4 Ways to Use Podcast Monitoring for Your Brand

Audio is everywhere these days. A cacophony of voices has been unleashed by the rise of social audio platforms, but for listeners, it’s being built on a strong foundation laid by decades of podcasters and their fans. 

This podcasting ecosystem is more interactive than it may appear, with fans more engaged and more likely to purchase from podcast advertising than benchmarks from other channels.

With these two broad trends in mind, here are four ways your brand can put media monitoring to work right away – without even purchasing a sponsored host live-read spot.

1 – Extract hidden mentions of your brand, from podcasts

In today’s world of hot #stonks and crowd pumps, prudent investors can feel left by the wayside. 

That’s why when news of Warren Buffett investing in Verizon stock broke, traditional media and investment analysis lauded the move. The Oracle of Omaha doesn’t invest based on conjecture, but the market certainly reacts to moves like his.

When the news broke, lots of podcasts covered it. Three weeks later, an influential voice added to the coverage.

While that was nice, and Verizon stockholders probably appreciated the validation, the news cycle buzz effects on the stocks were fairly short-lived. That’s why when an influential Bloomberg podcast, The Tape, covered Buffett’s investment, a full three weeks after it had been announced, prudent investors and stock watchers took note of the knock-on effect this coverage had on the stock. 

Mixed in with other podcast coverage about stonk tips, SPACs and Verizon’s products, we found this coverage in The Tape to be influential, and hyper-relevant to the types of people who would be affected by this kind of news, like a Verizon executive or shareholder.

2 – Influencer identification – find new, influential fans already talking about your brand

Speaking of influential, let’s talk about finding your brand’s fans. Not just fans, but your mega-fans, with mega-reach in a narrow niche.

Looking at the overall video game console ecosystem, as mentioned on podcasts, we can see the mentions are fairly evenly distributed amongst the three big consoles, over time.

Digging into this a bit deeper, we discovered one podcast, Nintendo Switch Craft, discussing the Nintendo Switch, had really incredible community reactions.

This podcaster releases episodes consistently, and entirely focusing on the Switch and its games. By standard metrics he is a micro-influencer, and maybe wouldn’t appear on influencer or public relations agency rosters or using traditional influencer ID tools.

He has fewer than 5,000 followers across Twitter and Twitch, but they are extremely engaged and passionate about his content:

Checking the demographic data allows us to validate what our gut is telling us from a brand marketing perspective – this is a legitimate influencer with a happy, and engaged audience. Advertising with this influencer is both a safe plan from the brand perspective, and likely to be successful to boot.

The influencer’s followers are primarily in the United States, they are outsized video-game fans, and 73% of them are in the 25-44 age bracket, which is to say they have some disposable income. 

3 – Trend research – discover new markets and opportunities

Podcasts are a favorite way to discover new products, ideas, and crucially – trends. New ideas make for great conversation, and podcast hosts are known to mine the bleeding edge of what’s new and trendy for podcast fodder. 

There’s also a lot of podcasts out there. 

If you’re considering placing an ad buy in a podcast, you’re going to need either, a massive budget, or next level targeting and filtering. 

Let’s say you’re a fintech app, maybe your product helps businesses re-invest. 

You have a specific goal your product accomplishes, and putting an ad on the Joe Rogan Experience isn’t going to move the needle. 

Here we’re comparing podcasts with discussions of finance to podcasts discussing innovation in finance for a two week period in early February.

By determining your next level of filtering, within a broader query, you can quickly identify the half dozen or so podcasts that speak to exactly the type of audience you’re after.

Once identified, you can learn what motivates them and what the broad themes of their discussions are, topics your ad can mimic to help make it that much more impactful.

4 – Campaign Measurement and Optimization – Get a 360° view of your industry

Perhaps most important for any business, is to know what’s going on in your own industry. 

It’s why trade magazines and industry groups exist. Keeping tabs on the industry is part competitive monitoring, and part inspiration seeking. 

Let’s take a peek at an industry that’s seen explosive growth in the last couple of years, the plant-based meat alternatives industry.

We can see that it’s Beyond Meat, and everyone else.

We can see that Beyond Meat captures an outsized proportion of the mentions. This includes visual mentions, where a brand logo is visible in a photo or video included in a post.

That’s one way to look at a post, but another common way for people to communicate is with emoji, and here too we can see some notable trends. 

Predictably, we have foods represented in the emoji cloud, but for a group of unicode characters that are disproportionately yellow, there’s also a lot of green in this emoji cloud. Something to note if you’re looking to add some flair to social posts about meat alternatives. 

Digging deeper into the emoji used we might uncover some niche podcasts that discuss vegan recipes or similar, and primarily use the 🟩 square emoji to promote themselves. Using some of the tactics discussed above, we could further refine to find the perfect podcast, and community, to advertise our product.

Podcasting monitoring uses

These are four powerful use cases for podcast monitoring that you can put into action right now. 

Practice one, and deploy your learnings to the next. Soon enough you’ll feel comfortable with all four, and:

• Uncover hidden communities with passionate fans ready to try new things
• Identify ideal podcasts to place your product: your needle in 1,000 haystacks
• Podcasts are on top of the latest trends, capitalize on them for your brand
• Optimize your campaigns, and dig deep into the insights. Visual analytics can help uncover unlikely inspiration for your next audio advertising campaign.