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If you’re here, you know this already… Podcasts are an amazing source of visibility for your brand, because everyone’s listening!

The reality is, listening to a podcast nearly topples Facebook lives, because that’s what people want right now – AUDIO v. video.

But! How do you retarget ads to your podcast listeners if you can’t download the right data? No, you can’t get a CSV file of everyone downloading your podcast, so this is the next best thing!

In this episode I’m detailing a Team Hirsh secret strategy: The Podcast Amplifier Funnel. (My amazing team dreamed this up, and our clients are already seeing huge success!)

You’ll learn…

The step-by-step ad strategy we use for THIS podcast
How we create a “podcast listeners” audience + how much $$ we typically spend
The 2 KEYS to success for every influencer, from high-ticket sales to ecommerce!

Tune in for another action-packed episode (in under 10 minutes!), and then share your takeaways on IG stories. Tag @emilyhirsh for a shoutout!

Key Points:
[1:56] How to retarget podcast viewers when you can’t see “cost per download”
[4:06] I suggest retargeting to something free (unless you’re in ecommerce)
[5:46] The 2 KEYS to success with our “Podcast Amplifier Funnel”
[6:41] How this works like Facebook lives

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Episode Transcripts:  

Today I’m going to share with you guys a really fun, what I’m calling “secret podcast ads funnel.” So, we’ve been testing this out on a lot of our clients, and first of all, I think podcasts are an amazing source of visibility and brand awareness content, and actually almost topping Facebook Lives these days because of how people are consuming material. They are consuming audio more than they are sitting and watching a longer video.

So my podcast has been amazing. We’ve seen such great feedback from it, and then we have several clients with podcasts seeing amazing results. If you’re not in the podcasting world, I highly suggest you try it. You don’t have to make it too complicated. I mean, I literally record the audios. We put the beginning and the end, intro/outro. My team does that, and then we push it out. We don’t do anything crazy to make it complicated, and so far the response has been great.

So with that, we’ve explored what ads look like with podcasts, because the problem with podcast ads is that you’re a lot of times driving it to like, Libsyn or something, an off-site podcast download on iTunes, and so you can’t actually see the conversion, obviously, of pixeling, who downloaded it. You can’t see like the cost per download, and so you really have to go off cost-per-click, driving traffic, but it’s like, “Well, is that getting me downloads, or not?” You know, that’s been kind of the question for several of our clients.

So one thing that we did is what we’re calling “the podcast amplifier funnel,” and it’s something my team actually strategized and created because they are so amazing, and then we’ve now tested it out, and it’s working amazing and really wonderfully, so I wanted to share it on here now that it’s proven and tested.

Basically what we do is we create a blog post on my site for every podcast episode. So, every episode has a URL link on my site, and you can go to the show notes. There’s a player, and then you can click to go download the episode on iTunes or Android or whatever. Every episode we drive to that link, that web link. We will create an ad out of every episode, and we’ll spend anywhere from $25 to $100, so not that much, on each ad.

And so, I have a podcast released twice a week, so we’re promoting every one for a couple of days after it releases, and then what we do is we create a bulk audience of everybody who goes to my podcast pages. We create an audience of anyone who lands on any of those podcast page URLs, and you can obviously get even more detailed with it and have like, an audience of somebody who goes to one podcast page. And then with that, you know where I’m going with this. You can then re-target those with a specific ad. And so what we do is, we create the audience of everyone we know who’s clicked on the ad, which means they’ve engaged with our podcast. So we know that they have engaged with it and probably listened to at least one episode, right?

So then we create an ad that’s like, “Hey, I know you’ve recently listened to the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast, and that you’re interested, ” …I don’t remember exactly what we say, but … “And that you’re interested in Facebook and marketing tips.” Then we send people to our case study funnel. So we connect basically that “Hey, we know you listen to our podcast and that you’re interested in what I have to share on the podcast, and so we have this awesome resource for you as a next step, and that is our client case studies and behind-the-scenes and how we’ve accomplished managing this much ad spend,” whatever we say.

But basically we’re creating a retargeting ad that’s speaking directly to people we know who have listened to the podcast. Because you can’t get a CSV file of all your downloads, this is kind of the next best thing in creating a retargeting ad of people that you know are consuming that content. And so for you, it obviously depends on your funnel, but you could send people to your podcast every week and then create an ad directly re-targeted at them, sending them to your webinar.

I would suggest sending them to something that’s free, not like a paid product, because they’re really not warm enough at that point just by visiting your podcast page, unless you’re in e-commerce. That’s a different game. But if you are e-commerce and you have a lower-priced product, you could definitely send people to the product, and then if you also have high ticket in an application funnel, I would also test re-targeting to that too, because it’s a free application. You’re not asking them to right away buy, and people might sign up for that, and that would be fine.

So the keys are a few things. One, that you consistently fill that warm audience. So if you’re, like with podcasts, you’re constantly releasing new ones. You have to constantly promote that to cold traffic so you’re constantly building that audience up, and then you have this audience, and then your next level ad that you’re re-targeting to, the key with it is that it speaks to those people, so that it acknowledges that you know that they are interested in your podcast, and so, “For all podcast listeners,” I mean, you could even say, “For all podcast listeners, we’ve got this amazing special download only created for you.” Then you re-target them with that, and they feel very connected to the messaging.

Those are really the keys, and this is something that’s worked really well for not only us, but several of our clients, and it’s something that if you have a podcast, we’re including in that visibility phase of The Hirsh Process, promoting it. Because like I said, you can’t re-target … With Facebook Lives, why they’re so powerful is you can re-target video views. But if you just send someone to go download your podcast on iTunes, you’re lacking that re-targeting audience, and so that’s how we kind of got around this so that we could still build the warm bucket audience of podcast downloads and viewers to re-target, and use this awesome source of content to build people’s warm audiences.

So like I said, podcasts are super hot right now. They’re working really well. I mean, if you’re listening to this, you’re listening to one. You know how it’s so great to connect with me on a podcast and get information, and we’re just seeing so many results with people consuming it. So we wanted to then, of course, tie ad spend so that we can get more people to consume our clients’ podcasts that are resulting in conversion and sales and growing their audience.

It’s a wonderful, warm, brand awareness, visibility piece of content that you should leverage and put ad spend behind, and then you build in your re-targeting ads. That is our secret podcast ads funnel that we use over here at Hirsh Marketing, and I think it’s super valuable. If you have one, test it out. Let me know how it goes. If you want strategies like this, we have tons of these little secret strategies that I haven’t even shared yet on here, custom to you. Go to HelpMyStrategy.com and apply to work with Team Hirsh today. I’ll see you guys later.