"Let's be realistic, let's ask for the impossible." "Expect the best, plan for the worst and be prepared to be surprised." Beyond any positivism or negativism, expectations are always the order of the day when it comes to starting new projects. So, if you have already decided to create your own podcast and you want to know what to expect in terms of audience, here we tell you.
This answer, rather than black and white, is made up of shades of gray. Broadly speaking, there are three key factors that determine how many listeners will come to your new show.
🙏🏼 The divine trinity of the podcast audience
- Host
Who will be the main voice of your podcast? Beyond the format - whether it's a roundtable, a monologue, a highly narrative program or a documentary - the person who guides the conversation, narrates what's going on and runs the show for the audience has a profound effect on the number of listeners you might expect.
When given a choice, we could classify podcast hosts into two broad categories:
Are you going to go for someone who doesn't have any kind of established community to be the face of your podcast? This is a very valid option. However, it is important to keep in mind that, even if it is an expert, with a melodious and powerful voice or with very pleasant approaches to the topics to be discussed, the fact that the host has no previous recognition is something that usually greatly affects how many listeners you are going to have initially.
- Non-famous people
To put it another way: if podcasting were a game of high-scoring, picking a host who is not famous or influencer would not subtract any points, but it would not add anything either.
- Famous people
If choosing a host that already has a reputation and its own community is an option, don't hesitate to take it. When you have an audience of your own, with a significant number of followers, there is already an advantage: you are already scoring points: in just three months, a relatively short period of time, you could expect to collect 500,000 or 600,000 downloads, depending on the influence of the person in question.
Of course, we can't guarantee an exact number, but we can guarantee that the effect is directly proportional: the more previous audience you have who is going to be hostthe more audience will reach your podcast.
Now, the point is not to be famous at any cost. Having influence, in this sense, is relevant when that influence is the product of the thoughts, positions and deeds of the host. In other words: if you want to have someone with fame as the face of your show, make sure people follow you for what you say and not how you look.
A success story? Alejandra Azcárate's podcastfor example. In a very short time, less than six months, it managed to have a million listeners. Why? Among other factors, because she is a person of influence who, normally, could gather a thousand or two thousand people in her lives of Instagram. After having made a whole batch of this type of content, and after verifying that people were following it, listening to it and paying attention to its content, she jumped into the water to create her own program.
- Subject
The question is not to choose a topic because it is more or less trendy, popular or crowded. The main thing and the golden rule is: you bet to talk about a subject in which you more value can contribute, either as a company or as a personal brand. Where they can provide the most quality material, that's where.
Now, keeping that golden rule in mind, it is also good to have a clear picture: the topic you are going to talk about, the one you can contribute the most to, does influence how many listeners will come to the podcast. Now, again, the important thing is also the quality of listeners, not just the quantity. It's no use if a trending topic gets you 400 downloads, if when you develop the episode the quality is not the best and everyone ends up running away from the content.
In general terms, we could say that some topics are more listened to and sought after than others: some are very broad and collective, while others are much more niche and segmented.
In fact, according to the Encuesta pod, a study to understand the behavior of podcast audiences in Spanish, some of the most trending topics for podcasts are comedy, horror, suspense, entertainment, entertainment, current affairs, society and culture, while topics such as business, sustainability, technology or history tend to be less frequented. Shows in the first category usually have almost three times as many listeners as those in the second.
Topics such as entertainment or current affairs, for example, in addition to having more audience organically, are also nourished by Internet search engines: it is much easier and more likely to position yourself and gain listeners with a content analyzing a trend such as Shakira's latest song versus achieving Google search results for energy sustainability.
Even so, our advice remains the same: do not force the theme of your podcast. Don't be fooled: the important thing is not only that they talk about your show, the important thing is that they talk well about it.
- Dissemination channels and investment in advertising
What are you going to leverage to make your podcast grow? Here the how is extremely important: it is not the same to produce a podcast that is part of a business strategy with solid social networks, a strong marketing bet and a strong investment in advertising to enhance those channels, than to produce a show for a brand without networks, mailing or other channels that help spread your content once it has been published.
This whole scenario also directly influences the number of listeners that can be expected for the content. Again, obviously, there is a directly proportional relationship here: the more channels we have, and the stronger and larger they are, the greater the reach and the greater the volume of audience we can expect.
📈 Always keep growing
From Naranja Media we have witnessed many times how those three factors we have just mentioned have a very powerful influence on the amount of listeners that a podcast can expect and, indeed, receives. Therefore, we have also been able to show what are the minimum standards of listeners that great podcasts can achieve.
Usually, our shows are very focused on thematic categories that are not the most massive: business, technology, sustainability and innovation, for example. That's why, in those cases, our goal is to achieve one thousand downloads and one thousand listeners during the first two months of a podcast's life on the air. Going forward, our goal is to achieve sustained growth in the number of listeners over the next year: between 15% and 25% of monthly growth in terms of audience.
While this is the general picture you can expect in terms of listeners and audience for your podcast, we prefer to reiterate once again: quality over quantity. Factors such as episode retention are as important as the number of people listening to the content.
It's useless to have a celebrity at the top, talking about a trending topic, with a good financial muscle for the guideline if, after all those goals and the large number of listeners to wait, the content is empty and shines for its non-existent soul. There, you definitely lose the game.