For anyone that knows me, they know that I love CrossFit. If I’m not doing CrossFit, I’m watching videos, talking about it, or listening to someone else talk about it on my drive home. If I could figure out a way to make sure I dream about it, I’d be hitting new PRs (personal records) in my sleep every night.

Can I get enough? I don’t think so… I think the only other thing I could do is to have an in-person conversation with someone I look up to in the sport — like Mat Fraser, if anyone has any contacts — which is very unlikely.

The closest thing to that? A podcast.

Podcasts have taken the world by storm, with the number of worldwide listeners in 2022 over 424 million and growing. In Australia, Takeatumble found that an average Australian listens to just under 2 hours of podcast content every week.

Podcasts have a significant effect on listener behaviour, influencing opinions, knowledge and even purchases. The people we listen to are, in many ways, influencers. When most people think of influencers, they think of those Instagram accounts constantly seeking new partnerships.

But influencers aren’t just an Instagram thing — they’re a growing part of all marketing sectors, including podcasts. To understand how you can leverage the power of influencers in podcasts, let’s first take a look at what makes it work at all.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Who is the first person that comes to mind when you think about Nike? Tiger Woods, Lebron James or Michael Jordan?

For me, it’s Tiger Woods. Although these athletes are technically high level brand ambassadors, we feel that they have set the tone for what we now refer to as an influencer. We like to think of an influencer as the more affordable and entry-level version of a brand ambassador.

Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that uses product endorsements and shout outs from people who are respected and have a dedicated following in their niche. The easiest way to think of influencer marketing is to think of an individual (not a business) promoting a brand on a marketing platform, using their personal reputation.

This can be done in many ways, but the ones we are most familiar with are:

Social Media
Podcasts
Blogging

Influencer marketing is so popular that it now has its own categories: celebrities, mega influencers, macro influencers and micro influencers.

What is the difference between affiliate marketing and influencer marketing?

We often get asked if affiliate marketing is the same as influencer marketing — it’s not. Don’t get influencer marketing confused with the person that keeps popping into your DMs trying to get you to be a brand ambassador for a product you have only a mild interest in.

“No, @jane_xoxo3, I don’t want to send my ‘fire pic🔥🥵’ to your page, but thanks for telling me my profile looks great!”

The difference between affiliate marketing and influencer marketing is that affiliate marketing makes use of bloggers or social media influencers in your industry to promote your product, and then earn a commission off every purchase made from their endorsement, whereas influencer marketing involves more of a campaign that sees influencers endorsing a product by making some mention of it.

Influencer marketing and affiliate marketing go hand in hand, but the main difference between the two is the objective: affiliate marketing is primarily sales driven, whereas influencer marketing is mostly focused on increasing brand awareness. In fact, affiliate marketing is often tied into most performance marketing initiatives, meaning it is measured the same way SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and PPC (Pay-Per-Click).

While it can sometimes get a bad reputation for being a bit spammy, make no mistake: affiliate marketing is incredibly powerful when it is done well.

You just need to do it in the right order: trying to slide into the DMs and doing it out of the blue probably isn’t the best way to go. Instead, use brand awareness influencer marketing to build awareness first, and then consider direct messaging people.

What are the benefits of influencer marketing?

Now that you know the difference between affiliate marketing and influencer marketing, let’s get into the benefits of influencer marketing.

Builds trust

Influencer marketing helps build trust with your audience, which makes it easier to sell. A lot of the time the audience has a personal connection with the influencer, so a mention from them can earn the brand huge kudos amongst their followers.

However, the importance of authenticity in influencer marketing cannot be overstated; influencer marketing relies on relationship with the audience, so you don’t want to jeopardise the existing connection the influencer has with their followers by sending the wrong messages.

Sam Oh from Ahrefs puts it best: “the main reason influencer marketing works so well as a marketing strategy is because you’re borrowing trust from a person who already has influence over your target audience.”

Make sure you focus on choosing the right influencers to market your brand, though — McDonalds isn't going to choose a CrossFitter to market their brand. Your influencers needs to fit with your target audience.

Affordability

Influencer marketing is a great way to improve brand awareness without having to bust your budget and commit to long term advertising contracts.

The power of influencer marketing is huge for small business owners, especially if you work with an Australian marketing agency that offers creative strategies, helps you partner with the right influencers and knows how to leverage influencer marketing so that you can stretch your budget and maximise your marketing spend.

Brand awareness

This is where the power of influencer marketing becomes really clear, especially for small business owners who don’t have a huge budget to spend on large brand awareness campaigns.

Influencer accounts typically have a large number of followers, all of whom feel some kind of personal attachment to the influencer. An influencer marketing campaign allows you to directly reach this highly engaged audience, meaning that every shout-out or recommendation you receive will be actively seen and heard.

While this personal connection helps brands reach their audience, it’s absolutely essential that authenticity in influencer marketing is maintained, otherwise you risk precisely the opposite of brand awareness.

Consumer insights

Influencer marketing can help you understand your target audience even better than you might have thought you understood it, helping you serve them better and potentially growing your business.

Successful influencers are geniuses at reaching their audiences, keeping up with trends and understanding the content their audience likes best. This also has the added benefit of saving you time in designing and brainstorming — while you’ll want to be part of the process, influencers will be able to support you with developing creative content. This gives you the chance to place more focus on other parts of your growing business.

It’s all in the strategy, baby.

Stop! I know, I’ve done a good job selling you on influencer marketing, but before you perform a Google search on “influencer marketing Australia”, please have a look at these influencer marketing steps to help you understand the whole process before you commit any of your marketing budget to a campaign.

Start with an objective

Knowing the objectives of influencer marketing for your brand will help you to quantify your marketing spend. There’s no point allocating any portion of your budget to anything if you don’t have a clear objective. The easiest place to start is deciding whether you want to increase brand awareness or sales. Knowing this will help you choose the right influencers and get the most out of your budget.

Develop a strategy

Get creative! Be strategic in your approach and don’t just go for the obvious options. Do a little research – you might even find a few gems that are willing to promote your business for free. Try to think about how you long your campaign will be, which influencers you want to market your brand, your budget and how you will measure influencer marketing and its impact on your business.

Evaluate influencers

Don’t just look to influencer marketing trends to develop a campaign. You should be passionate and want to work with the influencers you are considering partnering with, as they are essentially a representation of your brand.

Liking them plays a huge role, but it isn’t the only thing that is important: the numbers need to add up. While checking how many followers they have might seem like the most obvious thing to do, it isn’t. Pay very close attention to audience engagement on their content, especially if you’re considering partnering with a social media influencer. Buying followers is incredibly common amongst unfluencers (aka wanna be influencers), and will only lead to damage.

So after all this discussion, is influencer marketing worth it? It depends on your brand, but from what we know: absolutely yes! According to many people in the marketing industry, influencer marketing often produces the strongest ROI.

Podcast Influencer Marketing

So this lands us here: podcast influencer marketing. Not every product or service can be effectively promoted using still images or in a short video on social media, so podcast influencer marketing presents a great opportunity to provide buyers with all the information they need before they decide to purchase.

Podcast influencer marketing also supplements higher level marketing efforts and other types of influencer marketing. It also allows brands to remarket their product to buyers that are at different stages of the purchasing funnel, making it an incredibly effective way to ensure you stay in the mix.

There are different ways podcast influencer marketing can be done, and the way you choose to do it depends primarily on your objectives: do you want to build awareness or increase sales? Knowing this will help you understand how you want your product to be promoted.

The most common way to increase sales through podcast marketing is to offer incentives (also known as direct response marketing). This can involve the podcaster offering a code that only their audience can use to get a discount or free trial. Increasing brand awareness through podcast influencer marketing involves getting shout outs or getting podcasters to do reviews on your product or service during their podcast.

Pay attention!

No, literally — get creative with your marketing strategy and pay to get ears listening, now! Whether you’re a large brand, or a small business seeking influencer marketing for startups, we’ve got an influencer marketing strategy that will suit your needs.

As someone passionate in your field, think about what you’d love listening to, and we’ll help you find the right influencer for it. I might be one of CrossFit’s biggest fanatics — or disciples (if you know you know) — but soon enough you’ll be hitting the ears of someone who’s as much of a fanatic as you are for your category. Go get in conversation with them and you might be surprised how much they love to listen.

You might think that I’m overly passionate about linking your brand with an influencer, but the truth is, I’m more passionate about marketing strategy, and exploring creative ways to help you market your brand so that you can reach your target audience in the most cost effective way possible.