Podcasting Q&A

Don't waste money on FB ads. Spend it here instead!

Buzzsprout

This is Week 5 of a 5-week miniseries to help you grow your podcast and get more listeners.

In this episode, Travis explains why Overcast ads are his go-to paid promotion strategy.

Learn more about running ads on Overcast by visiting overcast.fm/ads

Fill out this short questionnaire to submit a question or topic for a future episode.

Need some help with your podcast? Join the Buzzsprout Podcast Community on Facebook to get the help you need from podcasters just like you.

Travis:

Today on five minute Monday we'll talk about the best place to spend money to promote your podcast. welcome to five minute Monday. We're bringing the best tips and strategies for building your podcast in five minutes or less. So if you're new here, consider subscribing. Now this week we are wrapping up our mini series focused on growing your podcast. I hope it's been beneficial for you so far and today I'll cover the top paid promotion strategy for growing your podcast. And the reason that I wanted to talk about this is that it's really easy to waste money on online ads, whether it's Facebook ads, Google ad words or something else. Those companies are more than happy to take your money regardless of how much it actually helps you grow your podcast. But there's one platform that lets you market directly to podcast listeners while they are listening to podcasts, which is the perfect scenario, right? And that is overcast. Overcast is a popular podcast app available for Apple Devices, iPhones and iPads and the way that they do ads, your advertisements appear below the controls. So like the play button skip forwards, get backwards on the now playing screen. So when somebody is listening to an episode, your ad would appear at the bottom of their screen and it also appears in the add podcast directory, which is where people go to find new shows to listen to. It's kind of like the browse section in overcast and then when somebody clicks on your ad it takes them directly to your podcast on overcast, which invites your list, new listeners to subscribe with a single tap. And when you purchase an ad in overcast, your ads run for 30 days at a time. So overcast puts your podcast in front of other listeners, other people listening to podcasts and does it in a way that encourages them to subscribe. Let me break down for you what your ad actually looks like in overcast. All right, cause all of us are familiar with Facebook ads. We're all familiar with Google adwords ads where people pay to get search rankings. How do overcast ads look? Well it features your podcast artwork, which is another reason to get it professionally designed. If you haven't yet the name of your podcast and a short message that you can customize that describes your podcast and and intrigues people and makes them curious about what your podcast is about. So really does a great job of capturing what your podcast is and introducing it to people that might be interested. Now what's really cool about the way that you can target people that overcast shows your ads to is you can choose to buy ad spots based on targeted podcast category, which means that overcast will show your podcast ad beneath podcasts that are in your category, right? So if you have a business podcast, you can pay overcast to put your podcast ad beneath business podcasts. Does that make sense? So you're already in the with somebody who might be interested in what your podcast is about by choosing the right categories. Now you might be asking how well does this work when you purchase an ad and overcast, does it actually lead to results? Well, when we launched how to start a podcast, which is our first Buzzsprout podcast, we decided to run three sets of ads on overcast as a test just to see what would happen. We paid$340 for a 30 day ad spot under the technology category, paid$100 for a 30 day ad spot in the games and hobbies category, and then$190 for an ad spot in the education category. So three categories,$630 total and everything was the same, right? The artwork was the same, the title was the same. And then we use the same tagline for each of the ads and then after 30 days of running these ads, we had picked up a total of 310 new subscribers. That's 310 people that subscribed your podcast that weren't subscribed before with education. The education category giving us the best bang for our buck. It turned out to right around$1 and 50 cents per subscription. So if you have the budget for some paid advertising and you're looking for something that's not going to take a lot of expertise to execute effectively, but you want the result of gaining new subscribers, then you know, my recommendation is to go with overcast ads. It's simple to execute and the results speak for themselves. Now, if you want to learn more about how to advertise your podcast and overcast, all you have to do is go to overcast.fm forward slash ads and I will leave a link in the show notes as well so you can click on over and check that out. That's it for today. I hope you enjoyed our five part mini series on podcast growth. If you're new here, hit the subscribe button. If you're watching this on youtube or you can subscribe to the five minute Monday's podcast and your favorite app to squeeze even more podcast related content into your life. Thanks for listening and as always, keep podcasting.