A friend of mine has a small business for riders and she asked me about what equestrian publications and podcasts I’m consuming regularly because she’d like to start advertising.
If you have an equestrian business and you’ve done advertising, I’d love to help her narrow in on publications or podcasts that she should consider. Please share if you’ve had a great experience with any specific sites, publications, or podcasts as an advertiser. Thank you!
Who does she want as her customers? She can develop an informal, brief profile.
Do they show and how much, how often do they ride, what disciplines does she want to focus on, what kind of horses do they have (including general age range of horses – younger and actively in ongoing training, or older mature horses who know their job).
And especially: How much money do her hoped-for prospective horses spend on their horses in a month, and where can they most likely be found. High-end board barns vs. DIY’ers vs. backyard horse keepers.
Things like that. It can’t be just anyone with a horse! 
That tends to end up in a scattered, less successful bid for attention to her product.
Her ‘customer profile’ is something to ask each podcast or publication: Who is their primary target audience, and how well does it match her preferred profile?
Of course, have conversations (electronically or directly) with the outlets she is considering. She should not assume that she knows their audience just based on their content. She might learn some interesting and even surprising things about their strategy that aren’t obvious by just the content.
Good luck to her! 
my daughter has a riding summer camp program she ran for about five years, each rider was given a tee shirt that promoted the program that had to worn while attending the camp. The shirt had the program’s contact info on it. The kids basically became walking adverting billboard for the program.
All sessions were fully booked with waiting lists
So smart! Thank you!
the color of the shirts were changed each year, she designed shirt and had a local company produce them for her
I work in growth marketing, focusing on ROI+ growth for a wide range of businesses. From tiny ecomm stores and pre-seed startups to 7 figure+ MRR, paid ads are by far a better bet than any type of podcast, influencer marketing, or more traditional TV/magazine/etc. Even just a few hundred spent on Facebook and Instagram ads will go so much farther than the type of podcast or influencer partnership you could get for the same amount, and that is of course amplified as your budget increases.
Podcasts & influencer marketing CAN work really well as a supplement to paid ads on Meta, Google, etc, but they tend to be much spikier channels - ie, to get one really good result you need to try 10, in hopes that that one will cover the cost of the 9 that didn’t work out.
The good news is horse products are of course niche and expensive, which is a fantastic sweet spot for paid social ads, especially at lower budgets. It’s actually much easier for the algorithm to identify potential buyers for something so narrow than for something with a huge market like, say, skincare.
Feel free to PM me - I love thinking about this stuff, and I’m happy to talk to your friend and give her some more specific ideas!
Director of media strategy for a $1B multinational here. Will absolutely echo @spottedprincess that paid social ads are the way to go.
Careful targeting and setting the right audience parameters, and good creative, can make a small investment go a very, very long way.
Be wary of paid search–its effectiveness is dropping sharply with the rise of generative AI search results and LLMs.
We are a landscape design and install company. We had no luck with paid social - what few leads were generated never replied to inquiries and we had zero ROI.
What did work was yard signs and referrals. Almost 2/3 of our business comes word of mouth, 1/3 from yard signs we put up in gardens we are working on, and a tiny percentage from Houzz or Google. Of course this works for us because we have a defined geographic range - your friend’s business may not operate that way.
It is a thought to get ‘sponsorship’ signs up in trainer barns, as many businesses do these days. Kind of the equivalent of a yard sign.
Whatever the product, maybe see if it is possible to do demos at shows. Definitely get into the vendor space with a table and display. It can be very effective if people can contact and see the product working, in person.
@zanthoria, local businesses do tend to be harder to market with paid social IMO - your potential customer base is much more limited, so the algorithms don’t have as much opportunity to learn/optimize and take a lot longer to give you good results. I have seen ways around this – lookalike audiences from existing customers lists that give the algo a headstart on learnings, hyper specific creative messaging, experimenting with other platforms (Nextdoor for ex I’ve seen be fairly effective for similar businesses), very detailed lead qualification forms, etc. But generally I’ve seen it takes a lot more money and/or effort to get good results for businesses limited to a particular geographical area.
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