This is a deep dive into DesignCrowd and the long-tail success they’ve had with podcast sponsorships. It’s an example of the results you can achieve with sponsoring podcasts. As the founder of a podcast advertising agency-and someone who has worked on hundreds of campaigns-I can tell you that most podcast sponsorships prioritize short-term results. As sponsors grow in this space, however, they start to recognize the incredible value of the long tail. No Podcast Advertising Analysis is Complete without the “Long Tail” What does “long tail” mean? It means the staying power of a podcast ad and its ability to drive long-term return on investment (ROI). Beyond immediate results, a single podcast sponsorship can continue to generate new business for weeks and months after its release. Statistically, most podcasts get the majority of their listens in the first week. Podcast advertising rates are often based on downloads and streams in the first 30 days of release. When you look beyond that time period, it’s easy to see the huge bonus those additional listens can be for sponsors. This additional ROI can be due to a few different scenarios. For instance: Listeners hear an older episode and the ad at a later date. Or listeners recall the podcast sponsor when a relevant need arises. We recently spoke with Kevin Bradford, Content Marketing Manager at DesignCrowd. DesignCrowd is a crowdsourced graphic design platform, primarily aimed at businesses and entrepreneurs. This interview is a podcast advertising deep dive into the power of the long tail, which is a key part of DesignCrowd’s podcast advertising strategy. Disclaimers As with all, DesignCrowd’s experience may be unique (and your results may vary). Our podcast advertising agency, ADOPTER Media, has done business with DesignCrowd on a few of their podcast ad campaigns. Without further adieu, here’s our conversation. Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:46 – 18.4MB) Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | TuneIn | RSS Glenn Rubenstein from ADOPTER Media talks to Kevin Bradford from DesignCrowd Glenn Rubenstein: Kevin, thanks for joining me. To start with, for those who don’t know, what is DesignCrowd? Kevin Bradford: Yeah, well, thanks for having me, Glenn. DesignCrowd is an online website that allows customers, small businesses, entrepreneurs to outsource or crowdsource custom logo, web, and graphic design from designers all around the world. So, if you’re a small business and you need a new logo you can submit a brief to DesignCrowd. We will send that brief out to our community of 550,000 designers and within days you’ll have a whole selection of other logos and designs that you can choose from, any project receives between 60 and 100 different designs, and you select the best one and put that forward for payment for the design. You get the logo and the designer gets paid-wherever they are in the world. DesignCrowd’s Podcast Advertising Strategy Glenn: How big a part of the overall DesignCrowd marketing is podcast advertising? Kevin: Podcast advertising is a relatively new part of our marketing campaign. We’ve been doing it just coming up to a year now and it’s been a massive learning curve for us, but it’s become an important part of our whole marketing strategy. And obviously one of the key things is making sure it incorporates into a lot of the other things you do. So, whether that’s email campaigns or other social media advertising, it all has to work together to get your message across, engage the right audience and reach as many people as possible. How DesignCrowd Got Started Sponsoring Podcasts (and what they’ve learned) Glenn: You mentioned the learning curve. What do you feel that you’ve learned from your first year of running podcast advertising campaigns? Kevin: A huge amount. It was almost an accidental channel that we came across it. We spent on podcasts…and the initial results of that spend, and we’re talking within the week first week-first month, wasn’t great. We saw a couple of sales, but we thought well for the spend, it hasn’t been through the roof. We didn’t think it was going to move the needle in terms of the number of sales and the amount of revenue it’s going to bring in. Then we continue to sort of move on with our other advertising channels, marketing elements that we do. We saw that some of these podcasts that we featured on kept appearing in our post-purchase survey that we ask our customers where they heard about us, in the google analytics that we go through, the touch-points on our website we saw still traffic going through to these partner pages that would set up their landing pages for the podcasts. So when we drill down on that we notice that from the initial spend to the total sales-maybe six months later it had become a really profitable channel. And it really sort of…that’s when the light bulb sort of switched on and we thought we could definitely drill down into this and look at analyzing the tail of that spend that we have on certain podcasts and then sourcing podcasts that we need to part of and work with. Recognizing The Power of Podcasts through the Long Tail Glenn: So it did prove to be cost effective, it just took a while to really kick in. Kevin: Yeah absolutely it was, it was that sort of six months, it was almost as if we forgotten about it. We made that spend which we thought OK that didn’t work-let’s move on, let’s look at other avenues. So from seeing that keep emerging in our in our data, we then basically specked out what we thought that tail would look like per spend and then what it would look like if we spend X amount on certain shows, and that kind of drove the desire, I guess, to find out more about the industry and not be as reliant on immediate sales for immediate spend. Let it sort of live a little bit, breathe as it were, and and say what over time the evergreen content was going to bring in for us. Prioritizing The Long Tail Glenn: Long-tail results are something that I hear about from many podcast advertisers. In your case do you think it’s that people didn’t have the immediate need for DesignCrowd so when it came up, when the need arose that you were there destination based on the podcast, or what do you really credit for that long-tail of trickling in results. Kevin: There’s probably a couple of elements to it. One that the product isn’t something that you’d necessarily go straight to a website and purchase, if you’ve got a business name and a design name then maybe that’s the case. But in terms of needing design product its one of those things that you may need in future. So once you know about the brand from listening to the podcasts it may be a few days, weeks, before you actually come to purchase a product that you need. So there’s one reason why there may be that tail or that slight delay. But also podcasts from our experience, just get bigger over time. The content is evergreen and so just because the podcast goes out on a Monday doesn’t mean people are going to be listening to it withn that seven day period or even within that month. A lot of podcasts do a lot of good work in terms of putting those podcasts on their website and getting some SEO values when people are searching for how they’re going to build their business or looking for tips and hints on how to grow their entrepreneurial idea, these podcasts pop up and maybe six months later someone is listening to that not in necessarily the sequence that it was uploaded. They’re just listened into it for that information and if we’re part of that discussion as an advertiser then they were going to look to come to our site and use our product. DesignCrowd’s Current Podcast Advertising Plans Glenn: How many podcasts are you currently sponsoring, now in 2017? Kevin: We are probably down to a streamline of maybe 10 podcasts that we’re working with, probably in total we’ve worked with maybe 30 to 40 different podcasts for various amounts of time and that’s the key thing. You’ve got to test the show. There’s nothing on paper you can look at that says that podcast is going to work for me. It can take all the boxes on paper, and then for some reason it just won’t resonate. And so you have to, from our experience, get on the podcast. Make the spend. Do as much as you can to get the reads right to get the website looking right. This is just coming to the page, and ensure the offer is there for people to take up and just … test, test, test. And so once you know which podcasts are working best for you we kind of rolled back to our core podcast group that we know is successful. And from that try and add in new ones that we think are in the same kind of ballpark. The Podcasts That Work Best for Them Glenn: What types of podcasts have been the most successful for you? Kevin: Well it’s interesting, because we obviously started out with the with the idea that entrepreneur, start-up, small business podcasts were going to be the thing. They’re going to be listened to by the people who need design products or design assets and people who are looking out for a new idea, a new way to push their business and grow their business. And we thought it was going to be the absolute sweet spot and some of those podcasts have worked well for us and we continue to work with them. Others have been more along the lines of self-improvement, motivational podcasts. Podcasts that talk more about lifestyle and how to make the most of what you’re doing in business and in life in general. And it seems like a lot of people who listen to those podcasts have an entrepreneurial way about them and who probably wouldn’t turn themselves entrepreneurs. But we see a lot of things like fitness instructors getting logos, and bakers and h
