I hear folks in the podcast industry – from podcasters and publishers to advertisers and buyers – say all the time that they’re “data driven.” I don’t doubt this to be true, but what I think they really mean to say is that they’re “research driven.” 

Data isn’t just there. It needs to be gathered, sorted and made useful. And while you can gather fruits and vegetables from a garden, that can’t happen if you don’t first plant seeds and cultivate. 

Research is that process of cultivating data. But it’s not just cultivation. It’s framing and putting data the and the resulting insights to use. That use is where you get your return, your ROI. Data doesn’t drive ROI – research does.

So, here are just four (out of many) ways that research drives real return in podcasting.

1. Find Whitespace in the Marketplace

For every celebrity-driven podcast that tops the charts and gets press coverage, there are dozens, maybe even hundreds, that have joined the podfade club over the last decade. This includes many announced with breathless, sometimes royal or presidential, fanfare. While on paper it seems like a sure-fire formula to give a famous or infamous celebrity a podcast, the truth is that “build it and they will come,” has never been true for podcasting. 

Not every celeb has the specific mix of talent and perseverance demanded by the medium, not every fanbase is ready to commit hours of attention every month, and not every conversation between famous people is interesting or worth the time. Even beyond that, absent something really special, launching another me-too, “listen to me talk with all my interesting famous friends,” show into an already crowded market is really just playing darts blindfolded.

The same basic truths go for any genre of podcast, from true crime and business to sports, and especially, comedy. 

But it doesn’t need to be so risky.

Audience research empowers you to find what audiences and niches are well served by podcasts. And, crucially, this reveals the whitespace, where there’s a ready audience that hasn’t yet been offered a show that hits the mark. That’s the place where podcast innovation is sparked.

Because podcasting has a long, long tail, it’s not enough to look at the top charts, even drilling down into individual categories and genres. You need to look beyond simple genres – which are never really accurate or specific enough – and take an audience-centric approach.

The Signal Hill Insights team surveys more than 20,000 podcast consumers in North America annually specifically to learn what they watch or listen to, how and why they consume podcasts, along with their demographics and consumer behaviours. This information gives us a map to the densely populated content areas, revealing the empty green fields to plant your beautiful podcast garden.

The ROI on whitespace research: 

• Reduce the risk in content development;
• Focus your investment and efforts;
• Increase your chance of success in the marketplace. 

2. Test Your Podcast Concept and Content

Let’s say you have a well-refined concept and target audience, and you’ve done the market research that shows a clearly-defined opportunity. Is it now time to jump into production?

Hold on there. I’d advise taking a moment to understand if the idea and content resonates with actual audiences. 

In my experience, too many podcasts are launched based upon gut, and too few based on research. Often, the gut belongs to smart, successful content executives. But confirmation bias tends to overemphasize the hits in the record, obscuring the misses. 

Testing a trailer, assets, or even an actual pilot episode will give you real-world feedback about the appeal of the host, theme and topics, how much audiences value the offering, and, especially, how the podcast compares to others in their queue. Importantly, you’ll also learn what the audience likes and dislike about the show, and how likely it is that they’ll actually come back to listen when it launches.

While this all sounds straightforward enough, the devil is in the details. A successful podcast isn’t made for everyone, it’s made for someone (and many someones). That’s why it’s insufficient to test your podcast with a general, nationally representative sample audience. 

Instead, it’s absolutely critical to test your podcast with your target audience, people whose demographics and content preferences align with who you’re hoping to serve. When the Signal Hill Insights team designs a podcast test, it all starts with carefully defining that target audience, leaning on our industry-leading research database.

It’s also important to be sure your test is tailored to your content and engineered for insight. One size simply does not fit all. A sports fan is looking for something different than a true crime fan, and the business podcast listener has distinct needs. You want to be sure you’re not accidentally asking questions that will just get the answer you hope for, rather than delivering more objective feedback.

Plus, a successful audience test provides evidence and bona fides to give guidance and confidence to advertisers ahead of launch.

The ROI on podcast concept and content research: 

• Save money by finding the hits and misses before you go to market;
• Optimize your content with episode #1 not episode #100;
• Obtain proof of appeal to attract advertisers pre-launch.

3. Discover and highlight valuable audiences

Whether you’re a publisher or advertiser, there is simply no substitute for knowing your audience as deeply as possible. 

When it comes to selling ads, the advantage goes to the podcasts and networks that can deliver insights beyond the basic demographics offered in most hosting dashboards. You want to paint a detailed picture of who these listeners and viewers are, their habits, their likes, and why they buy. 

We work with Triton Digital to conduct the survey and audience analysis behind Demos+, which provides participating publishers with deep audience insights on individual podcasts, well into the long tail. When an advertiser wants to address moms, Demos+ helps grow that consideration set beyond just kids & family shows, because moms aren’t single minded – a lot also like true crime and history. 

Advertisers can also leverage this data in the Demos+ dashboard, using audience profiles to surface the shows that strongly over-index for who they want to reach, even if the show isn’t on the charts. As Sounds Profitable’s Tom Webster told a SiriusXM webinar, “The long tail audiences are often more engaged, not less. That’s not a weakness of scale—that’s the power of precision.”

The Signal Hill Insights team also works with podcasters and publishers on customized audience research to richly illustrate the value of their audiences. We worked with American Public Media to complement the genre intelligence in Sounds Profitable’s “The Business Podcast Consumer” with a tailored study that ended up showing how the Marketplace audience is uniquely engaged and inclined to take action when they hear a podcast ad.

The ROI on podcast audience research: 

• Obtain a detailed profile of your podcast listeners and viewers;
• Find shows that precisely meet advertisers’ targets;
• Prove out a podcast’s or network’s unique offering in the marketplace;

4. Demonstrate success, even on difficult-to-measure platforms

What does podcasting success look like? 

A place toward the top of the charts?

Millions of downloads or views?

Sure, nobody would give an outright, “no,” to these. But they’re also now being called “vanity metrics,” because they emphasize volume over impact.  

Real success has more to do with how an audience responds, and if they keep coming back, not just whether they “like and subscribe.”

While our podcast brand lift studies uncover how well ads drive metrics like awareness, consideration or purchase intent, we also dig into what is often the most overlooked influence: the appeal of the podcast itself.  Never forget that listeners and viewers come for the podcast, and the host. Only because of that are they willing to stay for the ads. And their love for the show and personalities often casts a halo on the brands supporting the content, which we can measure.

Libsyn called on the Signal Hill Insights team to get these insights for the LOL Podcast, a Gen-Z video podcast with a large following on YouTube. They wanted to understand how this show helped a well-known national quick-service pizza chain make headway with this young audience, on a platform walled off from digital performance tools like attribution.

Along with strong lifts in purchase intent and awareness of the chain’s specialty pizzas, we found that the Gen-Z viewers’ love for the LOL Podcast drove even greater dividends for the advertiser: 81% said the sponsorship made them feel more favorable toward the brand.

These are outcomes that can’t be measured in the data of views or even clicks. They require research, and insight.

The ROI of demonstrating brand lift and content success: 

• Learn how podcasts ads actually influence audiences;
• Uncover the hidden connection between ad effectiveness, podcasts and their hosts;
• Drive renewals.