Hypothesis

After an enlightening conversation with Benjamin Shapiro of the MarTech Podcast on my podcast, Everything Is Marketing, I felt inspired to take a risk and put some money behind growing listenership.

I had heard from a few others that advertising on podcast apps can be a decent way to acquire subscribers and finally decided to just give it a run.

Mediums like TikTok, YouTube, and Google are great for getting discovered, but usually have terrible retention. The algorithms work hard to surface new, great content, but that also makes it difficult to keep the attention of someone who found you through on of those mediums. On the flip side, mediums like podcasts, newsletters, and communities are great for retaining attention, but usually not great for gaining attention in the first place.

So the thought is that if there's a straightforward way to acquire a podcast subscriber, you can reasonably assume they'll stick around for a while and make it worth the investment.

I'll be honest, I'm disappointed with the download numbers for Everything Is Marketing right now.

More recently, episodes get 300-600 downloads, so the image above undersells it a bit. But I'd love to be in one comma club.

So where will Everything Is Marketing be advertised?

After looking through a few articles that list out a bunch of different opportunities, I decided on four:

• Overcast
• Podcast Addict
• PodBay
• PodNews

Overcast and Podcast Addict are both mobile apps. I've personally used Overcast and am familiar with how the ads work. PodBay is a web player for the browser which I haven't used before. PodNews is a website and newsletter, and the ads actually run in the newsletter.

Overcast

I remember Andrew Warner of Mixergy telling me over Twitter DMs that he had experimented with Overcast ads and bought subscribers for around $1 but that he stopped after a while.

Man, if I could go back and get subscribers for a buck each... 😆

If it were still at $1, the smartest thing you could do back then was put in $1,000–$10,000 and gain 1,000–10,000 subscribers in a short amount of time. That would put you squarely in the 90th percentile of all podcasts for a relatively small investment that you could then go monetize in a variety of ways.

Today, it costs about $18 per subscriber in the Business category. That estimate is based on how many "taps" actually become subscribers.

It looks like after I ponied up the $1,350, the price went up to $1,475 for the next 30-day slot. I have no idea how the pricing model works but apparently it's sold out now.

Nonetheless, 100 new subscribers would give me a significant bump that I would consider a win if it cost $1,350.

The ad is supposed to run for 30 days and I'll be able to monitor performance.

I do wonder: How much will the most recent episodes published influence the tap-to-subscribe rate?

Overcast gives you the option to customize the "description" rather than using the text they grab from your default description. I decided to go with "The best long-form interview show with marketers, entrepreneurs, and creators." I probably should have put more thought into it and put my copywriter mind to work, but I whipped it up in a couple minutes and decided to just ship it.

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Podcast Addict

Podcast Addict is a popular app amongst Android users and for $400, it's just small enough for me to pull the trigger without talking myself out of it.

The only downside is that the next available ad slot is in August, which is two months away as of this writing. So I won't really know the full effects until September. The upside is that this helps me isolate the effect as I don't have much else advertised for August.

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PodBay

PodBay has a slightly more sophisticated ad buying interface than the others that allows you to choose specific days you want to advertise on. The impression I got was that they don't have many advertisers since there were no unavailable days and I could choose days as soon as the next day.

And at $25 a pop, I decided to just book out a week since people listen to podcasts on different days and have different listening habits.

The ads will run from June 6th to June 12th for a total of $175.

PodNews

PodNews isn't a podcast app, but it's got the attention of a lot of podcasters and podcast listeners.

What was especially intriguing was that it's included in their newsletter of over 18,000 subscribers. The pricing varied per day from $29 to around $150. So instead of booking out just 2-3 expensive days, I opted to book out more cheap days, feeling like that was a better deal and more efficient use of budget.

They recommend you use a standard CTA format of "Subscribe to {SHOW}" and then give you free rein on the description. This time, I decided to put a bit more effort into the copywriting. Still not my proudest work but I tried to get a bit more creative with it.

The other interesting aspect is that the link will actually go to swipefiles.com/everything-is-marketing.

I decided on this because if I sent them directly to a podcast player, it might not be the podcast player of their choice and I risk them bouncing completely. By sending them directly to a hosted page, I can see how many people make it there, although I'll have no idea how many actually make it to a podcast player.

I probably won't do this again unless there's a significant amount of traffic, but for $362.50 total across 7 days, it didn't seem like all that bad of a deal.

The ads will run June 24th, July 2nd, 9th, 15th, 22th, and August 2nd and 3rd.