Is podcast advertising a part of your education solution’s marketing strategy? If not, you’re missing out on a lucrative channel with proven ROI.

With podcast listenership increasing by 50% in the last five years, this medium offers a growing opportunity to target your educational niche and drive higher conversion rates.

Let’s explore the benefits of podcast advertising for educational businesses and key considerations marketers should keep in mind when tapping into this channel.

Why is podcast advertising so beneficial for educational brands?

Podcasts are a powerful tool for spreading brand awareness and increasing sales for educational businesses. Podcast listeners tune into shows that both educate and entertain on topics relevant to their interests.. This gives educational companies a direct avenue to build relationships with listeners who are already engaged and interested in aligned topics.

When educational organizations find suitable and safe podcasts for their target audiences, ads can translate into sales.

For example, people who listen to travel and foreign language podcasts might be interested in learning a new language. If you’re offering online language tutoring, you can reach a relevant audience by placing podcast ads within these shows.

Podcast listeners are an engaged and responsive audience. A staggering 63% of listeners have interacted with a brand after hearing a podcast ad, and half of all US listeners have bought a product after hearing an ad on a podcast. These stats reinforce that expanding into the podcast industry could mean significant growth in both awareness and conversations.

Why educational advertisers should consider brand safety and suitability in podcast advertising

Advertising safely and suitably is crucial for educational businesses, as maintaining trust and authority with their audience is paramount. Thankfully, there are strategic brand safety and brand suitability measures you can take to grow your podcast advertising strategy while upholding your brand reputation.

What’s the difference between brand safety and brand suitability? Brand safety strategies prevent ads from appearing next to harmful content, helping safeguard your brand’s integrity. Brand suitability strategies ensure ads align with the surrounding content’s tone and audience, helping you remain relevant and convey your brand values.

The problem is that podcast advertising presents a unique challenge for educational marketers because conversations can shift unexpectedly.

A surprising tangent into unsuitable topics can turn a seemingly safe podcast ad placement into a brand safety risk. With millions of minutes of audio, it is impossible for marketing teams to manually monitor podcast episodes and flag risks with the speed and accuracy required.

A tool like SeekrAlign can help your team take control of your podcast ad placements. Its AI-driven system uses proprietary machine learning algorithms to rank content for brand safety and suitability with more accuracy than keyword-based systems.

SeekrAlign provides suitability metrics for podcasts based on the Global Alliance of Reliable Media (GARM) guidelines and its own patented Civility Score, which tracks personal attacks and measures severity within the context of spoken intent

Assessing podcasts at the episode level, SeekrAlign provides an extensive, highly searchable database of over 40,000 podcasts, graded on their contextual civility. Having a solution like this in your toolkit can help you execute your podcast advertising strategy with more speed, clarity, and confidence.

How to identify your target audience for educational advertising

Now that you know how to optimize your podcast strategy for brand safety and suitability, you can build out your targeting strategy. Understanding your target audience and the podcasts they listen to is essential to drive performance with your ads.

To reach the right educational audience, it’s crucial to understand two things:

1. Who you’re targeting in the educational sector
2. What kind of podcasts they listen to

Let’s look at some strategies you can implement to help you better define and understand your target audience.

Strategies for defining and understanding your target audience

Start by building a demographic and psychographic profile that outlines your target audience. Include their age, location, and education level. Specify what they align with, including values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyle choices. Analyze these traits to better understand what engages and motivates your audience.

Next, consider their educational needs and roadblocks. Are they seeking career advancement, skill development, or personal growth? Do they struggle with certain subject matter or testing formats? Knowing their core needs and challenges helps you offer tailored solutions.

Use your existing content marketing efforts to guide you. Peel through content and social media insights to better understand which topics generate the most interest and interaction among your audience. Use polls, interviews, and feedback forms to gather input from your audience for fresh insights. This gives you an idea of how to engage your audience in ways they prefer.

How to select podcasts that align with your target audience

To create a cohesive brand message, you need to feature your ads in podcasts that align with your educational products and offers. Look for shows that match your target audience’s needs and interests so listeners naturally sync up with your solutions.

As educational marketing specialist Firdosh Khan explains, “[There’s] a departure from generic marketing approaches toward targeted content that resonates with the individual goals of each student.”

Here are a few things to look for:

• Subject matter: Find podcasts that cover subjects relevant to your educational niche. This helps you target listeners who are already interested in topics related to what you sell.
• Level of education: Identify podcasts that cater to your audience’s educational level. There’s no need to advertise on a K-12 education podcast if you offer continuous learning for entrepreneurs.
• Professional development: Seek out podcasts focusing on career advancement and skill development within your field. Find shows that focus on the same goals you help your audience with. By doing this, you offer a ready-made solution to help listeners reach their professional goals while they’re tuned in.
• Innovative teaching methods: If you’re appealing to educators, look for industry-relevant podcasts that discuss forward-thinking teaching methods or edtech topics. This can help you attract educators who would be most interested in your products.

While it might seem obvious to advertise on relevant podcast episodes, consistently placing ads in the right places is not easy. Picking podcasts manually is impossibly time-consuming, and conventional programmatic advertising can either miss harmful nuances within podcast discussions or produce false positives and negatives that block you from high-quality shows.

That’s why scaling your podcast advertising with SeekrAlign is so helpful.

Its machine-learning algorithms detect and rate civility at the episode level based on rigorous safety and suitability measures. Assessing the deep undertones of each conversation, Seekr can recognize all kinds of contextual issues, including profanity, personal attacks, and hate speech. Whether you’re advertising on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or another platform, you can ensure your ads are being placed in the right places.

Unlike traditional programmatic advertising systems that place ads automatically based on keywords, Seekr’s sophisticated search and filter functions make it easy to find shows that align with your brand’s message and audience.

How to craft engaging educational ads for podcasts

The right educational podcast ad can captivate listeners and position your school or product as the solution to their learning challenges and goals. We recommend bookmarking this article so you can refer to this list when writing your podcast ad script..

Essential tips for crafting engaging educational podcast ads:

• Pinpoint a problem and solve it: Address a specific challenge your target audience faces and present your educational product as the solution.
• Hire voice talent for brand awareness: Ads voiced by professional talent work best to boost brand awareness.
• Craft host-read ads to drive sales: Podcast host ads drive the most sales, as listeners trust the recommendations of hosts they regularly connect with, seeing them as thought leaders in their field.
• Keep ads short: Voice talent ads shorter than 30 seconds are better at driving awareness, connection, and intent than longer ads.
• Use SEO techniques: Voice SEO can improve ad placement so your ads appear alongside highly relevant content.
• Use AI to craft content: SeekrGenerate can help you create ad content with the perfect tone for your ideal customer. Seekr’s Retrieval Augmented Generation technique helps produce specific and accurate content to personalize your digital marketing strategy.
• Consider ethical issues: Focus on brand safety and suitability in your ads to maintain educational integrity and trustworthiness. SeekrAlign ensures safe, suitable ad placements.

Elevate your education marketing efforts with podcast advertising

Podcast ads result in high conversions for educational businesses, but to truly drive student recruitment, you need to target the right audience.

It’s far easier to target your specific educational niche in a relevant setting with the right tools at your disposal.