One of the most overlooked weapons in any marketing arsenal just may be the podcast. If done right, a quality podcast can allow any size business to generate traffic and establish their brand as a local and national authority. The challenge continues to be how to develop an effective enough one to drive that traffic and boost authority and awareness. Some recently published data from Improvepodcast, just may offer the insights you need to determine what is working and what is not. The following is taken from their recently published data:
- Age – the largest age group of listeners, is between 12-35 years old (49%) also in this group listenership is growing the fastest. In the age group between 35-54 years old, 40% listens to podcasts regularly.
- Education – 60% of regular podcast listeners have a 4-year college degree, postgraduate degree, or advanced degree.
- Employment – 80% of regular monthly podcasts listeners are students, full-time, or part-time employees.
- Household income – the largest group from an income perspective, are listeners in households with annual income between $100k-150k (17%). And total listenership in households with annual income above $75k is 41%.
- Despite having various levels of avid fans, all the main podcasts genres have a solid listenership base, primarily in the range of 50-60 million total fans. Podcast hosts and content creators have a big role to play when working on listener engagement for its own show.
- A high diversity of shows allows every listener to find a show corresponding to their interests. Popularity also impacts the entire industry as users who start listening become quickly engaged and listen to more shows to add to their listening applications.
- Nielsen’s Marketer’s Guide to Podcasting trends tells us which categories of products are mostly consumed during the year. This is a great way to understand a better profile of your audience and create both better content and better-targeted ads.
- Planned and built-in content quality – great content quality can be designed and improved upon by gathering data, understanding your audience, and having a good long term content plan built with an end goal in mind. Most valuable podcast listeners will continue to look for high-value shows. Production of content should take this into account and have long term plans on how to plan for value.
- Audio quality is equally important – many listeners focus solely on their podcast so providing the best sound quality is extremely important as this is the only sense a podcast can be experienced. But many people also listen to podcasts in noisy environments – in cars, during a walk, at the gym, in public transportation. It is very important to provide them with great experience and pure sound quality. Without good audio, they can easily switch to music streaming.
- Big brands use the marketing mix to reach all clients. In the past years’ brands have developed approaches and well-reached clients through online channels like:
- Email marketing
- Display/banner ads
- Video ads
However, there has been no medium allowing to deliver in high volume online audio ads. Podcasts are now filling this gap, and brands will want to include these additional channels to reach their clients.
Podcast advertising will be important to brands because:
- The nature of listeners – young, well educated and affluent
- Another source for collecting data, this time for a very valuable audience
- Currently, podcasts are delivering content to niche audiences which will improve ads targeting and have a positive impact on return on investment
Businesses will start to leverage high-quality podcast content to target niche audiences efficiently.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
SearchPro Systems
2024