Starting a podcast is a big challenge and keeping it attractive for the audience is even harder. This is why this blog will guide you step by step to achieve your goal. Fasten your seat belt, we are about to address the most important step of your journey: finding your topic and your target audience!
The topic
If you read this post, it is probably because you are willing to start podcasting and therefore, I assume that your idea is already pretty much in your mind and that it has been approved by your marketing team. But, have you thought about everything?
To make it easier, I have prepared a check list that will tell you right away whether your subject is good or not. I am not here to judge you but those are the questions the company I work with asked itself while they were launching our podcast channel. If a similar show already exists, you will have to compete against one ore more podcasts and this may be hard if the others already have an audience… Also, if your subject is too diverse or too niche, you might never get the community needed to get people to follow you on a regular basis. And, most importantly, it has to fit your companies’ goals and you have to be aware of the work it represents. Somebody will have to manage the channel, push it on social medias, create visuals…
Did the check list help? I really hope so… Let’s sum up a little bit: the field of activity and niche must be quite specific and unique. Also, the subject will have to be approached creatively. You should obviously choose a topic that your company needs to talk about and have a perfect command of. Before you start a topic, you need to make sure that you can create an abundance of content. You should make a list of topics for at least 30 episodes. Finally, you should search iTunes for podcasts comparable to the one you plan to create, review customer reviews and check the number of followers on their social networks. By analyzing your competitors, you’ll be able to tell whether or not your topic has potential.
The target audience
As I’m talking to companies in this blog, the target audience is usually clear since it should be your customers. However, there are some interesting figures for companies about podcast enthusiasts. Here are interesting figures taken from “The Podcast Trend Report 2019” that shows the results of a survey sent to 1,203 people who are active in various podcast communities. First interesting thing is that 82.4% of podcast enthusiasts listen to podcast during more than 7 hours a week. Then, 59% of respondents say they spend more time listening to podcasts than they spend on social media. Furthermore, women are less interested in business podcast than men. Also, the age of the average podcasts listeners is around 35 years old. Finally, the countries that have the most podcasts enthusiasts are (in descending order): South Korea, Spain, Ireland, Sweden, United States, Italy, Canada, Australia, France, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom. (source: Statista, 2019) These numbers are indications and they should orientate your marketing strategy. If you were going to target only Swiss people, forget it, this is not a country where podcasts are very popular unfortunately.
Here is what I had to say for the subject and the target audience. I will launch a new post next Wednesday, same time to keep going in the creation of a successful podcast show. Thanks for reading, sound on!
