At Signal Hill Insights we’re proud to have just released our second annual Benchmark Report: Branded Podcasts. It’s the only report of its kind, analyzing survey responses from more than 15,000 podcast listeners, offering their opinion on branded podcast episodes, as well as how the podcast shaped how they feel about the brands behind them. 

Before I dive into some of what we’ve learned, I want to talk more about the very nature of benchmarks, and explain why we take a unique approach.

Thinking Critically About Benchmarks

I’m actually of two minds about marketing performance benchmarks. On one hand, you can’t deny their value in providing a point of comparison for understanding how well a campaign performed. When we present podcasters and advertisers with a brand lift result, we often get asked, “is that good?” Benchmarks give us a yardstick for sizing up that answer.

On the other hand, benchmarks can be a rough, imprecise instrument. In order to achieve the critical mass of data to be reliable, they’re often based on averages across a wide variety of ad types, industry verticals, and sizes and types of brands, even if all the results come from the same channel, like podcasts. 

To illustrate, let’s take a metric like brand awareness. When a large, ubiquitous brand like Coke runs a podcast ad campaign, we can’t expect it to have much impact on awareness of the brand, because nearly everyone who hears the ad already knows it well. A new or emerging brand, however, can reap significant gains in boosting an upper funnel measure like awareness. 

Trying to compare Coke’s awareness lift scores to benchmarks that are strongly influenced by emerging brands is just not fair. A Coke campaign isn’t a failure if it can’t meet such a benchmark. A more meaningful benchmark in that case might be brand favorability. Context is everything.

Attention, Halo Effect and Listener Recommendations

All that said, our Benchmark Report delivers on what the title promises. It contains the “what,” revealing benchmarks on key objectives most brands have for their podcasts. 

For instance, 61% of the branded podcast listeners we’ve surveyed say the episode they just listened to made them feel somewhat or much more favorable toward the brand. We call that the “halo effect,” because the brand is basking in the glow of credit for providing content the listener enjoyed. As such, it gives brands a critical performance benchmark for their podcast.  

We also found that after hearing an episode, 75% of listeners agreed that it kept their attention for the entire time, while 63% of listeners say they would probably or definitely recommend the podcast. 

On their own, these stats are useful for brands evaluating their podcast’s performance against other shows, or for those brands looking to understand the potential benefits of producing one. But they’re not enough. 

These results become tremendously more useful when we explain the “why” and “how,” not just the “what.” 

The “Why” Behind the Benchmarks

In this year’s Benchmark report, we dive into why branded podcasts often perform so well on these metrics. Our analyses show that a branded podcast generates return on investment when it delivers value to the listener. Listeners have motivations and needs for listening to podcasts. When a show effectively meets them, then it’s also likely to result in that ROI. 

So, in this report we identify the key drivers for each benchmark metric – the qualities that real listeners assign to podcasts that hold their attention, improve their opinion of the brand and move them to recommend it to others. Looking at the first objective, when listeners said a podcast heldtheir attention for an entire episode, they also are likely to agree, “I was interested in the topics covered in the podcast.” and, “the podcast was entertaining.” This may sound like common sense, but it’s important to have it verified by evidence, not only intuition. 

“How” To Achieve Benchmark Level Performance

Knowing that you need to make an interesting and entertaining podcast is useful, but it raises the question, “how do you do that?” That’s the “how” we cover in the report.

Spoiler alert: there’s no magic formula or one simple trick to making an interesting and entertaining podcast. Anyone who tells you otherwise probably also has a bridge to sell. 

In fact, these qualities are subjective. The crucial variable is the audience. A podcast is not a broadcast. No podcast is for everyone – your branded podcast should be for someone in particular, and others just like them. Knowing who they are, and understanding what they want and need from your podcast is the foundation for creating the show they’ll find engaging, will value, and endorse.

Our latest Benchmark report shares tips on how to identify your audience’s needs, illustrated through the case study of one podcast that really gets this right. To make things even more concrete, we share verbatim listener feedback on three other successful real-world branded podcasts, giving you some rich insights into what it is about these shows that exactly fits the bill.