you're building this, this, this content, this library of content that's built over time, not you don't build a library and fill it with a book in 20 minutes. You put a book in and a book and a book in, in a book in and a book in. And eventually you have your library to cover the return on investment with this. What I really want to what I really want to bring this back to is the fact that there's there's a couple of ways that you can say, look, here is the direct correlation. Here is what our podcast helped support. Here is what this marketing effort did for us. There are some ways to get direct correlation off of that. And those are huge. The things that I love about those is they they tell you where you can apply more and where you should apply less. Awesome, wonderful and great tools. What's tough is the the ROI of this that isn't direct, that is tougher to justify. What I mean by that is the fact that they saw your podcast and you know what? They also saw you on Instagram. They may have come in through Instagram, but they saw your podcast and that's something that triggered them to do that. There's all sorts of pieces like that where you have to realize that marketing is not one thing, where you just shove money out there and you start printing it. The money has to take a few different stops, a few different paths. But what I really want to talk about in this is if you are not seeing that boost in sales, if you are not seeing that boost in inquiries, mainly if you're not seeing the boost in those strategic items that you set up to look at to begin with, then it's time to adjust your podcast strategy. If the oven that you bought to put in your restaurant, or the widget maker you bought to put in there started stamping out the wrong widgets, or just started burning the tar out of your pizza. You're going to look to fix those items, right? You're not just going to keep saying I. It's fine, it's fine. Just dump money into it. No. So that is what so many people do unfortunately, is they let the marketing go when it's not effective. They're like, oh, we're just going to stop it. Don't do that. Make sure that you look at it, you analyze, you pivot a little bit and go from there. You never know who was watching and who is going to see your materials. That's going to say, yep, I'm going to click on that link or I'm going to pick up the phone or I'm going to stop in. This really is it's all about building and supporting your holistic marketing efforts. That is where the return on investment is. And when you look at your bottom line, that is where you're really going to see it. With that being said, we've got an interesting news story about how YouTube. I know it's become one of the top podcast platforms now, but they are doing something on the video side that is very, very cool. Stay tuned. We'll be back. Oh. So now for some news. Which. This. This is pretty interesting to me. So it's, for our article discusses how a technical change to YouTube's ads system could significantly affect podcasting. This is kind of interesting. YouTube is just working on something. This isn't released yet, but they're working on something that allows them to do, like a podcast level ad insertion. Currently, we work with a lot of our clients on ad insertions on branded podcasts. Now there's so many different ways to do ad insertion. You can go out and sell the ad and have it inserted into your podcast and say, look, we'll have it in there for a month. And if you pay us dollars, a lot of it with our branded podcast that we're working with. I'm going to throw this out to Atomic Auto Sports once again. We put an ad in depending on what services they're offering. So right now they're going into spring. This is a busy, busy, busy time of them for them because everyone wants to get the race car ready. So we are talking about the things that people need to know to get their race car ready in December. We are promoting stuff to help people try and get in the shop early, so they didn't get as busy in the springtime. We wanted to spread that out. We're able to change that through all of their podcasts, through dynamic ad insertion. YouTube is looking at letting you do the same thing with videos. So what if you watch like if you watch any YouTube people now? In many cases, if a YouTuber does an ad, it's a baked in ad. It is in the video. They are not ever going to be able to remove that a lot of advertisers like that. So one that I see all the time on one of the motorcycle channels I watch is for an Insta360 camera. When they do that ad, it's for a camera that just came out typically, and that's going to be out there for eight, ten, 12, 15 years. That ad is going to be the same if we do with dynamic ad insertion in a year, they can say, hey, give us that ad to do this, or hey, we just put a new camera up. Go ahead and put that ad in your dynamic insertion. It allows you to change the ad that's in the YouTube video without destroying the video. It's the same way we do dynamic insertion on podcasts, except with podcasts. It's obviously just audio with the dynamic insertion and video. It's going to be video to me. It's going to be very interesting because it's going to allow advertisers to target specific ads to specific people and to specific topics in a video. This, once again, this hones in to make sure that you are getting the exact right advertisement. What I see that like YouTube does so right is YouTube typically advertises things to me that matter to me. There's so many other play like I'm going to mention some of like the other streaming services are advertising things to me that just do not matter. And they're not things that I'm going to use. So to me, it allows YouTube to really hone in that ad game. When you niche in like that, you think, boy, I'm going to be losing the breadth of the customers. Sure, you may not be advertising as many people, but the people that you're going to be advertising to will be much, much closer to your target audience. To me, that is huge. The other piece to this, from what I see in a podcasting standpoint, if you are a podcaster, that also puts your stuff up on YouTube. That gives you the benefit of saying, look, I can change this on a monthly basis if you want to to sponsor this. That to me raises that level and allows you to charge a little bit more because you know that you can change an entire swath of videos with an ad rather than just the one video that you're doing. The really cool part about this too, from a branded podcast standpoint, this is not as much like someone that's looking to make money from the podcast as someone that's looking to drive business with their podcast. With that, with those that dynamic insertion in the video, once again, we can change things throughout the year, throughout the month, whenever, to fit whatever season your business is in. If it's a busy time, let's say you do holiday stuff. Whatever it is, we can adapt for that specific time of year for all your videos in the system. To me, this is something that if YouTube goes through with this, it's reported that they're working on it. When this comes out, this will be absolutely huge to me. I am really looking forward to this because once again, this gives us as branded podcasts, all sorts of ways to promote your business within your branded podcast. To me, absolutely awesome. Looking forward, I mean, any time we get a new tool like this, I get really, really excited. As you can tell. That being said, do me a favor. Make sure you subscribed. Follow all those other happy things. I would absolutely love it if you would leave a review. This would help us out immensely. It allows us to talk about a more of the stuff that you want to talk about, but be it helps us gain some of that visibility to. Additionally, I want to make sure that we are doing the things that you want to see. So make sure you leave a comment, send us a request. You can do it in the comments. You can do that. You can go to the website. You can submit something that way. Whatever you want to hear about when it comes to your branded podcast, let us know. I would love to talk about this for you. That all being said, do me a favor. Take care of yourself if you can take care of someone else too. I will see you very soon.

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Josh Troche

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