Podcast Marketing, A Useful Tool for Companies Going Overseas

Imagine the scenario that you are wearing headphones and leaning against the subway car with eyes slightly closed. At this moment, the voice of Li Bin, the founder of NIO, comes through the headphones, “Our original intention is to build the car as a mobile living space and emotional partner.”

There is no hard sell. When the founder of NIO no longer stands on a platform, but slowly implants the concept of “long-termism” and “user-first” into your brain through a podcast lasting one to two hours, you may realize that NIO is starting to establish an emotional connection with you through sound in a subtle way.

This is exactly where the power of “voice” as a medium for media communication lies - it allows brands to invisibly enter the lives of listeners, breaking the sales pitch of traditional advertising, and delivering brand concepts and values through stories in a more natural and intimate way.

And podcasts are becoming the main force of this “voice” marketing.

The Rise of Podcast: From Being Spawned by Pandemic to Becoming New Marketing Battleground

In 2020, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 sweeping the globe and the overall struggles of the content industry, short videos, graphics, gaming and other content industries were competing fiercely. Podcasts, which use sound as a carrier, have become a new increment as people spent more time at home. According to podcast search engine Listen Notes, the number of Chinese podcasts added 10,000 in 2020, a five-fold increase compared to 2019. In order to further seize the attention of users, podcast products have been chased by capital. In addition to online audio veteran players Himalaya, Lychee and Dragonfly FM who are coveting this track, Internet giants such as ByteDance, NetEase, BiliBili and Tencent have also run in one after another since 2020. The next four years have become the golden period of China's podcast development (Figure 1). It is expected that by China's podcast audience will reach 158.6 million in 2025.

According to the 2024 Podcast Industry Report, more than 80 percent of surveyed users listen to podcasts for three days or more per week. Nearly 77 percent of respondents listen for more than half an hour in a day, which is equivalent to brushing through at least 60 short videos and browsing through 10 articles on official accounts. About 40 percent of respondents listen to podcasts for more than one hour a day, which is equivalent to one long episode of a variety show or nearly two episodes of a TV series. Compared to other audio/video and social media, more than 40 percent of respondents spend the most time listening to podcasts.

Figure 1, The Golden Period of China's Podcasts between 2021 and 2024

Source: eMarketer

Compared with China, podcasts have been developed for many years and have formed a sound ecosystem in both content production and user consumption in the United States which has a high private car penetration rate, a huge driving population and a long average daily driving time. According to public data, the number of monthly listeners of podcasts in the U.S. reached 116 million in 2021, and more than 120 million Americans listened to podcasts on a regular basis in 2023. Among them, the youth aging 12 to 34 have become the main force of podcast listeners, up to 60% (Figure 2).

As a diverse medium that combines audio, video and electronic radio, podcasts have been expanding their influence in the U.S., emerging as a key channel for politicians, brands, and the public to communicate with each other, especially during major events such as the U.S. election.

In the past few months of the U.S. election, Democrats have followed the usual practice of producing expensive TV ads, conducting ground pushing operations in swing states, and recruiting a large number of volunteers to walk around the neighborhoods to sell Harris's political ideas. On the other side, Trump made frequent appearances on podcast anchors, notably launching a three-hour conversation program with podcast host Joe Rogan that topped 45 million views on YouTube. Eventually, when the election results were announced to celebrate his victory, Trump made a point of thanking the podcast hosts represented by Joe Rogan. Elon Musk has also repeatedly stated in the media that President Trump and Vice President Vance's participation in the lengthy podcast had a big impact on the outcome of the election.

Figure 2, Podcast Listeners in the U.S.

Source: Statista

Podcasts are thriving in the U.S. market and have huge potential for commercialization.

The U.S. podcast industry is a huge market with rich products, including first-tier apps like Apple and Spotify and unicorns in key markets. Apple's Podcasts has played a key role in the development of the podcast industry in the U.S., and is still the dominant podcast app. Music streamer Spotify has also been vigorously promoting podcasts over the past few years, shifting from “music-centric” to “audio-first”, and has become the second largest podcast app after Apple. From 2019 to 2020, Spotify acquired six to seven audio content or technology companies, each with a bid of roughly EUR 100 million to 200 million, in order to acquire users, content and ad-cash technology. For example, Spotify purchased Gimlet Media, a podcast content production company, with a whopping price of USD 230 million. Currently, the U.S. podcast market has reached USD 210 million in gross revenues (Figure 3).

According to PwC's 2023 Podcast Advertising Revenue Study, advertising revenues of U.S. podcast grew 5 percent to USD 1.9 billion in 2023, and are expected to grow 12 percent to more than USD 2 billion in 2024 and approach USD 2.6 billion in 2026.

Figure 3, Total Revenues of Podcasts in the American Market

Source: Podsights

Podcasts have evolved into an emerging medium that cannot be ignored, as is pointed out in the China's Podcast Industry Report 2024.

"Voice" Marketing, A Form of Business

With the rapid growth of the Chinese podcast market, more and more brands are utilizing this platform to connect with their target consumers. "Voice" marketing is becoming a business.

For example, Giada successfully attracted more than 300,000 followers by launching a podcast called “Flowers in the Rock” in Xiaoyuzhou app, which combines topics such as women's empowerment and social change to raise brand awareness among young women. Nike invited athletes and opinion leaders to share their sports stories, reinforcing the brand's connection with sportsmanship through podcasts, further enhancing its influence among young groups.

Levi's “Words with Lee” podcast, which showcases the brand's values through multicultural and social responsibility issues, quickly attracted a large number of young fans, while Louis Vuitton was launching a podcast in 2023 about the brand's history, craftsmanship, and close relationship with art and design. Although podcasts have a smaller audience than videos, LV still chooses to reach out to a younger, more culturally literate audience, building an emotional bond between the brand and its consumers.

Figure 4, Brands Use Chinese Podcasts for Marketing

Source: Campaign China

Foreign brands, on the other hand, use podcast marketing to achieve deep user connection and precise market positioning. For example, Beefeater, a British wine, successfully connected the brand with the joyful atmosphere of Christmas through the podcast advertisement on Spotify in 2021. The ads were centered around Christmas markets, dinner parties and hot drinks, precisely targeting the 18 to 35-year-old group. Capitalizing on the festive atmosphere and seasonal music, Beefeater's ads received over 10 million displays and attracted 2.6 million listeners. (Figure 5)

Grammarly chose to connect with the workforce through podcasts to promote its tone of voice rewriting tool. Focusing on the 25 to 54-year-old career-minded user group on Spotify, it emphasized the importance of positive communication in the workplace and offered an upgrade solution, achieving a 6 percent website conversion rate and 152 percent return on advertising. American home furnishing brand Ashley cleverly combined festivals and promotional nodes to accurately target consumers who are ready to buy furniture, and eventually realized 131 percent return on advertising and 31 percent increase in consumer flows of brick-and-mortar stores.

These cases show that podcast marketing can not only establish a deep connection between brands and consumers through emotional resonance, but also accurately reach the target audience and optimize brand communication effects, making it an important part of brand marketing that cannot be ignored.

Figure 5, Beefeater Uses Spotify for Marketing

Source: Spotify

How "voice" becomes a form of business?

In the era of information explosion and fragmentation, traditional marketing methods are facing increasing challenges for brands to accurately reach young people and establish deep emotional connections. Especially in the context of escalating production costs and diminishing advertising effectiveness of video ads, podcasts, as an emerging voice marketing channel, are becoming a favored choice for more and more brands.

Compared with traditional video ads, podcasts have low production costs, requiring only a recording studio and audio editing software. Their production threshold are relatively low and listening scenes are more free, making it easy to break new ground among different users. Compared to video advertising, podcasting is also an efficient and low-cost marketing channel. According to AdvertiseCast, an advertising media company, the average CPM for a 30-second advertisement on a podcast with 2,500-5,000 listeners is only USD 23, while it is USD 30 for a podcast with more than 100,000 listeners. In China, WeChat's CPM (cost per 1,000 displays) is 1,500 yuan and BiliBili's CPM is 600-1,000 yuan, while podcasts' CPM is around 50-100 yuan.

In addition, audio has strong marketing “memory points” and a unique “whispering” communication style, which makes the relationship between brands and listeners more intimate and stable. According to Chen Siwei, a podcast industry practitioner, podcasts are able to reverse filter loyal users compared to short videos and graphic ads.

Podcasts don't specialize in immediate consumption conversion, but have an extremely strong long-tail effect on brand long-termism. Unlike quick-consumption media forms such as short videos, the content of podcasts are more insightful and continuous, providing brands with lasting exposure. Once a user subscribes to a podcast, he or she is likely to go back and listen to previous content, creating long-term brand exposure. This long-term and multiple exposure and contact is an advantage that images and short videos cannot match. Currently, the audience of podcasts is usually a highly educated, high-income young elite group. More than 60 percent of podcast listeners have experienced tertiary education or above, easy to accept new things, and many of them have already formed a purchase behavior, which provides an excellent opportunity for brands to reach high net worth customers.

Many brands have begun to realize the importance of podcasts as a promotional channel, and have been giving a try on some platforms.

For example, although Tesla has always emphasized that it does not advertise, it has launched its own podcast “Tesla GIGA Radio” on Himalaya, which conveys its brand message to listeners in an easy and natural way by telling Tesla's design concepts and owners' stories. By telling stories about Tesla's design concepts and car owners, the brand's message is delivered to listeners in a relaxed and natural way.

In addition, Lancôme launched the podcast “The Nights We Stayed Up Late” in collaboration with Xiaoyuzhou, discussing the common topic of staying up late in collaboration with several top podcasts and interacting with the listeners in the comment section, combining its Luminous Eye Cream with its “Stay Up Late” message. It ultimately garnered 13 million social media impressions, 600,000 in-depth interactions, and 3.1 million hours of listening time.

These successful cases show that brands can not only utilize podcasts to build emotional connections with consumers, but also gain longer-lasting exposure and user favor through creative content and in-depth interactions. In the era of information fragmentation, podcasts are becoming a new battleground for brand marketing as a means of "Voice Plus Emotion" communication.

Will Podcasts Become Windfall for Overseas Marketing?

Currently, China's companies face many difficulties in podcast marketing in the domestic market.

This is mainly due to the commercialization problems of the podcast industry itself. Although podcast apps have attracted a lot of attention in the capital market, the actual user group is still relatively niche, and it is difficult to form a scale effect. Podcasts have always been in the subordinate position of “eyeball economy” in “ear economy”, and it is difficult to break through the bottleneck of user growth. In addition, the low willingness of domestic users to pay, coupled with the reliance of most platforms on advertising revenue, has led to the monotization of the profit model. Taking Himalaya as an example, its advertising revenue has accounted for 24.5 percent of its total revenue, but this also exposes the imbalance of its commercialization, and the revenue model that overly relies on advertising is difficult to support the sustainable development of the platform. At the same time, marketing expenses and content costs continue to stand high, resulting in the industry trapped in the “money for the market” predicament. Fierce competition and the high costs of content creators and copyright further exacerbate the financial pressure on enterprises.

In comparison, the room of podcast marketing in the Europe and U.S. is much broader and worth exploring and experimenting with.

Take the American market as an example, media habits in the U.S. are different from those in China, especially when it comes to mobile phone usage, according to marketing scientists MSAI co-anchors. Americans are more likely to do most of their work on PCs than Chinese consumers who rely on their phones greatly, especially in cities like New York where poor signal in the subway makes people more reliant on laptops. As a result, while short video platforms like TikTok are on the rise, traditional media and PC-based advertising in the American market remain important.

At the same time, changes in data privacy and consumer behavior are making brand marketing more complex. With stricter privacy protection regulations, American companies are facing more challenges in conducting precision marketing, especially as traditional cookie technology is losing its effectiveness. Although AI has been increasingly used in advertising in the U.S. to help companies analyze data and optimize ad content, brands still faces the problem of how to efficiently use these new technologies. In addition, the rapid growth of social media and short videos, while providing new opportunities, has also made it more difficult for brands to stand out on these platforms.

Currently, for Chinese brands going overseas, podcasts may really become a windfall of overseas marketing.

Podcasting is an emerging marketing tool with a diverse and stable audience, especially in the U.S. where podcasts have become one of the mainstream media. Through podcasts, overseas brands can more naturally connect with their audience, providing a more focused and efficient way to reach them. By partnering with podcast hosts, brands are able to embed their advertising content into real and emotional conversations, thereby increasing brand credibility and listener engagement.

With the platform of podcasting, brands can effectively break through the limitations of traditional advertising and communicate with American consumers in a more personalized and localized way, helping to build awareness in the American market, enhance their images, and even directly promote product sales. In the process of globalization, brands no longer simply place advertisements, but can co-create content with podcast hosts to provide valuable listening experiences and create deeper user connections.

In addition, podcast platforms also provide brands with accurate audience data and ad effectiveness analysis to help them optimize their advertising strategies. Compared to traditional TV ads or social media, podcasts provide more granular tracking of results, which allows brands to adjust ad content and delivery strategies in real time to improve ROI (return on investment). A variety of initiatives, including hosting live events, promoting programs more aggressively, and launching video podcasts, can drive conversions from online listeners to offline purchases.

It is worth noting that brands need to be very careful about working with local podcasters when entering the overseas podcast market, especially in Europe and the U.S.. Not only do they need to understand the local culture, but they also need to have a good understanding of the audience's psychology. Overly strong brand involvement may cause the podcast to lose its original authenticity and affinity, instead of achieving the desired marketing effect. This puts higher demands on the brand's overseas team, especially the head of overseas market who needs to have good communication skills and cultural sensitivity.

For example, well-known podcasts like The Daily or Reply All in the U.S. already have a mature advertising format, and brands can work with them through implanted ads or customized content partnerships. For example, Nike's early collaboration with popular podcast The Tim Ferriss Show, in which designers were invited to share the brand's backstory and product concepts, successfully aroused consumers' interest and resonance. For Chinese brands, there is a dearth of such collaborations.

Overall, podcasts are suitable for big brands, as well as emerging brands, especially FMCG brands, to create their own “content drawer” through a relaxed chat format that perfectly fits the podcast's user profile and brand audience.

How “Ear Economy” Beneficial to Overseas Marketing

So how can podcasting, an emerging channel, be utilized to help brands go overseas for precision marketing?

First, choose the right platform to pinpoint potential customers based on the interests and behaviors of target audience.

Second, when using podcasts for brand marketing, producing quality content is the core. It is no longer as simple as brands dropping money on ads in the past, nor is it thrown to podcast hosts and that is the end of it. Brands need to co-create content with podcasters. According to Ding Jiao, co-founder of SHENG PM, who shared his experience at the Morketing Marketing Conference, working with podcast hosts to co-produce interesting and valuable content, tell brand stories or share industry insights can build an emotional connection with listeners. For example, SHENG partnered with Pantene to increase brand exposure through three episodes of lip-sync ads and attracted audience attention through science-based content. Next, community activities such as the “Wake Up Early Energy Program” were planned to motivate users to participate and drive purchases. Finally, the combination of e-commerce and stores realized a complete transformation from attracting customers to purchasing.

Moreover, the interactive nature of podcasts creates a bridge of direct communication between brands and consumers. Brands can interact with listeners, answer questions, participate in discussions, and even conduct interactive activities through podcasts. This format can deepen the connection between brands and listeners, therefore increasing user engagement and strengthening uesers' brand loyalty.

The blowout overseas podcast market is waiting for more Chinese brands to enter.