Have you ever wondered if podcast advertising would be a good fit for your business? You can hear the ins and outs of podcast marketing for yourself on our own podcast. Listen to the episode below with Donald Kelly!
Use the time stamps below to find answers to your specific questions!
Show Notes / Time Stamps Episode Intro (0:00) About The Guest (0:30) Reaching Out To Big Podcast Companies vs. Small Podcast Companies (1:44) How Much Do You Need To Pay To Run Podcast Ads? (4:52) What Is Dynamic Advertising? (6:19) What Makes A Good Ad? (9:09) Example Of An Effective Ad (10:48) How Long Should Podcast Ads Be? (14:25) What Are Realistic Expectations For Results From Podcast Ads? (20:15) Final Takeaway From The Guest (24:04)
Transcript - Stratezine Episode w/ Donald Kelly
Junior Germain (0:00) Should your business use podcast advertising? Donald C. Kelly is joining us today to help answer this question. Donald has been in the podcast industry for more than 10 years and has more than 4.5 million downloads on his podcast, The Sales Evangelist. As the owner of the TSE studios, Donald Kelly has tons of experience helping other podcasts run ads to audiences. Now, Donald, I'm a huge fan. Would you be able to just kind of take a few minutes and share a little bit about yourself? Donald Kelly (0:30) Yeah. First off, thank you all for having me on your podcast. I'm excited for that. And I'm super grateful that you're providing this value to our community and in helping other business owners as well. As for me, I run a training organization started from a podcast back in 2013. But the podcast is called The Sales Evangelist. And since then, we developed a sales training organization where we help new sellers, people who are just brand new coming into sales and want to learn it. We teach them how to become effective in selling in a matter of weeks, and help them land a first job, as well as we train corporate clients, and help them and individuals to develop their sales skills.
Junior Germain (1:10) Wow, I love that. Thank you so much. So we'll hop into a few of our questions. Again, we want to talk about using ads on podcasts. How sellers, business leaders, business organizations can really just use that to leverage their business. And so I kind of want to start with, where do I go? Let's say I am a company. I know this is the kind of ad that I want. I want it to to be on a podcast. Do I go to a small podcast? Do I go to a big podcast? Where do I start? And what's that process? Like I mean, do I just give them a phone call, say hey, can you run this ad? What's kind of that process to building that relationship? Donald Kelly (1:44) Well, I think you'd make any podcasters happy by asking them if you can run ads on their podcast. The major organizations, I'll start there. So like the Coca Colas of the world, the you know, Zoom, or Legal, you know, some of these big ones you hear all the time. These bigger companies they go to what's known as an agency or media buyer. And these media buyers, they go, and they reach out to podcasts. So the media buyer will give you, you know, you may give them a budget, say we're looking to get into the homeowners market. We wanted to get on podcasts that are speaking to homeowners who are affluent, who are in the DC area, or in the eastern part of the United States, maybe that's the northeast, that's the demographics that you're going for. And then you, the media company, will go out and find those people and then they'll work with them to create the ads. You create the messaging that you want to give. And then they help find a podcast and reach out to the podcast. They say, hey, we want to get your media kit, tell us how many downloads you get and who's in your audience. And we have a client that wants to run some ads. And that's one way to do it. Now for the smaller folks like for you know, you and I who are small businesses, we make a podcast that we listen to that we find very interesting and entertaining. However, the bigger podcast, if we're going to them, generally, they probably have a little bit more of a charge, a little bit more. And they may work with some of those bigger agencies, and they may not take us up. So if you're going to like, I don't know, one of NPRs podcasts and trying to get on that, that may be a little more challenging as a small business. Right. It's worth a shot and what not. But what I would say would be more effective is if I run a I don't know, give me a business. Just give me a random business. One of you. How about you Amber?
Amber Whitney (3:35) TJ Maxx. Donald Kelly (3:36) TJ Maxx, let's see. A small company, a small company. Junior Germain (3:40) How about, let's see. Think of one right here in town, Gater Jacks, it's like a little restaurant. Donald Kelly (3:46) All right, so Gator Jacks. So Gator Jacks, their demographics is right in that area. It may be they sell stuff online, which probably could be a little bit better in a situation like that. I mean, we'd have some online things that they could ship out or what not. But if your demo if your surroundings is large enough, first off, five podcasts are right in Rexburg, or podcasts that cover Idaho in the first place. And those are the podcasts that I would go for. You can go on Apple podcasts that and you could search for them. And you'll find maybe some of the podcasters covering Idaho, maybe travel podcasts, or maybe podcasts about nature stuff out in Idaho or podcasts that are talking about, you know, different things relevant to Idaho. So you would then reach out to those people and say, hey, I saw you know you have a podcast, and then obviously you want to make sure it fits your demographic, right, that they are speaking to your people that would go to Gator Jacks. In a situation like that, if it was something that people would find entertaining, listening to it in Rexburg, or in the community in that area, then say, hey, I want to run some ads. And you find out what their audience size is, and then you find out how much they would charge for ads. Everyone would differ, but in the industry it's about $25 per mil on average. I'd say 20 to 30, or depending on your your podcast, and mil meaning 1000. So for every 1000 downloads, it's $25. So let's say a podcast has 2000 downloads per episode, then the ad placement generally would be about $50. For that podcast. If they do three ads on their pre-roll, one at the beginning, a mid roll right in the middle, and then an outro, that could be $150. For that episode, thats what that person would spend. And let's say that podcasts local to Rexburg and they cover an area that Gator Jack is gonna go on, they produce five episodes per week, right? So five days a week, now you can start doing the math, you know, $150 per episode, we'll make it simple and say $100. In the episode, because they do two spots on there. So that's $500 for that campaign, for that week. So that's how that would work. In that scenario, maybe Gator Jacks has offeres that you're trying to push, and maybe that'll be cheaper for them than to go and spend hundreds on social media ads at that point. So the point though, the idea there is that the podcast ads are going to live on for a long time. Most companies have, we can go into this, but most of the bigger podcasts or ones that deal with some of the bigger companies have what's known as dynamic advertising. Dynamic advertising simply means that when that campaign is over, we could change the ads in that episode. So let's say somebody goes back and listen to one of my episodes from a year ago, you're not going to hear the ad from today. The ad from today is going to be a new ad for the new sponsor. Now, that campaign is over. So that's interesting, dynamic advertising.
Junior Germain (6:46) Okay, so you're kind of paying for that spot, then. Donald Kelly (6:49) They pay for that spot during that episode. Donald Kelly (6:52) So, say that you're going back to the Gator Jacks to say we're Gator Jacks, would it be beneficial for them to reach out to different podcasts? Not just a couple in, like not just one or two in Rexburg. But a couple more throughout Rexburg? Do they usually, how many does one company usually reach out to I guess? Donald Kelly (7:12) I would say several. For instance, we have a sponsorship with a company right now. Their name is Scratchpad. And Scratchpad has, I don't know they probably sponsor a lot of the main podcasters in the sales arena. And also other companies because they want to just get to as many people as possible, they want to get their brand out there. So your campaign, just depends on what you're doing and how aggressive you want to be. But it's a great idea. Like if you listen to radio, or traditional radio, traditional radio shows have like, you might hear one spot on one radio station, you hear it on another radio station. Or going on different platforms, you may go on Facebook and you see an ad and you see that ad on Insta or, you know TikTok, or YouTube, because that's diversified across the different platforms with the same concept as well. So yeah, definitely, you can do that and should. But the important thing is that in a situation like that, you want to you want to give unique codes. You probably hear that on different radios so you can know where your campaign is coming from. So say Gator Jacks advertises on my local podcast, and it's all about recreational stuff to do in southeastern Idaho. It may you know, it's called the rex life. There you go. And so the ad may say something like this. For more information to learn about Gator Jacks, get a free you know, free upgrade, go to gatorjacks.com, use promo code rex live, or whatever. Now that coupon code, now Gator Jacks can see how many people came from that code. And that's how you can differentiate and see which podcast works best. And then you can obviously double down on those ones. So if you saw that they advertised on 10 podcasts, and I saw that 3 of them really are driving most of the traffic, take the ad dollars from the other ones, and then dump it into those three main ones. Because that's where all of your traffic is coming from.
Junior Germain (9:02) Yeah, that makes sense. I love that honestly. And what you said really kind of goes into where I want to pivot. This is probably the golden question. What makes a good ad? You know, I listen to podcasts. I don't know if there's a sweet spot? How long it should be? I'm not sure if, you talked about promo codes, you know. What makes an ad stand out so that I'm listening to I don't know, Joe Rogan whatever, what makes me stay on it? Donald Kelly (9:28) So ads are two things. When it comes to podcasts, one of the main reasons why they work so well is intimacy. And what I mean by this is that your audience and the host have a very intimate relationship. I mean, people for instance, for my podcast people listen to me. And they know about my life. They know about what's going on. They know they listen to me on a day-to-day basis. I'm in their ears, and that's such an impactful and powerful way. So you build a strong relationship with your audience. So whenever they, whenever I share something now, because of the intimate relationship we've built over months where people are walking their dogs and listening to me, or they're going to the grocery store and that's in their habit or going to the gym, and you're listening to a TSE episode, like that becomes very strong. So they say, okay well, Donald is giving me a ton of value. If he mentioned that LinkedIn is important and that I should consider Sales Navigator, I can try it for free. I'm going to test it out. So that's the critical side. So you want to make sure that. Some people have ad reads where literally, it doesn't matter. They can just read the ad. So the company gives them the ad, and they read it. For me, one of the things that we see that makes it, and most companies will do this, what makes an ad even better is when that person speaks to it, because of the intimate relationship, right? So let me give you an example. For us, we like to make our ads entertaining, in some way, just a little bit, give a little bit of excitement to it. That way, our audience, they will pardon the ad so to speak, or they won't mind the ad that interrupted the actual podcast content. Because of the fact that they trust me, and two because it's entertaining. So it might I'm making something up now. Right? Our podcast is focused on salespeople. So I might say something to the nature of, you know, as a sales professional, I'm sure you probably realize that you go on LinkedIn, and you open up the inbox, and you get flooded with 10s of 1000s of junk people trying to spam you, right? You know where I'm getting from? But here's what we recommend. Wouldn't it be better if you could actually really connect with people on LinkedIn, not have to worry about spamming, and actually grow your business? Well, this is why I recommend Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator allows for you to do exactly that. You can connect with people in the right way, have rich relationships, and not have to worry about those annoying spamming. As a sales professional, my team and I, we use it every single day. And I highly recommend it. If you want to find out more about Sales Navigator and to get rid of those spamming, and to try this and see how your pipeline can increase, go to linkedin.com/tse. Again, linkedin.com/tse, they'll give you a 30-day trial on the house, because of your boy. Again, go to linkedin.com/tse, and tell him Donald sent you. So in a situation like that, I gave a simple example. I use a personal thing. And I kind of made it a little entertaining, but also informative enough. And obviously, the call to action is critical. Critical, and it must be convincing. So I don't do brands that I don't have faith in their products, or it's not morally in line with me. So I'm not going to have you know, alcohol on my podcast. Even though they may give a lot of good money. It's not aligned with me, and my audience is going to know that. And they're going to sense that and they're not going to do it anyways. So if you kind of feel the situation because again, these intimate relationships, they will know if something is original or not, versus something that's pushed, and they will be like a sellout. So then they'll be like, okay, Donald's selling out. You know, I'm not sure if I want to keep listening to this. And that ruins or tarnishes that relationship. So you want to be genuine to your audience, genuine to you and your brand. And give people what they want, or what could benefit from in that scenario.
Amber Whitney (13:15)
So that passion is more motivating or inspiring for your listeners, they can feel that passion. I think that's a lot more personal. So what would you say is your ratio then between ads that they play versus ads that you say, in your own words that you read yourself versus the ones they read?
Donald Kelly (13:33)
In our business, our podcast, it's 100%, or 90% of the ads are mine. Sometimes the client may write the ad, like say, for instance, I'll give an example, we work with the client, one of our clients right now. So I'll back that up a little bit. They gave us the ad copy, but we worked together, and we discussed what we wanted to have go in it. So it's something entertaining, it wasn't necessarily like fully read this, like Donald, here's the script, make it you. So we had fun with that a little bit and kind of evolved it into that. If you go to listen to my podcasts or listen to the scratchpad ad. I think right now it's something about my Jamaican heritage, and we had a good time with that.
Junior Germain (14:22) That's awesome. Yeah, it's really cool. You might have hit on this before Donald, how long are those ads typically? Give me a range. Where should I stay inside? Donald Kelly (14:31) Good question. Didn't hit on it yet. We do it right now. Our intro ads. So the very beginning are teasers. They're 15 seconds. Okay, so that allows for us to be able to give for ads at the top of the episode. Then our mid-rolls. We keep them at about 20 to 30 seconds. And what we do is we have two mid-roll spots. So our podcast episode is 30 minutes. So we have a break right away around that nine-minute mark-ish. And then we have another one around that 22-minute mark-ish. So we can put two ads in there, a 1 to 30-second ad leading to one minute. So there are two minutes of advertisement in the middle or in the body of the interview. And then at the end, we have a 15-second ad. So it's 15, 30, and 15. Junior Germain (15:26) Okay, so three different ads. Donald Kelly (15:28) Yeah, three different ad spots. So, okay, in the pre-roll, your mid-roll is the middle of it, it's a long one, and then your post-roll at the very end. It's another opportunity, another ad, a 15-second ad. Generally, on our podcast, a 15-second ad at the top and a 15-second at the back are the very same ads. We just changed it up by pre and post. And so it might say, this episode is brought to you in part by Gator Jacks, or this episode was brought to you in part by Gator Jacks. This episode of Spawn was brought to you by the following TSE sponsors. This episode is sponsored by the following sponsors. Junior Germain (16:08) Yeah, okay, that makes sense. To me, hearing three ads that kind of sounds like a lot. And how long is your podcast episode? Would you say? Like 30 minutes? Donald Kelly (16:15) So 20 minutes, yep. It sounds like a lot. But if you watch TV, we have so many ads that we go through. Again, this is why it needs to be a part of the brand, right? I mean, even since then, it's one of the concerns I had like is it going to be too much? But you listen to when I'm in a podcast that I'm loving, like I listened to, like How I Built This the other day, and it was like an hour-long episode. I was like man, these episodes are too long, you know, people are gonna be zoned out. But I listened to Jimmy Kimmel and his story, it doesn't matter, I was in tune, I was enthralled by it. So when I had a little break for like, you know, 15 seconds or 20 seconds, it wasn't that big of a deal. Because I want the story with Jimmy. I wanted to hear that. And it was okay, I gave my consent. And most people do that, again, because of that intimate relationship. And that's why people choose to do a podcast because those people tend to be more willing to listen to that, that host and what they recommend when they share something in their own voice, especially if it's entertaining and it's going to help them. So like our brands, we don't have folks on our brands like food folks. We're focusing on people in the sales arena. So like LinkedIn, or tools that's going to help them. They put up with it per se or allow it because of those factors being entertaining, and it's not too long.
Amber Whitney (17:44) So to do that, you sound like you work a lot one-on-one with the person, not one-on-one, but you work pretty closely with the person that wants you to post their ad, or speak their ad on your podcast. When you work with them one-on-one, do you also help put in your input on what the discount should be? Or how much do you have your input versus what they tell you to do? Donald Kelly (18:09) Yeah, we don't necessarily do that part of their business and their marketing team, and their value, the value that they're offering. So they have an idea for their campaign, they might be in brand awareness, where they just want people to come to their website, and there may be software that they want to get people to download so they might give it a download come and download the podcast. Perhaps it's something like an existing software to have a campaign going and they just want to get a discount for people to get people to sign up. So they might say, you know, use coupon code XYZ to get a discount. But not generally do we do that, they tend to do that with their marketing teams. Amber Whitney (18:53) All right. So your opinion on what the ad should be or how that ad should go? Is smaller but your personal interaction with them on what to say and just being that go-to person. I mean, being that in-between person for the listeners and the ad person is stronger? Donald Kelly (19:10) Yeah, I mean, our inputs there but again, it's their campaign so the campaign is like if they're trying to sell more software, then that's their thing. We're going to change that, but the ad itself in what they say to get people to go to the website we have a lot of input on that side. Because if Gator Jacks again, if Gator Jack is trying to get people to buy their new, frosty and they're trying to do a discount towards that, it makes sense, right? I won't be upset if they want to sell that. Otherwise, we will have them on our show. But that's their camp, their focus, their marketing team, that's their plan. I just come in and help them do that by saying well your messaging to sell may not tie to our audience. This is what I read, come in for the messaging. But as far as the detail, that part doesn't matter too much.
Junior Germain (20:07) Awesome. Thanks so much, Donald. So it sounds like you have a ton of experience creating the ads, writing it up, and presenting it within the podcast, I love to hear this. And it may vary from industry to industry, but what are some realistic expectations? What can I expect the results from the ad will be you know? Will it change my business? Is it a kind of slow and steady thing? What are some realistic expectations there? Donald Kelly (20:29) Yeah, every brand is going to be different, and so forth. And so some of our brands, they have different outcomes, like say, for instance, in general, you're going to look at a long term game with it, right? Okay, all of our sponsors, they're doing a three-month package with us at least. We have a couple that do a one-year contract. So they're getting into a long-term game with it. But you're gonna see steady growth of your business, or even coming into purchasing the solution or even in some of these brands cases, getting brand awareness to them. But I mean, it just depends on how long they're doing it. But I would say it would rival in many cases with some of the social media ads that people would do, like, if you're going to spend, you know, a couple of thousand dollars on Facebook. I've done it where I've spent, you know, several thousand dollars on a Facebook ad campaign for different things. And the result was meager, where we didn't get a lot of business from it. And, you know, it's like, you know, okay, we got some folks, we got some potential leads who would come into the funnel. If you're doing like a podcast campaign, if we were to get like 10 people in our business to come back and do sales training, that would be you know, that could be like 10 grand, compared to and if we spent, you know, $1,000 on ads. I think that would be pretty much really worth it, right? You know, I mean, and here's the thing with podcasts, too, you don't need a huge audience to see impact. You get some people, even think about it. Sometimes people you know, want to get into the podcast with like, you know, hundreds of thousands of listeners. But just think about if you go to a conference room, and there's 500 people in that conference room, that's pretty crazy, like 500 in a room. So think about that with a podcast, you have 500 people listening, can we, if I'm Gator Jacks, I don't need all 500. Can I just get 100 of them interested? And maybe 50 of them to come back to the store and purchase? 50 of them spending an average of maybe $40 on an order? That's not a bad gig. Right? Junior Germain (22:43) Yeah, I like that. You mentioned long-term contracts, they can kind of go about a year, maybe a little bit more. So, if a company wanted to start running ads on the podcast, is there any short-term options for them? Donald Kelly (22:54) Yeah, I mean, podcasts do different things. We just do a three-month campaign. Three months is our starter package. Because we know that it takes that much time with our brand, for them to make an impact. They come in for a week. And they say, Oh, we didn't see anything in a week. It's like, yeah, you probably want to do more than that. Same idea, If you go into a Facebook ad and you run Facebook ad for one day, your results are not going to be as strong versus running it for like a week, or several days. Versus you know, obviously you're going to pay a lot more in those instances. But it's just like anything, the more presence you have, the higher chance you have of having better success.
Junior Germain (23:34) Cool, totally. Any other questions you might have for our guest? Amber Whitney (23:39) I think that's it for now. But it's been very interesting learning about how that marketing works. Usually, as the audience, I don't think about the whole process behind it. So getting to know more of how that works in the background. How you get an ad to come and sponsor your podcast is very inspiring. It's great to learn. Junior Germain (24:03) Yeah, totally. Hey, Donald, can we get maybe a final takeaway from you? Just one thing you've learned from the years? One piece of advice you'd have for a podcaster or a company looking to start using this platform for ads, what's your tip for them? Donald Kelly (24:18) If somebody's looking to start using podcasts, or for their business, using it for their ads, the biggest thing I would tell you is you know, have fun with it. Like, don't make it like a boring read. Don't make it like you know, try to get Gator Jacks it's the best family Avenue around. Like no, give stories, give testimonies, give people telling you to know, like something that's going to pull someone in. So again, maybe you like going to Gator Jacks, you interview a couple of the kids saying that you know, why do you like Gator Jacks? Because their fries are the best. What do you like about Gator Jacks? Oh my goodness this has been around for institutions and this is in our community, and they have the best burger on this side of the Mississippi. You heard it hear folks, you know, folks like Gator Jacks and this is why I love it and I recommend you come down here. I come here every single day, don't tell my wife. You can find more information about Gator Jacks and get a free discount, get a 10% discount at GatorJacks.com. But again, that's entertaining, that little bit of pull. And that's what I tell you, if you're going to do that, those are the things that will make your ads memorable. And it's gonna make people relate, and it's going to help you to win more business. So that's my last tip for you. Thank you. Junior Germain (25:26) Thank you. Yeah, we love it. And I think our listeners are gonna grab so much from these awesome golden nuggets, these takeaways honestly, and insights from your many years of experience using podcasts running ads. And so thank you so much we were so grateful for all that you brought to this episode. Thank you. Junior Germain (25:44) Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you all for having me. Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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