How to prove your podcast’s value to potential sponsors

TLDR: Use PodIntelligence to make the life of your potential sponsors easier by giving them unparalleled insight and access to the nuggets of your content they are most interested in. This will do wonders for the value they perceive in partnering with your platform.

Let’s say you have a string of at least 30-50 podcast episodes. First off, congratulations! Most podcasts never make it that far.

Second, what you have now is fairly impressive to look at, but very hard to use for anything but listening or re-posting.

It’s hard to use for these three reasons:

1) Lack of structure

2) Minimal predictability

3) No way to “zoom out” or “sum up”

Lack of Structure

Lack of structure is easy to start with. Although most podcasts do have a rough format they use, they use it more like guidelines than actual rules. This is just the right amount for engagement, as in today’s world people like to listen in on conversations rather than lectures. But on the other hand, the lack of structure makes any direct comparisons between episodes difficult, beyond their length and title / general theme. This in turn means that any type of meaningful analysis is completely out of the question.

Water Under the Bridge

It’s easy to focus on the good work that you have already done, but for anyone interested in sponsoring your content, that’s water under the bridge. They will want to know how your future content, the only one they can get involved in, is going to look.

If the only thing you can offer to answer this is a list of vague titles or guest’s names and a handful of clips, it’s no wonder they can easily get cold feet.

Minimal Predictability

You can send them an episode or two for them to listen to, but nobody’s got an extra hour and a half in their day, so they are most likely to roughly skim and skip through the content, trying to get a general idea, which means that their final opinion is going to be based on some random clips from an episode they know you purposefully chose for them.

That’s the best case. Worst case is they will have no time and will go with episode titles alone to figure out what you might be talking about in the future, and how their stuff could fit in there.

No Way to Zoom Out or Sum Up

It would be easier to answer both of these challenges if you had a way of zooming out, aggregating, and simply looking at individual episodes or their sum and drawing conclusions for that. For example, if you burned a wish off Aladdin’s genie and therefore had unlimited time to work on your podcasts, you technically could carefully listen to your complete body of work and make note of all of the keywords, topics, places, people, and brands that you mentioned while keeping the guests and the listeners entertained, then transcribe those potentially useful nuggets and clip out both video and audio files corresponding with each quote. This would allow you to build stuff like word clouds that show you what your episode was about at a glance, and allow any potential sponsor quickly sift through your work with the luxury of having all of the important bits already pointed out. 

The problem is, that work sounds endless and tedious, and is a moot point because you are almost certainly fresh out of genie wishes, so there is no way you could ever have time for that. You could also, of course, use PI instead to do it for you.

Even the raw, untouched output of PodIntelligence enables you to leapfrog all of the above-mentioned problems when you face a potential sponsor.

Lack of Structure

Lack of structure? – Irrelevant. PodIntelligence is able to parse and analyze your content even if no structure is present, just like you could if you listened to it all and wrote down all the salient parts. The difference is, it can do it in minutes, rather than weeks. And it is all done for you.

Insight

Minimal predictability? More like clear-cut insight. A word cloud that shows the words most used in the episode in a hierarchical cloud (words most used are bigger and closer to the middle of the cloud) is a part of the PI results. You can present just the word cloud and it would immediately paint a very clear picture about what that episode was about, and give them ideas to explore keywords that seem promising, then listen to the ready-made clip examples. This will quite efficiently give them a good outline of how your past shows looked, and by extension what can they expect your content will look like in the future.

Cost of Risk

In my own work, I talk about something called a “cost of risk”. In a nutshell, the amount of cash you ask for is not the only cost felt by the client. It’s simple – would you lightheartedly send your kid to the cheapest dentist you know? Why not, doesn’t she have the best price? Maybe in dollar terms, yes. But there’s the added “cost of risk” that feels very real although it’s not on any bill – the worry that you made a horrible mistake.

What does that have to do with PI? Well, if the potential sponsor can’t really see what they are getting into without listening to 20 hours of a podcast, they will indeed feel a strong “risk cost” and therefore be willing to pay less money for the privilege, despite your results.

It’s All Going to Be OK

The ability to “sum up” your long reams of audiovisual content is a key to calming them down, letting them see the value of such a sponsorship much clearer. As a final “nail in the coffin”, the data you have on your content will later enable them to easily check every time they were mentioned in the podcast, and check the relevant clip. This will give them hard data to show on their reports and generally make their decision much easier overall.

And it needs to be said, this is ON TOP of the potential to simply point out the clips where you already mentioned their brand or a topic their audience loves, instead of just promising you will do that in the future.

You may not have done that with the intention of scoring points with them, but I kind of think that makes it worth more, not less.

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