How Burrow Leverages Podcasts to Drive Brand Awareness

Next year, the average US adult will spend more time listening to digital audio—whether that’s streaming radio or podcasts—than traditional radio, according to our estimates. As adoption continues to grow, so does advertiser investment.

“People find resonance with podcasts, and they want to talk about [them] a lot,” said Alex Kubo, vice president of ecommerce and digital marketing at furniture company Burrow. “Podcasts [can] grab somebody's attention and walk them all the way down the funnel. So the hosts, in their voice and their own context, are talking about the key points of the product and the experience that they personally value. And that's what the audience holds onto. Whereas a channel like social, we can get a really wide reach. We can get pretty targeted, but our ability to hold somebody's attention on that channel is very, very limited.”

Watch the full interview with Burrow's Alex Kubo below.

For Burrow, digital audio is a maturing channel. “The amount of data that's available to marketers today is a lot different than it was three, four or five years ago. [We] can isolate certain demographics; we can isolate where our core audience segment really resonates,” Kubo said.

While figuring out what audience to reach is very important, finding the right host to work with is just as imperative. “Podcasts are an interesting channel, where it's not just, ‘Let's write this 30-second clip that gets read in the middle of a show and deliver that to this specific audience.’ It's all about how it's delivered,” he said. “Podcasts are a unique channel because somebody has already invested in learning more from that particular host. That's the host that they like to listen to, and so it's less disruptive to have these more inline mid-roll segments. But it all comes down to how well does the host communicate the story of the brand and the products and the value [proposition].”