Business
This is a podcast advertising case study about DesignCrowd and the success they've had sponsoring podcasts. It's also an example of the longer-term (or "long tail") results you can achieve with podcast ads. 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 Case Study 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 case study about the power of the long tail, which is a key part of DesignCrowd's podcast advertising strategy. Podcast Advertising Case Study Disclaimers As with all podcast advertising case studies, DesignCrowd's experience is 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. 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,