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If there is one aspect of marketing and promotion that is criminally underused by podcasters, it’s this: the offline world. Yes, there is a whole world out there, inhabited by real people visiting non-virtual places, and it doesn’t disappear when you turn off your laptop.
I spent many years conducting advertising and marketing effectiveness studies for brands and advertisers so they could see what aspects of their ads were working and which ones weren’t. Over all that time, the two most effective forms of advertising I encountered were podcasting (duh) and a general category of marketing we call “out-of-home,” which means exactly what it sounds like.
Out-of-home (OOH) advertising is a broad category that encompasses everything from billboards to mall kiosks to gas pump ads to video screens in taxis. But for the most part, they all have something in common: a small, unique window that is contextually fixed, where the exclusive attention of a consumer can be earned for a short period of time.
Think about this—when we browse the web, we are bombarded with a withering torrent of advertising messages, from banners and skyscrapers to pop-ups and flyovers. A media site might blast a dozen different advertising messages at you before you even scroll down. It’s exhausting! And all the eye-tracking software in the world can’t tell you if any of it actually means anything in the brain of the viewer.
But now think about the last time you went to the movies. I bet, before the previews and the dancing candy boxes, you saw some ads for local and/or national businesses. You were the very definition of a captive audience: the theater is dark, and you are getting one very bright image instead of 20 display ads. The same thing happens when you take a taxi in New York City—the cab is equipped with a video screen that alternates clips from TV shows with ads. I bet you watched it.
The great thing about OOH advertising is that if you think it through, you can reach the exact ideal listener you are hoping to get to in a far more efficient way than blasting Facebook ads or social posts. Imagine you have a sports podcast (let’s say it’s better than Two Superfans Talking about the Cubs from earlier). It might be free to post social messages about it, and even cheap to buy some Facebook ads, but once you actually sit down and figure out the conversion percentages for these efforts, I bet you will be underwhelmed.
Imagine, instead, buying some posters in the restrooms of sports bars, right over the urinals. Heck, even buying custom urinal cakes, so guys can read about your podcast while they freshen and deodorize the space. The percentage of qualified leads in this scenario likely borders on 100 percent.
The great thing about this kind of advertising is that you don’t have to eat the elephant all at once. If your brain flashed to what it would cost to buy run-of-toilet ads for Buffalo Wild Wings nationwide, this is not a thing you have to do. Start local—again, if your show is ready for the Grand Opening sign, you just need to start somewhere. If twenty-five people try your show after a weekend of sports bar advertising, and those new listeners tell their buddies, you are on your way. In fact, local advertising, period, is underused in podcasting. I certainly don’t care where my listeners live. If I double my downloads even though my new listeners are all from my home city of Boston, this will trouble me not.
Events in general are a pretty good bet. Most cities and towns of a certain size have some kind of food-related festival, for instance. What a great place to set up a booth promoting your cooking podcast or cheese-making show! Again, the ratio of potentially interested people to not-interested people is vastly better than it would be from buying online ads, even if you could target that precisely with programmatic advertising.
I think podcasters often default to things like social promotion because it seems easy and/or cheap. But if you have done the work to really profile an ideal listener, all you have to do is think through where you can find those humans in real life. I guarantee putting in some effort in meatspace will vastly outperform the metaverse, every time.
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