Let’s say 10 businesses call you today because they want to advertise on your podcast. All of them are interested in running ads for multiple months during different times of the year. They want to know what availability you have on your shows and they also want to make sure you’re not running any ads for their competitors at the same time. How on earth would you figure that out?
Oops, times up! They needed an answer 30 minutes ago. This was a missed opportunity.
It’s time to start treating your podcast as a business. And every smart business knows how much inventory they have at any given time.
Megaphone’s inventory tab allows you to quickly see what inventory is available and what inventory is already sold at any given moment. Now, getting a quick answer for advertisers is just a couple of clicks away.
This video shows you how the inventory feature on Megaphone works.
Finding Your Inventory
When you first click on the inventory page, you’re not going to see very much. That’s because you need to go to the left and select a podcast first. If you click a podcast and you still don’t see anything- then you have forgotten the most important step.
Creating Draft Episodes
IMPORTANT: You can not see any inventory if you have not created draft episodes which tells Megaphone how much inventory you’ve created for your podcast. Makes sense, right? Without draft episodes, Megaphone has no idea how many episodes you’re planning to release in the future and how many ad spots you’re planning to include in each episode. Please refer to the video above to see how to create draft episodes in the podcasts section of Megaphone.
We recommend you schedule draft episodes one year in advance. That doesn’t mean you need to know the content for those episodes, it just means your planning in advance, you know that you’re going to release an episode on a specific day and you also know how many ads spots you’re going to create in each episode. Many advertisers plan their campaigns months in advance, so this is a very important step.
Determining What Inventory is Available
Once you’ve scheduled your draft episodes, you’ll be able to easily see how many ads spots are available, and how many you still need to be sold. Megaphone’s inventory tab only focuses on campaigns, it does not show you what MTM (Megaphone Targeted Marketplace) ads are running and what promos have been scheduled.
