When you’re producing a podcast wouldn’t you like to know…

…who’s in the audience? Not just basic demographics, but the interesting facts and qualities that directly relate to your objectives?

…what your audience really thinks about your show? Not just reviews and social media chatter, but also the thoughts from among the majority whom you won’t hear from in those venues?

…how the podcast impacts their opinion of your brand? Whether your podcast is content marketing, brand marketing or creative expression, don’t you want to know the result of your investment?

Having audience data in hand allows you to measure, analyze and optimize your podcast to ensure it’s meeting your objectives.  And no matter why you’re making a podcast, you should have at least one key objective. But because podcasts don’t carry all the same signals that other digital media platforms do – even if way too often you’re left relying on, and hoping you can trust, the platform’s own first-party data – many marketers assume they can’t get objective audience and performance metrics. This can lead to guess-work and inferred connections.

You don’t need to wave a magic wand to get objective and reliable audience metrics for nearly any podcast. sing survey methods this data can be customized to your specific needs and objectives. Instead of settling for what might be available in expensive third-party datasets, you can define specific insights. 

Want to know their favorite brand of chocolate? How many vacations they’ll take this year? Their decision-making power at work? If they use a VPN or anti-virus software? Sure! And that just scratches the surface.

Know Your Audience, Grow Your Audience

You’re making a podcast for someone – many someones, actually – and you should know who they are. Defining the target audience frames all your efforts: the content, the marketing and the outcomes. Don’t you want to know if, and how well, you’re hitting the mark? 

Red Hat designed Command Line Heroes to meet the needs of a very exacting audience: software developers and system administrators. They used research, including one-on-one interviews, to inform the content. But the days of “build it and they will come” are over for podcasts, if they ever actually existed. Making a show for a specific audience group doesn’t guarantee they’ll listen 

The Signal Hill Insights team designed an audience survey to test if Command Line Heroes was reaching the target. 

The answer? Yes. 6-in-10 said they were developers or system administrators. 

What about the other 40% of listeners? The vast majority said they were in IT, meaning they worked for the kind of organizations where the brand wanted to build awareness, affinity and loyalty. 

This kind of valuable audience insight provides both verification and a roadmap. Verifying the audience not only proves out success, it shows where to double-down on audience development efforts. At the same time, by seeing what other types of audiences are listening, you get directions for additional growth that wouldn’t have been obvious otherwise. 

Audience Surveys Are Your Barometer of Growth or Decline

Podcasts are opt-in, not spray-and-pray. Consumers choose to tune in, and only stay tuned in if the show meets their needs, whether that’s laughing, escaping, learning something new, or upping their game. 

Smart producers pay attention to metrics like subscriptions and follows, downloads, unique listens and views, and completion rates to monitor how individual episodes are performing, and the overall health of a podcast. But these can be trailing indicators, even if you’re checking in every day. 

What this means is that if you see that listen- or view-through going down, those are minutes of attention you’ll never get back. If downloads, listens or views are trailing off, you’re seeing the effect of an audience you’ve already lost. 

In addition to these table-stakes measures, you also want to look for leading indicators – signals that tell you what’s working and not working before they have a significant impact.

Surveying your audience gives you a barometer, measuring the air pressure of their sentiment before it turns into sunny skies or storms. Putting aside major changes or some catastrophic event, discontent with a podcast doesn’t amass all at once. Instead, it tends to seep in, both for the individual listener and the audience as a whole.

When podcast consumers stop listening to a podcast, the most common reason they cite is that they, “lost interest in the show.” The third most cited reason is “repetitive or stale content” (Sounds Profitable, The Podcast Landscape 2024). These are causes that take their toll over time, not right away. 

I suspect a lot of people’s behavior is similar to mine. I’ll stick with a show for a while even if I’m gradually getting tired of it, or think it’s growing stale, often hoping maybe it’ll snap out of the lull. But eventually the balance tips, and I miss one episode, then another, and another. I’ve become a former listener.

Listens, views and downloads will certainly tell you when that final sign-off has occurred. A survey gives you the opportunity to see it coming, find out what elements are still winning, or have run their course. Then, you can optimize before there’s any need to recover. 

Know How Podcasts Deliver for Your Brand

When you’re a marketer creating a branded podcast it should be obvious that you want to measure its impact on brand objectives. But if you’re a podcast network, or even just producing one show, your podcast still represents your brand. And you should know the health of that brand.

We use survey methods to get at the heart of how a podcast moves the needle in audience perception. Does the podcast improve awareness? Familiarity? Or even consideration? Critically, you want to know how your brand’s association with the content itself makes listeners and viewers feel about it. Does it make them feel more favorable?

This isn’t reading tea leaves, like trying to infer a connection between download or view numbers and ROI. This is measuring an actual return for your brand’s health, and how the podcast moves hearts and minds. 

Keep in mind: every listener and viewer is a prospect. Audience research takes you closer to making them a customer.

Remember those Command Line Heroes listeners? The show delivered a 29% lift in affinity for Red Hat among that audience compared to a similar group of IT workers who didn’t hear the show.  That’s a measurable return. MEASURABLE.

If you have questions about your audience or want objective audience or performance metrics, book a call to learn how to put these measures to work for you. No magic required.