Navigating the Podcast Landscape: Choosing the Right Shows for Your Business

As a brand or business, you’ve heard a lot about the power of podcasting. But how do you leverage this unique medium to benefit your company? The two main methods are advertising on other podcasts, and booking your thought leaders as guests on other podcasts. What’s best is combining these methods to maximize brand awareness, engagement, authority, and sales.

But where do you start? By choosing the perfect podcasts and hosts for your business. In this article we’ll provide you with 3 tips for choosing the right podcasts and hosts to work with.

Table of Contents:

• 1) Find Your Niche
• 2) Shows Within Your Budget
• 3) Avoid Controversy
• Want to Learn More About Podcast Advertising?

1) Find Your Niche

The power of podcasts is its niche. When targeting your audience, you’re looking for quality over quantity. As an example, if you are a makeup brand who focuses on sustainability, you should specifically target environmental beauty and health podcasts, even if they have a smaller audience than Gwenyth Paltrow’s Goop Podcast. Your advertisement or podcast episode may reach less people, but the audience you do find will naturally be more receptive to your messaging.

To find your niche, look no further than Podchaser. Podchaser is the world’s most comprehensive podcast database, built for brands, publicists, and listeners to discover the perfect podcasts in their niche.

And Podchaser Pro unlocks access to even more one-of-a-kind data. First find podcasts about your topic. With Podchaser Pro, you’re just a few clicks away from knowing almost every podcast’s contact information, sponsor history, reach, Power Score™(cross-platform popularity), demographics, and more.

First, do a top level search of podcasts with topics related to your company. 

Then Pro users can access exclusive audience insights for each of those podcasts, unlike anything else in the industry. Podchaser Pro makes it easy to understand each podcast’s audience with detailed breakdowns of demographic and psychographic affinities like age, gender skew, and income.

2) Shows Within Your Budget

Of course, you not only want to know the type of audience, but the size of the audience.  You need to find a balance between shows with a large audience that are still within your budget. We’ve got you covered there too. 

Pro users can access each podcast’s Insights tab, which provides instant access to the show’s estimated listenership, broken down per episode and per month. On the same Insights page, you can also view our proprietary metric for podcast’s popularity, Power Score™.

To calculate a podcast’s Power Score, we’ve combined over 30 unique data points including audience size, subscribers, play through rates, and cross-platform influence over time. A podcast’s Power Score ranges between 1-100, 100 being the most influential. 

For the first time in podcasting history, you can understand a podcast compared to its competitors with a mere glance.

3) Avoid Controversy

The last piece of the puzzle is to dig deeper into the content of the show. The podcast might be within your right niche and budget, but when you dig deeper into the podcast they are saying things that don’t align with your company’s values or are just plain offensive.

You could listen to every episode of their podcast, but that would take an obscene amount of time. To save you time and money, Podchaser provides two tools.

First is Transcripts. With Podchaser’s transcript API, developers can now pull episode transcripts from the top 5,000 podcasts. To avoid controversy, simply download a podcast’s transcripts and scan them for any unwanted words or topics.

Second is Alerts. Built on similar transcript technology, Podchaser Alerts will inform you via email anytime your keyphrase is mentioned in a podcast. So you can set up alerts for words or phrases you don’t want your brand to associate with, and avoid the podcasts that use them. 

Alerts have many other uses for businesses as well: you can analyze topic trends, track mentions of specific brands (including your own), or track mentions of specific people to discover who’s talking about you, your client, or someone else you’re interested in.

Want to Learn More About Podcast Advertising?

Finding the right shows is only the first step in podcast advertising. If you want to learn more, please download our free eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Effective Podcast Advertising in 2023

Download eBook