How To Find Your Voice on The Retail Exchange Podcast

At The Retail Exchange podcast, we offer a range of advertising, sponsorship and custom content options for our partners.

Not only is partnering with our podcast a great way to create outstanding, shareable podcast content for your business, but the main benefit is that you can use our platform to engage with C-Suite retail leaders who are already on their preferred listening platform. When it comes to investing precious marketing budget with other platforms, you’ll often find yourselves fighting against countless others in the same space, resulting in a sea of noise that fails to engage your target audience. With podcasts, C-Suite leaders are tuned in to actively learning about how to solve the issues they face, and keen to hear from expert voices that can offer solutions.

Overall you’ll find that partnering with our podcast, whether for episode sponsorship, in-episode advertising, custom content creation of sponsorship of our presence at major industry events, like NRF Big Show and Shoptalk Europe, tends to be better for awareness, engagement and, importantly, driving action.

You may be thinking, do the vast majority of C-Suite leaders listen to podcasts? Yes, thousands do. And as well as putting your business at the heart of retail’s biggest conversations within episodes, you can also ‘find your voice’ by partnering with us at events, to promote your message to wider visitor audiences and senior interview guests we sit down to record with at each event we attend.

One thing that I will also address about podcast advertising in general is the question of whether it’s really possible to track clicks to downloads? Yes, it’s possible. With embedded analytics code, you can track clicks, and monitor downloads during the periods that you’re running in-episode advertising or sponsoring individual episodes. 

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s dive into partnering with The Retail Exchange podcast in more detail: 

1. Getting Started With Podcast Advertising, Sponsorship and Custom Content 

To begin, you need to reach to The Retail Exchange Partnership Manager by email who will be able to talk you through the options. This is pretty straightforward, there are four primary ways you can get involved:

• Custom Content

  This is where we dedicated an entire episode to your area of expertise, and secure retail or brand guests to join your company representative in a recorded, roundtable podcast episode, to be broadcast on our platform.

• Podcast Sponsorship

  Choose to sponsor a single or multiple episodes of The Interview Series or our Event Review episodes. Major international retail events? You’ll find us there, too. We partner with some of the biggest, and that means an even bigger audience for your message. A chance for you to maximise your brand visibility by becoming a Partner Sponsor of our presence at events like NRF Big Show in New York (US) or Shoptalk Europe in Barcelona (Spain). Your brand will be prominently linked with our podcast channel across all promotion, marketing and podcast content output.

• Podcast Advertising

  Put your brand message at the heart of retail’s biggest conversations by taking in-episode podcast advertising. Your message will be inserted into the pre-roll (at the start of a podcast episode), mid-roll (as the name suggests, this is placed at midway through the episode) and post-roll (prior to the episode outro).

• Digital Advertising

  Promote your business and brand message on our platform with digital banner advertising on our website or advertising within our subscriber e-newsletter The Bulletin, or a combination of the two.

2. Creating Your Podcast Advertising

Now we get into the creative part. Time to bring your message to life! 

For Custom Content episodes, our content team will work with you to help shape the topic and editorial themes for the ‘In Focus’ episode, crafting an episode synopsis that will help you to be prepared, when it comes to taking part in the roundtable, and also used as part of our outreach to retailer and brand guests we invite to join you in conversation during the recording

For podcast advertising, ads can be a maximum of 40 seconds in length so you have to capture listener attention and get your message out there quickly. This is usually the formula that we follow when creating ad scripts for our clients:

Podcast Ad Script Formula

• Thought-Provoking Statement: A statement/question that your target audience can immediately relate to. This is to catch a listener’s attention.

• The Host: Introduction to the host(s) of the podcast.

• About the Episode: One or two short sentences to highlight what the podcast episode is about. Who we’ll be talking to, and the value listeners will get from the episode? 

• CTA: Since you’re advertising on an audio-only medium, it’s important to make CTA URLs short and easy to remember.

Our production team will work with you to create your ad script for you, or make recommendations to a script you have drafted. Once your script is good to go it’s time to record! At The Retail Exchange podcast, we record and edit all of our ads in-house, and we’ll send you the draft audio for review and approval before it airs. Then it will be time to share your ad with the world in the upcoming episodes that you choose to place it within.

3. Budget

The Retail Exchange podcast has a range of partnership packages available to suit every budget. From £650.00 GBP for individual in-episode ads and digital advertising opportunities to £10,000 GBP for headline sponsorship at major industry events. We usually recommend having our clients start with a small campaign, combining in-episode advertising with sponsorship of a single episode, and supporting digital advertising.

4. Targeting 

Before deciding to sponsor an episode(s) or our presence at an industry event, It’s important to consider who exactly your audience is and who you want to be targeting. When it comes to events, some are focused on high-level C-Suite leaders (e.g., CEO, COO, CFO, CIO, SVP), while others attract those in more practitioner roles, such as Head of and middle management. You may also want to target our audience based on the following:

1. Retailer or Brand featured within an episode

2. Category or Sector e.g., Beauty, Apparel, FMCG, Technology

3. Job function

4. Topic/theme of episode

5. Location 

5. Measuring Success 

Once your episode sponsorship or advertising is up and running, you’ll obviously want to check in and analyse performance. The Retail Exchange podcast allows you to do just that, giving you insight into campaign success as well as being able to report ROI back to other members of your team.

We provide you with information including:

• Impressions 

• Reach 

• Frequency

• Clicks

• % of episode/ads played

• Job Function of Listeners 

• Location 

• Device 

And that's it! Pretty easy, right?  

To find your voice on The Retail Exchange podcast and own the conversation, download our 2023 Media Pack and learn more.

If you have any questions about partnering with The Retail Exchange podcast, get in touch with The Retail Exchange podcast Partnership Team!