3 Ways Direct to Consumer Brands Use Podchaser Pro

As a direct to consumer brand, your mission statement is in your name. Your goal: To find the most effective ways to inspire and move consumers to action. That’s why podcasting is the perfect match for D2C brands.

Why? Firstly, the podcast industry is booming. Every month an average of 104 million Americans listen to podcasts, up from 67 million in 2017. That’s one third of the country! Roughly the same number of Americans who watch football every week. And more than half of podcast listeners have bought a product they heard about via podcasting.

In addition, podcasts uniquely provide the opportunity to share your message to an engaged audience in an intimate and authentic format. Nowhere else can you share your product or service directly engaged with listeners for minutes at a time.

D2C brands use podcasting to:

Buy advertisements on podcasts
Create a branded Podcast
Book internal thought leaders as podcast guests

In this article, we’ll discuss how easy it is to do each of these with Podchaser Pro. But first, what is Podchaser Pro?

What is Podchaser Pro?

Podchaser is the world’s most comprehensive podcast database, and Podchaser Pro unlocks access to truly one-of-a-kind podcast data. 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.

Request a free demo to see why Forbes called Podchaser Pro, “an incredibly useful tool for podcast marketing or booking guests or promoting to media or for research and development.”

1) Buy Advertisements on Podcasts

The podcast advertising industry is growing because it’s effective. Last year, podcast advertisers spent a total of $1.33 billion, with that number expected to grow to $1.74 billion by the end of this year, and to $6 billion by 2026.

And a huge segment of podcast advertisers are direct to consumer brands. While it varies month-to-month, our Brands page shows that 30% of the top 30 podcast advertisers are D2C.

To top it all off, podcast ads are cost effective, especially compared to syndicated radio or television. We’ve written a whole article diving deep into podcast ad rates, but the short version is that they cost $10-30 per one thousand listeners. A similar 30-second radio ad can cost hundreds of dollars, depending on the market.

To advertise your brand on podcasts, you need to find podcasts that are the perfect fit. Podchaser Pro is built to help you target niches with extensive data on podcast genres, listener demographics, and popularity. Here’s how to utilize Podchaser Pro to get started advertising on podcasts:

Topic

Most podcast databases only have around a dozen categories, which is only the tip of the iceberg of podcast genres. Podchaser features over 100 categories you can filter at the start of your search. With this simple feature, you’re already finding more quality podcasts than you would with other podcast directories or Google rabbit holes, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what Podchaser Pro can do.

Listener Demographics

Once you’ve done this top level targeting, it’s time to get specific – and this is where Podchaser Pro really shines.

Before Pro, you had to guess the demographics of a podcast based on face value. If you were researching a men’s fitness podcast, you assumed the show’s audience was mostly men, who maybe skewed younger.

With Pro you no longer have to guess. Pro users can access exclusive audience insights, 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. Analyzing podcast demographics has never been easier than it is with Podchaser Pro.

Popularity

Of course, you not only want to know the type of audience, but the size of the audience. We’ve got you covered there too. Each podcast’s Insights tab gives you instant access to estimated monthly listener data, as well as our proprietary metric for podcast 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.

2) Create a Branded Podcast

Branded podcasts are podcasts owned and produced by a specific brand. Beyond that, branded podcasts can be anything. Some are interview podcasts, others storytelling podcasts, and some are even serialized dramas. Branded podcasts provide creative freedom, allowing your company to tell your story in whatever format is most effective for you.

One thing that branded podcasts are not: infomercials. Your focus should be creating entertaining and informative content instead of directly selling your product or service every episode. Only when you focus on content quality can you take advantage of the benefits of branded podcasts, which are:

Brand awareness
Brand engagement
Builds authority
Niche content

To read more about the benefits of branded podcasts, read our ultimate guide.

Market Research for Branded Podcasts

The first step of starting a branded podcast is to perform market research. You need to avoid oversaturated topics and find a unique angle within your brand’s niche. This is where Podchaser Pro comes in.

In addition to researching popularity, listener demographics, and category (which we covered in the last section), Podchaser provides more exclusive insights into your competitors.

First is Sponsor History. On many of the top podcasts, Podchaser Pro details which companies have sponsored this podcast recently, the dates of those advertisements, and how many times they’ve worked with the podcast. We even estimate how much it costs for a pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll ad on that podcast.

Second is Alerts. Podchaser’s Alerts allow you to receive an email alert every time your search phrase is mentioned on a podcast episode. Meaning you can monitor podcast mentions of your own brand as well as your competitors. Your first Alert is free, then contact us for more.

And to round off your research, each podcast page has links to the podcast’s social media pages, so you can understand the content they are posting, their follower count, and their audience engagement.

Every podcast’s Insight tab is your go-to for unmatched podcast data. Gain access to sponsor history, ad cost estimates, chart rankings, social media pages, and more — under one roof.

3) Book Your Brand’s Thought Leaders As Podcast Guests

Booking your company’s thought leaders as podcast guests gives yet another avenue to market your brand. In interviews they will be able to go beyond the soundbite of a traditional advertisement and explain the benefits of your product in a longform interview. A podcast interview can also convince customers to convert who have heard your podcast ads but may still be on the fence.

We’ve thoroughly covered how to find the perfect shows to guest on with Podchaser Pro, so let’s focus on the next step – finding contact information so you can reach out.

Before Podchaser Pro, finding podcast contact information was a nightmare. Trying to contact a show led you on a labyrinthian journey through Google just to find a single email address – which often ended up being a generic email for the whole organization. Podchaser Pro provides verified contact information for virtually every collaborator on a show, including hosts, producers, editors, and more.

The only downside of guest placement used to be the amount of work it took. But with Podchaser Pro’s verified contact information, our clients save dozens of stressful hours scouring the web for any scrap of information. Now, with just a few clicks you have everything you need to get your talent booked on a podcast.

Other Ways D2C Brands Can Use Podchaser Pro

What we’ve highlighted is only a few ways to use Podchaser Pro. There are several other tools that brands can take advantage of.

Here’s the full list of Podchaser Pro features for D2C brands:

Access to the world’s largest podcast database
Podcast reach data (per episode and month)
Verified contact information
Power Score™
Alerts
Sponsor History
Estimated Cost of Advertisements
Demographic data
Apple and Spotify Chart Positions
Exclusive Search Filters (has guests, gender skew, listener age, listener location)
Social media handles and analytics
Podcast metadata

Other Podchaser Products For Direct to Consumer Brands

Podchaser API – Built specifically to drive discovery for listeners, podcasters, and brands: Podchaser API unlocks our world-class database for your software development. Start for free right now to gain access to Podchaser’s user reviews, popularity charts, search tools, podcast credits, podcast reach, demographic information, verified contacts, and more!