Podcast Sponsorships: The Definitive Guide To Landing High-Ticket Sponsors (Even With A Small Audience)

This post contains everything you need to know about landing high-ticket podcast sponsorships for your niche show. It’s also a 60+ minute long read… If you prefer, you can sign up for the free video course version of this article.

There might be no more frequently asked question from indie podcasters than, “How (and when) can I land podcast sponsorships?”

It’s no wonder why. 

Podcasting takes an incredible amount of time, effort, and consistency on a weekly basis. And while you should love producing your show simply for the sake of it, earning some income – even if it’s simply invested straight back into the show – can make the podcasting experience a whole lot sweeter.   

Most podcasters, however, have no idea where to start when it comes to finding and pitching potential sponsors, pricing their ads, creating pitch decks, or managing the sponsor relationship. 

In this article, we’ll discuss everything you need to know to start lining up lucrative podcast sponsorships, from understanding which companies to target, how to reach out and make a pitch that actually gets a response, and how to get away with ad prices that are 20x the industry standard rates, even if you have a small show of less than 1,000 downloads/ep.

Before we get into the specific strategies, however, it’s important to understand a little bit more about podcast sponsorships from the sponsoring company’s perspective. 

Understanding Podcast Sponsorships From the Sponsor’s Perspective

As a podcaster, you’re no doubt keenly aware of the benefits that a sponsorship would bring to you.

Namely, income. 

But to get the most out of any potential podcast sponsorships, it’s worth understanding how potential sponsors think about working with podcasters, what their goals are, and how they measure success when deciding whether or not to re-up on an expiring sponsorship. 

Let’s start by talking briefly about the difference between sponsors and advertisers. 

Podcast Sponsors vs. Podcast Advertisers

These two phrases are often used interchangeably, but there are subtle differences that are worth noting.

Working with a podcast advertiser is typically a short-term engagement, perhaps even a single ad, over which the advertiser likely has complete control over the content. There is likely little or no relationship between you and the advertiser and you may not be highly aligned in values or audience.

When I think of advertisers, I think of them as looking for hired guns whose audience they can pay to quickly get in front of. 

Podcast sponsorships on the other hand are generally longer-term relationships that often become something of a partnership. 

With podcast sponsorships you may have greater creative control over the content you promote to your audience, and you may even collaborate with your sponsor to come up with something completely customer that will both resonate more closely with your audience… and get them better results.

Sponsors should be highly aligned with your brand in terms of values, mission, and audience, which is important if you’re going to be working together for a number of weeks if not months.

For indie podcasters, I’d suggest aiming for fewer longer-term podcast sponsorships with highly aligned brands rather than a larger number of quick-hit advertisers, both from a revenue perspective, as well as an energy (and sanity) saving perspective. 

It takes more time and effort than you might think to onboard a new advertiser, get everything you need from them, and go through the ad copy revisions process – all of this likely on a tight deadline – and restarting this process every one or two episodes can be a major pain. 

Regardless of the type of arrangement you end up with, a long-term podcast sponsorship or a short-term advertiser, the company you’re working with is likely to have similar goals when it comes to agreeing to work with you.

Let’s look at a couple of ways they’re likely to measure the success of your collaboration.

Brand Advertising vs Direct Response 

There are two primary forms of advertising that companies will engage in, Brand Advertising and Direct Response. 

Brand Advertising is essentially exactly what it sounds like, building brand awareness, identity, and values in consumers’ minds, often without selling one specific product. 

Brand advertising was the mainstay of older forms of mass media including TV, radio, print, and public displays, but it’s declining in popularity, specifically with smaller up-and-coming brands. 

One of the hallmarks of Brand Advertising is that it’s inherently unmeasurable.

Companies engaging in these types of ad campaigns often have no definitive way to know how many sales were attributed to their campaign in particular, which in the age of the internet feels archaic. 

Direct Response Marketing

Direct Response Marketing on the other hand is built around the idea of attribution. This means that a company that runs an ad campaign can directly tie sales back to not just a specific campaign, but a specific platform, website, or podcast where their ad was placed. 

These campaigns are often aimed at niches and used to promote specific offers to those audiences. 

Smart brands using podcast sponsorships as part of their marketing strategies understand that podcasting offers a blend of both of these objectives.

The unique discount codes you hear during almost every podcast ad ever allow the podcast sponsor to track sales that have come from that specific show. This way, the company knows how well their ads are performing on your podcast and as a result, there’s a sense of accountability on both sides.

In addition, multi-episode ad runs offer longer-term benefits such as brand awareness and positive brand association.

How Brands Measure the Value of Podcast Sponsorships

When it comes to setting prices and measuring the value they will receive from a potential podcast sponsorship, brands track a couple of different metrics. 

Keep in mind that I typically advise niche podcasters to avoid setting their prices based on either of the following metrics and instead put together custom sponsorship packages.

That said, you can bet that your podcast sponsor’s marketing team will likely be using both of these metrics to measure how the ads on your show are performing against their other advertising initiatives they’re engaged in. 

For this reason, it’s helpful to know about how these models work so you can speak the same language as, and more effectively negotiate with, potential sponsors. 

Cost Per Mille (CPM)

The first is CPM (Cost Per Mille), which, while the acronym still uses Latin for some reason, basically means cost per thousand impressions, or people the ad gets in front of. 

CPM is most often used by mass-market rather than niche advertisers, and I highly recommend avoiding this model like the plague if you’re producing a show with fewer than 10,000 downloads per episode.

When it comes to niche shows, you can make way more money by using the model we’ll discuss shortly.

If you do end up partnering with a podcast sponsor that is set on using a CPM model, however, just know that you’ll be negotiating over the dollar amount you’ll be paid per thousand downloads/streams of your sponsored episodes. 

Industry average CPM rates range from around $18 – $25 per thousand impressions depending on the length and placement of the ad, but again, this is not the model I preach when it comes to pricing sponsorship packages and I’d recommend steering clear of it.

That said, if you have a fairly large show with tens of thousands of downloads per episode, CPM-based advertising can be very lucrative for you. 

Unfortunately, most of us don’t have those kind of download numbers, so we have to look elsewhere if we’re looking to make real money through sponsorships. 

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

The second major way in which brands measure the value of their podcast sponsorships is CPA or Cost Per Acquisition. 

In a CPA model, you as the podcaster would be paid a set amount for every listener who signs up for the sponsor’s offer. 

The signup or acquisition might be a product purchase, a free trial or email list signup, or some other form of engagement determined by the sponsor. 

Again, while I prefer to think in set sponsorship packages, understanding this CPA model is particularly important, because this is ultimately what the sponsor cares about: Action taken by your listeners after hearing their ad.

If you are looking into a podcast sponsorship deal based on one of these standard models, CPA is a much better option for niche podcasters, especially if the sponsor is highly aligned with your audience. 

This is because while you might have 1,000 listeners (which would earn you about $20/ep on a CPM model), if the sponsor and their offer is a perfect fit for those thousand listeners, you might get 15 signups per episode. If the CPA deal is for $25 per acquisition, you’re looking at $375/ep.

This might sound pretty great, but in my opinion, you’re still underselling yourself by going with this model. 

This is because what’s being measured (and thus paid out) is only the signups within the sponsorship window. But that’s not all the value you’re providing your sponsor. 

Remember that in addition to the specific offer you’re helping them promote over the course of your sponsorship, you’re also providing them valuable brand advertising to a highly aligned audience. 

It’s entirely likely that many members of your audience will go on and buy the sponsor’s products and services weeks, months or even years after initially hearing about them on your show. 

If those sales fall outside the term of the sponsorship, you don’t get paid for those, even if you played a meaningful role in helping to facilitate them.

Ok, so we’ve thrown around a few numbers so far when it comes to pricing, but let’s talk in more depth about how much you can reasonably expect to make as an indie creator through podcast sponsorships.

How Much Should You Expect to Make from Podcast Sponsorships?

The short answer is… It depends. 

As we’ve discussed, if you’re sticking to the industry average CPM rates, you’re going to need significant download numbers to make any real money through those podcast sponsorships.

To reiterate, assuming an “industry average” ad rate of ~$20 CPM, a show that has two ad placements and gets 1500 downloads per episode would bring in $60 per episode. 

The rate will vary depending on the length and placement of the ad, and you can load up on sponsors and run multiple ads per episode, but for the average podcaster, if you’re dealing with industry average rates, you’re not going to make a living off of them.

Using industry average CPM rates, I know a ton of podcasters who bring in $50-$250/ep, which might sound great if you’re making nothing right now, but you’re certainly not going to quit your day job on that income. 

Industry average rates, however, are typically applied to mass marketing brands who are likely looking for general, rather than niche awareness, and they’re not the whole story when it comes to podcast sponsorships. 

When you start looking into niche sponsorships however, the expectations of revenue begin to change.

Niche Podcast Sponsorships

I’ve personally worked with a number of podcasters producing small shows in the ~750 downloads per episode range who have been able to negotiate podcast sponsorship rates of up to $1,000 per episode. 

For comparison, if we apply that price to the CPM model, that would result in a CPM of $1333.33 per thousand downloads, a whopping 44 times higher than even a generous industry average rate of $30 CPM. 

How is this possible?

As with so many other aspects of podcast creation and marketing, it comes back to knowing your audience better than anyone else does. 

If you produce a niche show, there are almost certainly a handful of companies serving your niche who will pay big money to get in front of their ideal customers. 

When you know your audience, you’re able to more easily find, approach, and make an ultra-compelling pitch to these potential podcast sponsors, as well as drive a harder bargain than you would be able to when talking with a generic, mass-market sponsor. 

When calculating how much you might potentially be able to earn through podcast sponsorships, it’s important to understand that the higher the average customer value to the sponsor and the more targeted your audience is to them, the higher the rate you’ll be able to get.

If your show is not particularly niche, or if you are but there are no companies specifically targeting your niche with their products, you’re not going to have much leverage with your sponsorship pricing.

The same is true, to a degree, if there are companies serving your niche specifically, but the average customer value is low. 

Niche sponsor relationships are best, not just for the higher than average rates you can charge, but because the agreement can truly be a win-win-win scenario for your audience, the sponsor, and you, which is essential as we’ll soon discuss.

Combined with the fact that there are likely very few alternative sponsorship options within your niche, this win-win-win scenario can result in long and lucrative relationships.

Getting Creative With Podcast Sponsorship Packages

Many of our clients at Counterweight Creative regularly set their ad rates in the $800-$1200 range per episode. But that rate typically isn’t simply tied to an ad that runs on the podcast.

Remember, sponsors care about getting exposure to your audience, and podcast ads are only one way to do that. 

Our clients typically make sponsorship deals that include social media shoutouts, newsletter mentions, and more. 

If you have a significant following on platforms other than your podcast, bring that to the negotiating table with your potential sponsors to sweeten the deal. 

We’ll talk more about other ways to get creative with ad-ons in the section of this article on structuring your sponsorships packages. 

What Can You Expect To Earn From Podcast Sponsorships?

If you get creative with your packages and target niche sponsors that are highly aligned and relevant to your audience, you can make some decent money through podcast sponsorships, even with a small show. 

That said, my typical advice to the average podcaster is not to expect to quit your day job off of sponsorships alone.

It’s an entirely reasonable expectation, however, to aim for your sponsorship income to cover the production costs of your show. 

For most podcasters, production costs might range from $500-$2000/mo, including audio editing, show notes writing, social media management and more. 

While you might be handling each of these tasks yourself now, it’s certainly not the best use of your time to continue doing so forever. In addition, bringing on true experts to take over those tasks can both improve the quality of your production, and give you more bandwidth to focus on the activities that actually grow your show and generate additional revenue.

Simply covering the costs of outsourcing elements of your production might seem disappointing at first. But consider it a first step in the process of building a platform that you can monetize further in the future. 

My advice is (at least initially) not to rely on or expect podcast sponsorships to pay your bills. Save that for either your day job or your own products and services should you choose to develop and offer them. 

When you take the pressure off of needing to support yourself with sponsorships, you’re able to be more selective with the sponsors you bring on, command higher rates, and create a win-win-win for your audience, your sponsor, and you. 

In the long run, this slower, more selective approach actually lends itself to greater income, and you can avoid alienating your audience by running five ads per episode, which is a nice bonus as well. 

Of course, regardless of the sponsorship model you pursue, the size of your audience is going to play a big role in the rates you can command and the expectations you should set. 

So let’s talk about download numbers.

How Many Downloads Does Your Podcast Need To Get Sponsors?

Perhaps the most burning question podcasters have when it comes to podcast sponsorships is how many downloads they need before they can start bringing in advertisers and sponsors.

There’s a slew of often contradictory information out there, but in the end, the differences often boil down to how you think about sponsorships. 

If you’re looking at being represented by a mass-market podcast advertising agency, you’re likely going to need tens of thousands of downloads per episode. 

Midroll, for example, requires podcasters to have a minimum of 30,000 downloads per episode, boutique podcast ad agency True Native Media requires 10,000, AdvertiseCast requires, 5,000, and other major advertising platforms will generally fall somewhere in between these examples.

For many podcasters, 5,000 downloads per episode is an almost unthinkable number, but fear not! Even small shows can bring in hundreds of dollars per episode in ad revenue if you approach the process the right way.  

As you already know, my opinion on mass-market advertising and podcast sponsorships is that it’s not the best use of your time, or ad slots, and that it’s not something worth chasing. This is especially when there are much better (and more lucrative) alternatives.

Not only are mass-market ads generally not specifically relevant to your topic or audience, but you’ll be selling your ad slots for a tiny fraction of the price you could command if you instead took the lead and approached niche sponsors personally.

How Many Downloads Do You Need to Land Niche Podcast Sponsorships?

When approaching niche advertisers and sponsors, the reality is that there really are no rules or minimum requirements, as long as you can make a compelling pitch. 

To demonstrate, let’s look at an example:

Imagine you have an incredibly niche show that has twenty listeners. 

It just so happens, however, that those listeners are the twenty top doctors in the world studying heart disease.

I’m willing to bet that you could pull in not just hundreds, but thousands of dollars per ad slot from pharmaceutical companies looking to have the ear of these leading experts.

The more aligned you, your show, and your audience are with the potential podcast sponsors you’re approaching, the less the number of downloads matters. 

That’s not to say, however, that alignment is the only consideration. 

Consider the Sponsor’s Situation

In our above example, the pharmaceutical company can afford to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars per episode to reach only twenty people, because if their pitch works, they stand to make millions or even billions of dollars as their product is adopted and rolled out on a potentially global scale.

Many companies, however, require a large number of small sales to be profitable, which requires a significantly larger audience.

A company whose primary product costs $25 and, once purchased, never needs to be bought again is going to require a much larger audience in order to make their advertising viable.

As a podcaster with a small, niche audience, your greatest leverage is when you can convince potential sponsors that although your audience is small, the lifetime value of these highly aligned customers will be large. 

This is most applicable to podcast sponsors who sell products and services that are either highly specialized and expensive, or based on a subscription-model which have their customers making recurring monthly or yearly payments. 

Do the math for your sponsors when making your pitch.

If you can show them that they only need 50 people to sign up for their offer to earn them $50,000 over the next year, they’ll most likely be through the moon to spend $500/ep over eight episodes to your niche, but highly aligned audience of 500 people who all have the exact pain points their product is designed to solve.

The more you can think like an advertiser or sponsor, understand their goals, and show them how your audience’s mission is aligned with theirs, the fewer people you need to bring on highly lucrative sponsors. 

This requires leg work and creativity, but the results are well worth it.

We’re going to talk about how to find and reach out to highly aligned niche sponsors shortly, but first let’s talk about structuring your podcast sponsorship packages so you’re prepared and confident in what you’re offering when you start reaching out. 

How To Structure Your Podcast Sponsorship Packages

One of the biggest mistakes indie creators make when dipping their toes into the world of podcast sponsorships and advertising is letting the sponsor dictate the terms of the agreement. 

Most podcasters don’t know enough about how advertising typically works, assume that the company placing the ad does, and end up with a deal that favours the sponsor, sometimes heavily.

If you’re at the stage where you’re looking to find a sponsor for your show, the best thing you can do is be confident in the value that you and your show bring to the table, and have clear sponsorship packages defined in advance. 

Developing these packages gives you a solid foundation to stand on as you’re engaging with potential sponsors and clearly signals to them that you’re a professional who knows what they’re doing and values the asset that their show is.

All this adds up to you earning more from your podcast sponsorships.

Podcast Sponsorship Term

Aside from the actual price, the most important thing to address in your sponsorship packages is the term, or length of the agreement. 

While it may be enticing to both you and your potential sponsor to run a one or two-episode trial and then reassess from there, over a century of both hard science and anecdotal evidence show us that repetition is essential when it comes to advertising effectively influencing consumer purchasing decisions.

In other words, your listeners need to hear the ad multiple times before they’re going to buy. 

The number of repetitions is up for debate, but multiple studies have concluded that a range between six and twenty impressions of an ad is necessary for the ad to prove effective. 

This means that a one or two-episode trial is likely not going to get results for your sponsor, who will then likely not re-up for a longer agreement with you. 

Lose-lose.

It’s for this reason that I would set your lowest level sponsorship package at a four-episode minimum commitment. Feel free to explain to the advertiser why this is actually in their benefit and that you don’t want them to throw their money away on a shorter package that won’t get results. 

After your base four-episode package, add on another couple of tiers consisting of 8, 12 or some other higher number of episodes. I generally like to discount the per-episode ad rate on these longer packages to entice sponsors to opt for longer-term agreements.

If they’re a good fit for your audience, this means that they’ll get better results while saving you the headache of having to track down, negotiate with, onboard and manage a new sponsor every few episodes. 

Also note that if you run a seasonal podcast, I’d recommend pitching an option to sponsor the entire season of the show.

Ad Live Duration

Another consideration when it comes to the terms of your podcast sponsorships is how long the ads will stay live on the podcast for. 

For most indie podcasters not using Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI), it can be a pain to go back and edit out old ads once the term has ended. But it’s a valuable negotiating tool. 

An ad that is going to be live on your show – even if it’s in the back catalogue – for the next 5 years is worth a lot more than one that’s going to be live only for the 8-week duration of the agreement.

If you want to get really complicated, you could negotiate this live-length separately from the number of episodes the sponsor has bought ads for. Ie. the sponsor buys an 8-episode package but the ads are live until a specific, predetermined future date, potentially weeks or months after the initial term has ended.

While the ad live duration can be a valuable bargaining chip, it can also start to introduce complexity to your podcast sponsorships process. Without solid systems in place to track and manage everything, it can become more hassle than it’s worth.

Podcast Ad Length & Placement

After considering the term of the agreement, you’ll want to address the length and placements of the ads. 

Some examples of placement and length packages might include:

1. 1x 60-second mid-roll
   
2. 1x 15-second pre-roll + 1x 60-second mid-roll
   
3. 1x 15-second pre-roll + 2x 30-second midroll
   
4. 1x 15-second pre-roll + 2x 30-second midroll + 1x 15-second post-roll

The combinations are near-endless and you should decide based on the number and length of ads you’re willing to subject your listeners to. 

If you are offering multiple ads to the same sponsor per episode, keep in mind that you’re going to want to vary up the ad styles to avoid fatiguing your listeners and turning them off of the sponsor (and you) entirely. 

I’ll also note that when dealing with niche sponsors who may not have advertised on podcasts before, I rarely stick to hard and fast time limits on the ads. 

Ultimately, I want them to be successful and if the offer they’re promoting will help my audience, I want to sell them on it, no matter how long that takes (within reason).  

Podcast Sponsor Exclusivity

While many sponsors likely won’t care, offering exclusivity can be an interesting upsell or bargaining chip to consider floating with certain potential sponsors. 

You’ve no doubt listened to plenty of podcasts with four different sponsors in a single episode. If you’re anything like me, with each additional sponsor added to the episode, the more scattered your attention is and the less likely you are to take action. 

That makes the promise of exclusivity valuable. 

You could choose to structure an exclusivity agreement in a number of ways. 

Say you have three defined ad slots in your episodes, a pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll. 

Your top-end package may include ad placements in all three slots for $1000 vs $750 for two of the slots, and $400 for a single slot in your lowest tier package. 

In effect, by buying up all three ad slots, a sponsor is also buying exclusivity, as there are no other slots available. 

But maybe they don’t have the budget to buy up all three slots at $1000/ep. 

As a bargaining chip, you could float the idea of a single ad slot exclusive agreement, where they only use one of your ad slots, but you agree not to sell any of the others. 

Perhaps instead of the typical $400 you would charge for that single slot, you offer the exclusive single-slot package at $600/ep.

By committing to an exclusive agreement you’re leaving money on the table by leaving any additional ad slots unfilled for the duration of the podcast sponsorship agreement, but if you don’t have a line of sponsors knocking down your door, this can be a good way to up your sponsor value in the short term.

Alternative Advertising Options

Running ads during your existing ad slots isn’t the only way to use your podcast to promote your sponsors, and in fact, your ad slots are likely less effective than some of the other methods of promotion. 

Sponsored Interviews

One of the most common features of many of the high-priced podcast sponsorships our clients have landed is a dedicated interview with someone from the sponsoring company. 

This allows the sponsor to speak directly to your audience at length and (hopefully) inject additional humanity into their brand and start to build the know, like, and trust factor with your audience. 

Remember that as with any other type of episode, the interview and the episode as a whole absolutely must be content that is valuable to your audience in its own right. 

It can’t simply be a 45-minute long commercial for your sponsor. That won’t work out well for them and it won’t work out well for you. 

If your podcast sponsor is truly aligned with you, your show, and your audience, there’s likely a ton of content you can get into that will be useful to your audience. Start by asking the sponsor themself what they think they can bring to the show that might not have been covered before. 

While the episode needs to be a solid, standalone piece of content, your sponsor will likely have certain talking points that they want to cover. Make sure you’re on the same page about what those are beforehand so that you can weave them into the interview in a natural way. 

Because of both the length, and the potential to build the know, like and trust factor with your audience, sponsored interviews are incredibly valuable to many sponsors, and that should be reflected in the price. 

We’ve had clients with small shows of 500-750 downloads land four-part interview series spread out across a few months for $1000 per episode. 

One more thing to keep in mind when it comes to sponsored interviews is that you do need to be upfront with your audience that the episode is sponsored content. 

I’m not a lawyer so I’m not going to give you legal advice on what that disclaimer looks like, but do your homework and make sure you’re in compliance with advertising laws in your region. 

Product Placements

Another non-ad-slot-based way of promoting your sponsor is through product placements in your regular episodes. 

Let’s say you have a show about cooking, for example. If you were sponsored by a specific brand of cookware, instead of running one or more ads, breaking up the episode, you could simply mention them in context throughout your episodes as the content allows for it. 

If done well, this makes for a better experience for both your listeners and your sponsor, as the episode isn’t being interrupted, and the ads are delivered more naturally. 

Listeners also get the benefit of seeing how you would use the product in your day-to-day life or work. 

Software tools are another great type of sponsor for these types of product placements, especially if you’re talking about a topic like online marketing where you might use these tools regularly.  

Not every type of sponsor will be a good fit for product placement type ads, as the product needs to be something that you have a chance to talk about regularly enough that it would appear in almost every show. 

Keep in mind that you don’t want product placements to feel forced or contrived. That will turn your audience off fast. 

Also, as with sponsored interviews, you’ll need to make sure you’re in compliance with advertising laws in your area and ensure that when you bring up your sponsor, you’re making a point of notifying your listeners that they are in fact a sponsor of yours.

Bonuses & Add-Ons

Once you’ve addressed the term and the particulars of the ads, think about how you can sweeten the deal and offer up something that your sponsor might not have been expecting from a podcast sponsorship, but will give them additional exposure to your audience. 

Consider offering to give shoutouts on other platforms where you have a significant following such as Instagram, your newsletter, in the show notes for the episodes, a banner on your website, etc. 

I’ve even seen shows change their cover art for each of their podcast sponsorships to accommodate the sponsor’s logo in the design. 

You can use these as set elements in your podcast sponsorships, create an à la carte list of add-ons or choose to not mention them beforehand and pull them out as a negotiating tool to pull the potential sponsor up to the rate you were looking for, which we’ll cover more in-depth later in this article.

The best way to outline everything you have to offer is to make a brain dump list of all the platforms you’re active in engaging with your audience on. Then, under each of those platforms list all the potential ways you could use them to promote a sponsor. 

Once you have this master list, it’s simply about pairing a selection of these elements in a few different ways that will appeal to potential sponsors.  

Paint Outside The Lines

Remember that when you own the value of your platform and take the lead in the negotiations around your podcast sponsorships, you get to determine the ground rules. 

You can make up whatever ad packages best suit you, your show, and your audience, and don’t need to adhere to any “industry-average” rates or packages if you don’t want to. 

Using this method, I’ve seen our clients frequently land up to $800/ep packages for 8-episode terms, often including additional social and newsletter promotions. 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. While $800/ep will sound incredible to most indie podcasters, is it really feasible for you and your show? 

How can you come up with prices that are in line with the benefit the sponsors will receive and allow you to own your show’s value? 

How To Price Your Podcast Ad Slots

When you’re working directly with podcast sponsors, you have the final say over how you price your ad slots. 

Industry average rates may apply to mass-market advertisers and when working with an ad broker, but when you’re working with smaller, niche advertisers, the sky’s the limit when it comes to how your structure and price your podcast sponsorships.

This is an exciting proposition.

But it can also be paralyzing.

Having a solid reference point like the industry average rates is comfortable because you can be confident that you’re getting (and offering) the same deal as everyone else.

The problem with this model is that as we’ve discussed previously, you could likely be getting 20-30x (or more!) the industry average rates when working directly with highly aligned niche sponsors.

So where do you start when setting your rates?

Baseline Rates

There are two ways that I like to think about setting your ad rates. 

The first is about setting a baseline rate for each of your podcast sponsorship packages and any relevant ad-ons. 

Although these rates should be grounded in reality, this is an entirely arbitrary number that you can set however you like.

I know podcasters whose baseline rate is $200 per episode and I know podcasters whose baseline rate is $800 per episode. The two shows I’m thinking of are clients whose shows are a similar size, both bringing in around 2000 downloads per episode over a 6-week window.

Like freelancing or setting the prices for any product or service, you may feel more comfortable starting low and raising your rates over time as you prove to both yourself and your sponsors that you’re getting them results, and your confidence increases. 

My suggestion would be to begin by setting your rates wherever you feel comfortable and then increasing them by $25 or $50 with each of your subsequent podcast sponsorships.

Having baseline rates gives you some solid ground to stand on when you’re approached by a potential sponsor and can be built into your pitch deck for easy reference when doing outreach or fielding inquiries. 

Having a set of baseline rates, however, doesn’t mean you can’t charge more for some specific podcast sponsorships.

Value-Based Pricing for Podcast Sponsorships

The second way I like to think about setting ad rates is what I would call value-based pricing. 

Essentially, this approach is about doing the math to determine how much the potential sponsor or advertiser stands to gain from the podcast sponsorship and basing your pricing on that.

For example, if you can make a strong argument that a potential sponsor will likely be able to bring in $100,000 in lifetime customer value based on an 8-episode ad run, they’ll likely have no issue whatsoever paying $1,000 per episode. 

Compared to other forms of advertising, that’s an incredible margin that would have most marketing and advertising departments salivating. For reference, Google’s auction system of advertising often eats up 90% or more of the profit that companies make by advertising on their platform. 

To run the numbers and make your case to your potential sponsor, you’re going to need to have a ballpark conversion rate – the percentage of your audience that will buy the offer – and an estimate at the average customer value for the company you’re dealing with. 

These numbers can be tricky, if not impossible to get exactly right, but your goal is not to nail the numbers, but to get in the ballpark and make a compelling case. 

Estimating Conversion Rates

The conversion rate will depend on how aligned your audience is with the podcast sponsor in question. The more overlap in your shared mission, values, and content, the higher your conversion rate will likely be. 

The price of the offer they’re promoting will also factor into the conversion rate. A $300 product or service will almost certainly convert at a lower rate than a $17 offer or a free trial. 

Feel free to poll your audience or reach out to specific listeners to gauge their interest and get a temperature check on how aware they are of the company already and what their opinion is of them and their products. 

Once you have a general idea of where your audience stands, given what you know about the sponsor’s offering, make an estimate of how many members of your audience would sign up for the offer out of every 100. 

For reference, the conversions rates for the podcasting as a whole sit at .52% for brand advertising and 2.21% for direct response per Podsights.

Keep in mind that those numbers are based largely on generic, mass-market brands, not highly aligned niche sponsors. 

As such, you should certainly be able to do better.

Estimating Customer Value

The difficulty of determining the average customer value can vary depending on the company’s offerings and business model. 

Subscription service companies are much easier because they generally have tiered monthly or annual pricing that you can use to base your estimate on. 

If your potential sponsor is a company that offers a $37/mo subscription service and you would guess that most customers probably use that service for an average of 2 years, you can easily come up with an average customer value of $888. 

Other types of offerings can be harder to determine exact values on, but again, it’s about getting in the ballpark and making a compelling case.

Crunching the Numbers

Once you have estimates on both your audience conversion rate and the average customer value, you can put them together to arrive at your value-based podcast sponsorship offer.

Using our example above where the average customer value is $888, let’s assume a conversion rate of 3% over a 6-episode ad run, meaning that if you have an audience of 1000 people, 30 of them would sign up for the offer. 

When you put those numbers together, you can see that 30 customers at $888 each would result in $26,640 in revenue for your potential sponsor over the next two years as a result of their ad run on your show.    

Knowing this, you can feel confident that if you’re charging $500/ep for each of a 6-episode run, the sponsor is going to be getting incredible value out of the agreement. 

You could then take things a step further and offer another package including email newsletter shoutouts and social media posts which might boost their conversion rate even higher, and allow you to charge more. 

This method can take some time and effort to do the necessary research, but it can allow you to feel confident in charging premium ad rates for your podcast. 

Whichever method you use to set your pricing, remember that you have the final say in how you set your prices and which sponsors or advertisers you bring on. 

Your platform has value. Don’t do it a disservice by selling yourself or your show short. 

What to Include in Your Podcast Sponsor Pitch Deck

No matter how aligned you know you are with potential podcast sponsors or advertisers you’re looking to pitch, don’t be offended if they want to see proof that your audience is aligned with them and their goals.

To do that you’re going to need two things: Listener data, and a way to concisely and clearly display it. 

The best way to do this is with a pitch deck. 

Get my pitch deck template in Keynote, Powerpoint, and Google Slides formats inside the Podcast Sponsorship Toolkit.

What Is A Sponsorship Pitch Deck?

A pitch deck for your podcast is a document or webpage that outlines everything a potential sponsor would need to know about your show before pulling the trigger on a podcast sponsorship deal with you. 

This includes background information about the show, hosts, and audience as well as your sponsorship pricing information.

While you want the deck to be thorough and informative, you don’t want to overwhelm your readers with so much data that they can’t make heads or tails of what your show is about or who your audience is. 

What to Include in a Podcast Sponsorship Pitch Deck

When it comes to putting together your pitch deck, ask yourself what you would want to know about a podcast if you were going to sponsor another show.

Broadly speaking, you’d likely want to know what the show is about and who listens to it.

Start by creating a template deck, leaving room for customization as you’ll want to tailor each deck to the specific sponsor you’re pitching.

I would suggest including the following:

Title & Artwork 

Don’t make them guess or comb through your pitch email again to determine which show this pitch deck is for. The first slide should have your name and cover art clearly displayed and establish branding.

About the Show 

Include a show description that clearly conveys what the show is about and who it’s for. The best show descriptions have a hook that draws people in and makes them want to listen. 

Good copywriting that captures attention and evokes curiosity will go a long way to proving to the sponsor that you know what you’re doing and will be able to effectively promote their offer in a way that gets your audience to take action. 

Remember that if your sponsor is really aligned with you and your subject matter, they should be hooked by this description as well! 

Beyond the show description itself, you’ll want to include information on you and any co-hosts, the show format, episode length, publish frequency, core topics you cover, and past guests.  

If you’ve received any notable press or awards, I would consider putting that information upfront on this page as well. 

Our Listeners

Next up should be the section with all the information a potential podcast sponsor would need to know about your audience to decide if they’re a good fit to advertise to.

Include any download statistics that you have available including total show downloads, the average number of downloads per episode over a 6-week period, and geographic data. 

If you have further demographic data through your website or social media reporting, be sure to include that as well. This might include age, gender, education level, household income, family size, and more. 

Just remember that you can go overboard with data if you’re not careful. Consider having a boilerplate version of your deck that includes all your potentially relevant data, but for each sponsor, cherry-pick the data that most effectively displays alignment and delete the rest.

Beyond data, this section is a great place to display listener anecdotes, reviews, praise, messages, emails, and other forms of social proof.

Most podcast sponsors understand that the podcasts that are most effective to advertise on are the ones where the audience has a deep connection with the host(s) and will buy whatever they endorse, so it’s important to display proof of that connection.  

If you’re struggling to get relevant data on your listeners, consider running a survey to find out more about who they are. Most podcasters we work with run an annual survey of their listeners, and will often incentivize survey responses by running a contest around it. 

I like Typeform (affiliate link) for collecting survey responses, but Google Forms is a great free tool.

Another option is to bolster your personal show’s stats with overall podcast industry listener data. This can be especially useful to include when pitching sponsors who may not have advertised on podcasts before, and you may want to consider including it even if you have strong listener data for your show.

Check out the annual podcasting report from Edison Research & Triton Digital as well as Podsights to find relevant data

Packages & Pricing for Podcast Sponsorships

This is the section where you lay out the different podcast sponsorship package options you offer and the pricing for each. 

Depending on how you’ve set up your packages, you may want to lay this out as a clearly defined set of packages with fixed prices, or more of a build-your-own-adventure where sponsors can pick and choose from different elements that are priced a la carte.

You can also include alternative ideas to work into your podcast sponsorships such as sponsored interviews that may not have fixed prices if that’s something you offer.

If you’re open to negotiating, say so. If you’re not, also say so.

Team 

If you have a team, consider including a slide highlighting them. 

If you have an editor, show notes writer, VA, manager, or anyone else helping out on the production of the show, include a photo and blurb about them. 

In my experience, businesses are much more likely to sponsor shows that have clear support where they know the host(s) have the bandwidth to spend the time and attention to make sure the podcast sponsorship partnership is done well.

Contact Info

Include a slide with any relevant contact information for both you and anyone else on your team who might be involved in executing on your podcast sponsorships.

I also like to include links and handles to the social media accounts that I’m active on, especially if part of my sponsor package options involve social shout outs and promotion.

Closing

I like to end with a short, 2-3 paragraph long slide that is tailored to each sponsor explaining why I personally would be excited to work with them. 

Don’t go over the top, make it real, honest, and authentic. 

If you can’t come up with anything, it might be a sign that they’re not a good fit for the show in the first place.

Pitch Deck Design

Remember that the goal of your pitch deck is to clearly convey the included information in a digestible, scannable way. 

You can use tools like Keynote, Powerpoint, or Canva to create your deck, but if you’re really serious about podcast sponsorships becoming a focus of how you monetize your show, consider hiring a designer to create your template for you. 

First impressions matter, and a well-designed pitch deck can go a long way to setting the tone that you take your podcast, and your sponsor’s time seriously, and you’re invested in making your show the best it can be.

Once you’ve locked in your general pricing and have put together a pitch deck, it’s time to start researching and reaching out to potential podcast sponsors. 

But first, let’s take a quick look at a scenario you want to avoid when targeting potential sponsors for your show, and what to do instead.

How to Think About Good Podcast Sponsorships

I was listening to the first episode of a podcast’s new season the other day. In the intro, the host notified her listeners that, unlike previous seasons, there were going to be ads in these episodes. 

She went on to tell them that they shouldn’t feel any pressure to buy the products, that they were all for products she used but might not be a good fit for everyone, and then apologized for having ads in the first place. 

This is absolutely the wrong way to approach podcast sponsorships.

When bringing on podcast sponsors, the goal should be nothing short of a win-win-win for your audience, your advertiser, and you.

If you feel the need to apologize to your audience for the fact that you have sponsors, you clearly don’t believe that the ads will benefit your audience as a whole. 

The podcast host in question obviously viewed her ads as an annoyance to her listeners. With that clearly stated attitude, how many people are actually going to follow through and make a purchase of one of the products? And if few people make a purchase, how long are the sponsors going to stick around?

In this scenario, no one wins. The audience has to sit through ads for products they’ve already been all but told aren’t worth their time or attention, the sponsors have paid to then have their ads undermined by the host, and the host – while she made some initial income off the first round of ads – likely won’t be getting a second run request from these sponsors when they fail to get results. 

Lose-lose-lose.

When podcast sponsorships work best, you should be genuinely excited about sharing your sponsors with your audience, because you know their products will benefit your listeners. 

Your listeners should be happy to sit through ads because they’re relevant and useful to them and address their current goals and challenges.

When the offer and the ads resonate, your audience buys, your sponsors are happy, and they re-up to continue advertising with you in the future. 

So many creators feel slimy about inserting ads in their work. But podcast sponsorships and advertising are only slimy if you make them so. 

If you feel you have to apologize to your audience about your ads, that’s slimy, and you likely shouldn’t have accepted that sponsorship in the first place.

But if you’re genuinely excited to share a new product or service that is aligned with your content and will genuinely help your audience? That’s generous. 

You get to choose what type of advertising you want to engage with.

Where to Find Podcast Sponsors

With this approach in mind, the next step is actually identifying potential sponsors who would be a good fit for you and your audience. 

If you reach a certain level of prominence in your niche, you’ll likely have companies start reaching out to you of their own accord to inquire about your sponsor rates. 

If this happens, you’re in a great position as they clearly see the value in your platform and you can drive the negotiations. 

But it can take some time to build your show to the level where it’s attracting sponsor interest, and you may want to start reaching out to sponsors before that. 

So where do you look?

The first, and most immediately appealing option might be Podcorn.

Podcorn: A Podcast Sponsorship Marketplace

For many podcasters, one of the most exciting new platforms to have emerged over the past couple of years is Podcorn. 

Essentially, it’s a marketplace to help podcasters and potential sponsors find each other and set up podcast sponsorships, not unlike a DIY version of the previously mentioned podcast advertising agencies, Midrolll, True Native Media, and Advertisecast.  

Unlike those agencies, however, any podcaster can sign up for Podcorn and begin pitching sponsors, regardless of the number of downloads they have.

How it works is a sponsor will submit a campaign and then podcasters can submit their proposals via a menu of pricing options for different ad slots and advertising options, as well as a written and/or audio message. 

When the sponsor sees one or more proposals that fit their campaign needs, they can accept the proposal with a click from their dashboard. 

The process is incredibly straightforward. But despite the ease of use, my guess is that most podcasters will struggle to make meaningful money – or even land a single sponsor – through the platform. 

Why Podcasters Fail At Podcorn

I signed up to Podcorn as a sponsor, looking to sponsor other podcasters in the entrepreneurship and wellness space to coincide with the launch of my new show, Build A Better Wellness Biz. 

Within days I had dozens of shows reach out with a variety of podcast sponsorship proposals. Prices ranged from $2 per ad slot all the way up to $350 per slot. 

Almost none of them managed to make a compelling case for themselves, however, for a few different reasons.

Poor Podcast Sponsor Alignment

Despite the choice, after skimming through the proposals, only two out of the 50+ proposals I had received were even remotely related to the target audience I had laid out in my campaign description, not that many of the proposing hosts had read it.

The second issue was that most of these shows had only a handful of downloads, one show as low as an average of six downloads per episode.

While a couple of shows had several thousand downloads per episode, the majority of the proposing shows were sub 100/ep, which, as an advertiser is not all that appealing. 

As we’ve discussed already, a small audience isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker, but when that audience is completely unrelated to the sponsor’s goals, that’s a problem, and a waste of a sponsor’s time and money.

Then there was the quality of the shows.

Poor Show Quality

I looked more closely at the two shows that seemed like they could be a good fit for potential podcast sponsorships. They were both in the health and wellness entrepreneurship space and seemed to be targeted to the same people as my show. 

My hopes were starting to rise. Maybe Podcorn wasn’t a total loss for me and my campaign!

Both were fairly new shows with one having published eight episodes and the other thirty-three. 

I hopped over to their Apple Podcast pages, listened to a bit of each of their most recent episodes, and the optimism I had been briefly experiencing came crashing through the floor. 

The show that had been around longer with 33 episodes sounded like it was recorded with a headphone microphone, and had no intro music or production quality to speak of. After listening through the first five minutes, it was apparent that not only was the host an unpolished interviewer but she had done no editing to clean things up. 

I moved onto the second, newer show, my hope at this point having transformed into something more closely resembling morbid curiosity.

Poor Direction & Lack of Cohesion

This show was aimed at healthcare professionals looking to either grow or start businesses, exactly my target audience. 

At eight episodes in, the production quality was much better than the previous show, with a proper intro and a great sounding mic from the host. But as the intro unfolded, my hopes for finding a podcast to sponsor from this Podcorn experiment finally disappeared completely.   

While the show was aimed at healthcare professionals, the guest on this episode was a construction business owner.

Now, that in itself is not necessarily an issue, I’ve had guests on my show who aren’t wellness business owners themselves, but the host did nothing to tie back what this guest was going to teach the listeners that would be relevant to them.

As the interview started, it became immediately clear that the host and guest were friends, and it seemed that this was the only reason the guest was there in the first place. 

Only eight episodes in, it sent the impression that the host had already run out of health professionals to interview on the show and had resorted to bringing on anyone he could find to create an episode with. 

I turned off the episode, returned to Podcorn, and hit “Not A Good Fit” on both of the shows’ proposals.

Show Quality Matters to Podcast Sponsors

As a podcaster, it’s important to remember that the quality of the shows a company sponsors says something about the sponsor. 

Personally, I wouldn’t want my brand to be associated with either of these shows, and hence, quickly passed on them.

Expect that any podcast sponsor worth bringing on will inspect not just your download numbers, but your cover art, audio quality, episode content, website, social feeds and more. This means that your podcast packaging needs to be on point if you’re seeking to land worthwhile sponsors.

Good sponsors want to work with podcasters who take their craft seriously. 

Unfortunately, my experience (so far) with PodCorn is that it’s made up of a large number of desperate, opportunistic podcasters looking to skip the steps of actually building shows worth sponsoring in favour of spraying as many untargeted sponsor proposals out as possible and hoping to get lucky.

The good news for you is that with the bar set this low, it’s really easy to stand out as a podcaster on the platform if you know how to present yourself. 

How to Succeed with Podcorn

No matter what platform you’re pitching sponsors through, be that Podcorn, another podcast sponsorship marketplace, or reaching out to potential sponsors directly, the same guidelines apply when it comes to making a compelling pitch. We’ll talk about these guidelines in-depth shortly.

The problem with platforms like Podcorn is that they trick podcasters into thinking that they can be lazy with their pitches and outreach and still get results. 

Popcorn’s entire value proposition is that the platform makes it “easy” to find sponsors for your show, which makes it easy for podcasters to think that the platform will do all of the work for you.

This is far from the truth.

While the platform can certainly help you identify companies that are actively looking to sponsor podcasts, you still need to do your homework in researching the company and writing a pitch that speaks to both their pain points and their goals.

Almost all of the pitches I received were generic, non-personalized, copy/paste templates that the hosts likely sent out to dozens of other potential sponsors. 

I deleted these proposals immediately, and almost any sponsor worth having is likely to do the same. 

The ones I spent time on were clearly addressed to me personally and made a compelling argument for why their show and their audience in particular was a good fit for what I was looking to achieve through my podcast sponsorship campaign.

One of these even included a personalized voice message which was a really nice touch.

It never hurts to go above and beyond in your pitch. If you’re willing to put in extra effort to stand out early, it sends a powerful signal that you’ll be willing to put in the same level of extra effort to help the sponsor promote their offer to your audience should they end up partnering with you. 

While Podcorn certainly presents an opportunity for podcasters, I’m generally wary of marketplace platforms like theirs. 

Whether it’s Podcorn, any of the various guest matchmaking marketplaces, or UpWork, my personal experience is that these platforms often attract lower-level podcasters who are looking for an easy win and aren’t willing to put in a ton of work. 

Of course, as I’ve mentioned above, that makes it really easy to stand out if you are willing to put in the extra effort to make a smart, personalized pitch like we’ll discuss coming up. 

That said, based on my initial experience with Podcorn as a potential sponsor, I would now be much more likely to do my research myself, off the platform, and reach out to specific podcasters that serve audiences I’m looking to get in front of. I know many of the best sponsors feel the same.  

This means that the reverse is also true. As a podcaster, your best bet for finding a truly great sponsor who will be willing to pay well above industry standard rates is to do your homework, identify highly aligned companies in your niche and reach out directly.

Researching & Identifying Your Ideal Podcast Sponsors 

In my experience, the most lucrative podcast sponsorships come either from a company reaching out directly to a podcast host and inquiring about sponsoring the show, or vice versa. 

It might seem like reaching out to a company and presenting them with a sponsorship proposal might not make as much sense as going through a podcast sponsorship platform like Podcorn. After all, the companies on Podcorn are all actively seeking out podcasts to sponsor, and any companies you reach out to personally are probably not.

The thing to understand is that companies are always looking for new ways to reach their target customers. And with ad prices steadily increasing on Facebook and Google, marketers are looking for alternative solutions to add to their arsenal and build inroads with potential buyers. 

If your show is made up of those potential buyers, you’re offering these companies a massive opportunity, even if they weren’t looking at podcast advertising to begin with. 

But before you start sending out pitches, you need to identify and research potential sponsors who would be a good fit for your show and your audience. 

There are a few different ways to find them 

Companies You Engage With

The easiest place to start is by looking at the companies you already know, like and engage with when it comes to your niche. 

For example, seeing as I write about podcasting and growing an audience online, if I were looking for sponsors for this blog or my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter, I’d start by looking at all the companies I use to help me podcast and grow my own audience. 

Potential sponsors like Libsyn, Squadcast, Shure, Heil, and Focusrite come to mind on the podcast side of things, while ConvertKit, MemberVault, Typeform, Dubsado, and Elegant Themes come to mind on the online business side.

I have no doubt that for any of these companies, I could make a compelling pitch as to why the blog is worth them sponsoring.

Make a list of all the products and services you use related to what you talk about on your show and start thinking about which ones might be open to sponsoring your show. 

The best podcast sponsorships for both parties are often when the host has personal experience with the products they’re promoting to their audience. It can also be easier to land the sponsor in the first place when you can share how they and their products have benefited you personally. 

While these companies you have personal experience with might be the best place to start, depending on the company and the niche, they may already be ubiquitous, a household name to everyone in your audience. In this case, they may not need to advertise, and you may need to expand your sponsor search.

Luckily, companies you have previous experience with is not the only frame of reference to use when seeking out sponsors.

Companies with New Products or Initiatives

Another great lens to filter through when looking for sponsors is companies who have a new product or initiative they’re looking to promote. 

This is a great time to reach out and engage with a sponsor, as their marketing budgets tend to open up when they’re looking to gain traction with a new offering. 

Again, this should be a company that operates within your niche and serves your audience, and the offering should be something that your audience would actually be interested in. 

If you’re actively engaged in your niche or industry’s community beyond your own audience, keep your ear out for new product announcements and train yourself to identify those announcements as your queue to reach out to these companies and offer your platform as a way to reach their ideal customers and spread the word. 

One additional bonus of getting on board with these companies as they’re rolling out new products and services is you can often get early access to the new offer yourself as a way to test drive it before promoting it to your audience.

Up And Coming Companies

Much like companies with new products or services, many new, up-and-coming companies rely heavily on advertising to get the word out and often have to be creative in how they do it. 

This is especially true when they’re competing against massive incumbents who can vastly outspend them on more mainstream advertising channels. 

This makes niche podcast advertising a match made in heaven.

As with new product announcements, keep your ear to the ground and make note of any new companies that are serving your audience and reach out to start a conversation. 

By getting in early and helping them gain an initial foothold, you’re laying the foundation for what could be a very long, very successful, and very lucrative partnership for both you and your sponsor.

Sponsor Your Podcast Yourself

Maybe the most – and least – obvious place to look when it comes to finding a sponsor is at yourself. 

While there are certainly a few prerequisites, like a product, service, or lead magnet to promote to your audience, if you have a business behind your podcast, self-sponsoring your own show is often the most profitable use of your ad slots. 

Even if I have one or more sponsors for my show, I like to always reserve at least one of my ad slots to promote something I’m doing, be that a simple lead magnet to get people onto my email list, an upcoming webinar or workshop, or a paid product or service offering. 

Creating and marketing these types of offers is well beyond the purview of this post, but you can find out more about how to successfully monetize your podcast here.  

Finding Out Who to Pitch At Your Potential Sponsor Company

Once you’ve identified a handful of companies that are fantastic fits for your show, you’re ready to start sending out your pitch decks. 

But who exactly are you supposed to email?

Depending on the size of the company, the job title of the best person to get in touch with will differ. 

If the company is active in using podcast sponsorships and collaborations as part of its marketing strategy, they may have someone whose job title is related to “Partnerships”. 

In other companies, it might be the Marketing Director or Marketing Manager. In really small companies you might be speaking directly with the owner. Some companies will have this information listed on their website, likely on either their “About Us” or “Contact” page.

The best place to start is by asking your network for a connection. Try and think of anyone you know who may have been in contact or partnered with someone from the company in the past and see if you can get an intro email. 

If you don’t have a personal connection (or don’t know if you do) LinkedIn is the next place to start doing some digging.

Using LinkedIn to Find Connections

Start by searching for your potential sponsor. This should return a list of people who work at the company, displaying their job titles as well as any mutual connections you may share. 

Scan the list of employees for anyone in a marketing or partnerships role, as well as anyone at the company with whom you have a shared connection. Even if they’re not in the marketing department, I’d always recommend getting a warm intro from a mutual connection to someone at the company, who can then give you another semi-warm intro to the right person.

Getting a warm introduction is by far the most effective way to start a conversation that leads to a podcast sponsorship agreement, so spend some time mining your network for connections before moving on to alternatives. 

Cold Outreach

If you can’t find anyone at the company with whom you have a potential warm introduction, all is not lost. 

If you’ve been able to use either LinkedIn or the company’s “About Us” or “Contact” page to identify the correct person to reach out to regarding a podcast sponsorship, your next best option is to try and cold email them directly. 

Sometimes, their email will be displayed publicly on the company website. This is often true for people in charge of partnerships, although more often than not, there will be a generic [email protected] type address rather than a specific person’s email. 

This email can be a good option, but first, I like to try and get in touch with someone directly, especially if I’ve been able to identify exactly who that person is.

To find this person’s email, I like to use a tool called Anymail Finder. 

All you have to do is enter the company URL, press enter, and Anymail Finder will come back with a list of email addresses registered at that domain.

If you already know the person’s name who you’re trying to get in touch with, you can enter their name as well to just search for emails that are potential matches to them.

Keep in mind that not every email address is available, but I’ve found Anymail Finder to be effective probably 85% of the time or more in getting people’s correct email addresses.

Contact Forms

If your network and Anymail Finder have both let you down, you still have one option left. 

At the very least, every company will have a contact form somewhere on their website, if not a more specific publicly available email like the “partnerships” email mentioned above. 

This is my last resort as you never know how many people your email will have to go through in order to reach the person who is actually the decision-maker. But if you haven’t had any luck identifying or finding out how to get in touch with that person in the first place, the generic email or contact form is worth a shot.

You can experiment with your outreach strategy, but often when sending a pitch through a contact form, I’ll shorten my pitch significantly and simply try to pique the reader’s curiosity and start a conversation with the person in charge of podcast sponsorships. 

My feeling is long pitch emails are unlikely to make it through the screening process and get a response, where a shorter email with a compelling hook probably will. 

Whichever method you use to get in touch with your potential sponsor, once you have their contact info, you need to know how to pitch them in a way that is actually going to get you results.

How to Write a Compelling Podcast Sponsorship Pitch

Even though you might know that your audience is an ideal fit for a potential sponsor, doesn’t mean it will be immediately apparent to them. This is where a well-written pitch email comes in. 

The goal of your pitch deck is to break down the nitty-gritty details about your show and your audience. The goal of your pitch email is to pique their curiosity enough to read through the pitch deck in the first place and open up a conversation with you. 

It helps to remember that many companies either: 

1. Get tons of podcast sponsorship or partnership requests from shows with small or unrelated audiences. 
2. Have never considered advertising on podcasts before and don’t see the value.

What this means for you is that your email has to clearly convey why they should be legitimately excited to spend money sponsoring your show. 

A well-written podcast sponsorship email will have your potential sponsor salivating over the potential to have a trusted source pitch their offer to an engaged group of their ideal customers.

Before you can craft this pitch, however, you’re going to need to do some research.

Researching Your Potential Podcast Sponsor

A compelling pitch requires you to speak to both the frustrations and goals of the potential sponsors in question, preferably in vivid detail. 

If you’re speaking to the same target audience, chances are you’re already keenly aware of some of those challenges. Chief among these challenges is likely finding more of your ideal listeners/customers to grow your audience and convince them that what you’re offering is worth investing attention and/or money on. 

But you can (and should) go deeper than that. 

Determine what products or services they’re currently promoting. Is there a new offer they’re trying to build hype around or gain traction for? If so, that’s a great offer to build a pitch around. Or, if there’s a product or service you think would be of particular benefit to your audience, craft your pitch around that.

Try and find out where else they’re advertising online and how. It’s easy enough to use the Page Transparency section on their Facebook page to find out what, if any, Facebook ads they’re currently running. 

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Targeted podcast advertising often has far lower CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) than other advertising mediums. If you can find which other methods of advertising they’re using, look at industry average CPA rates on those platforms, and then counter with how advertising on your show will get them results for cheaper, you’re in a good spot.

If they’re advertising on other podcasts, make note of which shows they’re advertising on and how long they’ve been running ads. If they’ve been running ads on any shows for more than a few weeks, chances are they’re seeing results and understand that podcasts can be effective marketing channels. 

If they’re not currently advertising on podcasts, you’re going to need to bring some podcast industry data on the effectiveness of podcast advertising and why it’s such a great platform to reach highly-engaged, highly-targeted niche audiences.

The more pieces of your sponsors’ goals, challenges, and existing marketing strategy you can put together beforehand, the more you’ll be able to speak their language, address their challenges, and offer up solutions in your pitch. 

Writing Your Sponsor Pitch Email

Once you’ve gathered your research, it’s time to sit down and write the pitch. 

If you write pitches to get guests on your show, or have done any podcast PR guest pitches to land interview appearances on other shows, you probably have a solid foundation in pitch email writing, and this sponsor pitch will follow a similar format.

Remember, the overarching goal of this email is not to overwhelm them with information and justification on why this is a good opportunity for them. Instead, it’s to pique their curiosity enough to get them on a call to talk further and discuss how sponsoring your show could be a win-win-win for them, your audience, and you.

With that in mind, let’s walk through the email structure one paragraph at a time. 

Grab my sponsor pitch and follow-up email templates inside the Podcast Sponsorship Toolkit.

P1: Introduction 

No surprises here. Introduce yourself and the show you host. If you have what I like to call a “Podcast Promise,” a single sentence statement that explains the mission of the show, include that as well. 

In the first paragraph, I also like to mention that I’m going to be making them a proposal that I think will be beneficial to them, just so they know what to expect as they’re reading through.

P2: Connection

Before pitching, you want to establish a sense of connection and show them that you’re aligned in both the audience you serve and your mission around the work you do. People and brands want to work with others who are working toward the same goals as them, so make sure you highlight this.  

If you’re a user of their products or services, include that information as well as a short anecdote about how they’ve benefitted you. 

Flattery is never a bad idea, but don’t go overboard. It has to be genuine.

P3: Proposal

Alright, it’s time to lean on your research and make the offer. 

If you’re crafting your pitch around a certain product, make sure to mention how it would be perfect for your audience. 

If they’re launching a new offer or initiative, show how you and your audience can help them gain traction.

Speak both to the goals you know they have – ie. reach more people and get them to buy – as well as the challenges they may be facing in reaching those people and convincing them to take action. 

While I like to offer some specific examples of how we could work together, I also like to mention that if they have other ideas, I’d be excited to discuss them and come up with something that will benefit both of us. 

Remember, the more specific you can be to their company and situation in particular, the greater the likelihood that they’ll follow up to continue the conversation. 

P4: Supporting Information

Once you’ve made the offer, give them links to further information.  

This should include your podcast pitch deck, but can also include recommended episodes for them to get a sense of your show, as well as information on the effectiveness of podcast advertising as a whole if you suspect they’re new to the podcast advertising game.

I prefer to link out to these specific resources rather than include the information in the email, as that can add length and clutter fast. 

P5: Call To Action

In the final, short paragraph, tell them what the next step is. 

I like to include a Calendly link and ask them to book a time to talk if they’re interested. In my experience, the most productive conversations happen over a phone or video call where you can iterate on ideas and brainstorm solutions. 

I also always give them an out, telling them that it’s no problem if they don’t feel it’s a good fit at the moment.  

The Results Are In The Follow Up

Once you’ve crafted your pitch email, it’s time to hit send. Don’t expect to hear back immediately, however.

Like all cold pitch emails, the results are going to come in the follow-up. 

Be prepared to follow up at least three times after you’ve sent your initial pitch. I’ll typically send my first follow-ups according to the following schedule.

1. Initial email (Day 0)
2. Follow Up #1 (Day 7)
3. Follow Up #2 (Day 14)
4. Follow Up #3 (Day 21)
5. Follow Up #4 (Day 28)

In this final follow-up email, I’ll address that they may not feel like it’s a fit right now and that that’s ok, but I’ll try again in 6-12 months and maybe it will be a better time then.

A lot of podcasters find following up hard, but I promise you that it’s a necessary step in getting results. 

Once you have this system down for one sponsor, you can repeat the process for each and every new sponsor you target. 

I like to work in batches, sending out a number of sponsorship proposals at once and then following up on the same schedule with each of them. 

Depending on the podcast sponsorships currently in place, I’ll repeat the process every 4-8 weeks, keeping it from becoming a constant task to keep on top of.

Make It Easy For Potential Podcast Sponsors to Say “Yes”

Remember that when you’re writing pitches, your potential sponsor should immediately see the benefit to them.

Don’t let yourself get stuck in the mindset that you’re imposing on, annoying, or making an ask of them that is weighted heavily in your favour. 

If you’re reaching out to the right potential sponsors, you’re doing them a favour by handing them an avenue to connect with their ideal customers. 

Negotiating with Podcast Sponsors

Even if your proposal is perfect and your podcast sponsorship package pricing is on point, don’t be surprised if your potential sponsors want to negotiate before agreeing on anything. 

Remember that ultimately, you have the final say over how you work with sponsors on your show. If they’re interested in talking more about sponsorship packages with you in the first place, they obviously see value in what you’ve built, and as a result, you may have more leverage than you think.

That said, negotiating can help you come up with a solution that may work better for both parties and (hopefully) become the start of a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship.

What Should You Negotiate On?

Personally, I almost never negotiate on price. 

Instead, I like to add more promotional opportunities to whichever sponsor package they’re interested in. 

This is one of the reasons tiered pricing works so well. If your sponsor is interested in your mid-tier package but the price seems steep to them, you can tell them that while you can’t lower the price, you’d be willing to include one or more of the top-tire elements to sweeten the deal.

Maybe that means adding in one or more newsletter mentions during the ad run or increasing the number of sponsored Instagram posts. 

To provide further leverage, I like to hold at least one option back that doesn’t appear in any of the packages outlined in the pitch deck. That way, if the sponsor I’m dealing with is looking to negotiate on the top-tier package, I still have something more to offer rather than having no option but to reduce the price if they’re not seeing the value.

Negotiating Podcast Sponsorships Over A Call vs. Email

While it might feel like a higher-pressure situation, I always recommend getting on a Zoom call to talk over the details of the potential podcast sponsorship. 

For one, I’m hoping that this will be a long-term partnership, and I want to get to know the person (or people) that I’m going to be working with. 

Secondly, getting on a call allows you to find out more about the company and their goals, challenges, and expectations. As we’ve discussed previously, the more you know about their situation, the more you can speak their language and tailor the sponsorship packages to help them achieve their goals. 

Just because you’re getting on a call, however, doesn’t mean you need to have a deal in place by the time you hang up. 

Use the call to get to know more about them, find out what they’re looking to promote, what would make this campaign a win for them, what experience they’ve had with podcast advertising before including what worked and what didn’t, and any other relevant information. 

Feel free to discuss potential options and tweaks to your original podcast sponsorship packages but tell them that you’ll send out a revised proposal once you get off the call with a new set of options. 

This keeps you from needing to run the numbers while on the call and gives you some time to reflect on whether or not you’re able to offer them a package at the price they’re looking for and still feel good about it. 

It’s all too easy to get swept up in a conversation and be so desperate to make any deal work that you end up with a sponsorship package where you end up doing more work than the sponsorship is actually worth to you.

Use the discovery call to learn about your potential sponsor and kick around ideas, but don’t feel like you need to settle everything then and there.  

Delivering the Ads In Your Podcast

Once you’ve lined up a sponsor and ironed out the details of the agreement, it’s time to record the ads. 

Depending on your sponsor, your agreement, and your level of familiarity with the products and services you’ll be promoting for them, the ads themselves could take a few different forms. 

Sponsor-Read Ads

Some sponsors will prefer to record the ad themselves and simply have you plug the ad audio file into the sponsored episodes in the agreed-upon location.

These types of ads give the sponsor complete control over the messaging and the delivery of the ad, which can be appealing to some companies. 

For you as a podcaster, these ads are also the least amount of work on your end as you don’t need to write or record any of the ads yourself.

That said, they don’t know your audience as well as you do, and not only can these ads fail to convert as highly for your sponsor, they can also come across as less personal and are more likely to turn off some members of your audience if the ads are not on-brand for you. 

It’s for these reasons that I usually like to steer sponsors away from these types of ads in favour of a host-read ad.

Host Read Ads

Host-read ads generally convert more highly than sponsor-read ads, for a couple of reasons touched on above. 

For one, if you’ve done a good job of building up the know, like and trust factor with your audience, they’re going to put more stock in a personal recommendation from you than from a generic sponsor-read advertisement. 

Depending on your podcast sponsorship agreement, you may also have more latitude to tweak or even completely rewrite the ad copy to tailor it specifically to your audience. 

My favourite podcast ads contain personal stories and anecdotes about how the host of the show has used the product in the past to solve their own problems and improve their life. 

I’ve also heard creative sponsor promotions that are woven right into the episode. I remember hearing one ad in particular on Matt Giovannisci’s MoneyLab podcast where he went on an epic 7-minute riff in the middle of an episode promoting his sponsor, ahrefs. 

While ahrefs was a sponsor, it was clear that Matt genuinely used and loved the product, and would be promoting it whether or not his show was being sponsored by the company. 

In fact, not only did Matt promote ahrefs on his own show, he also did a couple of guest podcast appearances where he gave big shoutouts on those shows as well!

It might not always make sense, but when possible, I encourage podcasters to similarly go above and beyond for your sponsors and do everything within your power to ensure that they’re getting value from your partnership.

Building a Long-Term Relationship with Your Podcast Sponsors

If you’re targeting sponsors who are highly aligned with the mission and audience of your show, it’s not uncommon for podcast sponsorships to develop into long-term partnerships that stretch over multiple years. 

That may not mean that your sponsor is running ads every single week over that span (although they might), but they may come back regularly for regular ad runs, maybe two or three eight-episode runs per year for example. 

These types of host/sponsor relationships are ideal as a host, as you have a fairly reliable source of income that you can bank on to some extent. 

I like to try to go above and beyond for any sponsor I work with, but especially with long-term relationships like these. 

I’ll send handwritten notes to my contacts at companies I partner with, send short video messages on their birthdays or when the company hits a milestone, and give them additional shoutouts from time to time on the podcast, social media, or my newsletter outside of the podcast sponsorship package, and even if they’re not currently sponsoring the show. 

I’m a big believer that creating a phenomenal sponsor experience will set my show apart and help keep the relationship strong into the future. 

Even outside of being podcast sponsors, if they’re operating in the same industry or niche as you, these people and companies could be some of your biggest allies in the future, so it’s worth going the extra mile to build a genuine and generous relationship with them.

Managing Podcast Sponsorships Is Real Work

Actually finding and landing sponsors for your podcast may the biggest challenge you’ve faced when it comes to podcast sponsorships. But it’s worth mentioning that while sponsorships can certainly be a steady source of revenue, by no means are they free money.

One of the most common reactions I hear from podcasters after landing their first sponsorship deals is frustration with how much work they can be to maintain. 

Depending on the sponsor you bring on, they may expect monthly (or even more frequent) reporting on your download stats, there may be multiple rounds of revisions on ad copy and reads, and then of course there’s the continual effort of research, outreach, negotiation and onboarding of new sponsors. 

I’ve talked to many podcasters who landed a sponsor at a rate of $100-$200/ep only to give up on podcast sponsorships after the initial run as the economics of how much effort was involved in relation to how much income they were bringing in just didn’t make sense. 

It’s for this reason that I encourage you to put in the effort to seek out highly aligned niche sponsors who will actually pay you decent money to sponsor your show and get in front of your audience. 

It’s going to take time and effort to land sponsors anyway, so you might as well put in that little bit extra to identify and connect with the companies who are actually willing to make it worth your while. 

Other Methods of Monetizing Your Podcast

Of course, podcast sponsorships aren’t the only way to monetize a podcast, and in fact, in terms of potential for income they’re one of the worst. 

Especially given that podcast sponsorships do take a decent amount of time and effort to manage, I would personally much prefer to put that time into creating a product of my own that I could then sell to my audience on a continual basis. 

Of course, not every show lends itself well to creating products. But regardless of the genre or format of show, many of the top podcasts in every category have developed products, services or offers of some other variety that allow them to take control of their podcasts revenue.

Like we discussed, podcast sponsorships can be a great way to cover your production costs, and maybe even a little extra. But unless you’re bringing in tens of thousands of downloads per episode, you’re likely not going to make a living off of them. 

On the other hand, I know plenty of podcasters who have built multi 6-figure businesses around shows with 500-1000 downloads per episode. 

If you’re curious about exploring some of the other monetization options other than podcast sponsorships, this article is a good place to start.   

Go Land Your First (Or Next) Podcast Sponsor

So where do you go from here?

The first step is to get ultra clear on who exactly your audience is beyond simply how they engage with you and your show. 

Find out as much information as you can about them to create a complete picture about who your archetypal listener is, from where they shop, to what other podcasts they listen to, to how they spend their weekends, and more.

This might mean surveying them or it might mean setting up 20 phone calls to talk more in-depth with a selection of your listeners. Or both!

However you do it, if you’re going to sell sponsors on higher than industry average rates, you’re going to need to be able to make a compelling pitch. That requires that you know exactly who your audience is and what they’re interested in so you can approach companies that match up with their interests, challenges, desires, and worldview.

Once you’re clear on that information, it’s time to start doing your research.

Identify 10 companies that would make a good fit for your listeners and start crafting pitches.

The first one will be the hardest, and you’ll likely experience some resistance when it comes to actually sending that email. 

But once the first pitch leaves your outbox, the others flow with much less friction. 

Remember that the results are in the follow-up, and it might take months or even years to land your truly ideal sponsor. That’s not to say you won’t have other sponsors in the meantime, but patience and persistence are essential to making podcast sponsorships work effectively for your show. 

If you’re able to build systems and a habit around the research and pitching part of the process, sooner or later, you’re likely to start bringing in a consistent stream of sponsors – and income – for your show.

Profiting off your creations is one of the sweetest feelings in life, but it doesn’t come easily. Push yourself through the resistance, continue searching for and pitching new potential sponsors until the results start to come.

Then, continue the process on repeat and watch the results multiply.