FRAMEWORK FOR DELIVERING STRATEGIC PODCAST INSIGHTS
Recent studies show that branded podcasts increase brand perception by 85%. The channel is uniquely designed to shift the focus toward storytelling and content creation rather than direct promotion, aligning with the “Rule of 7” in marketing—where customers need to engage with a brand seven times before converting.
So Why Do Branded Podcasts Work?
Brands can reach a wider audience by sharing podcast episodes on their brand channels—LinkedIn, Twitter, Email, Communities (etc.). The content repurposed from the podcast allows you to develop video clips, short-form series-level content, text-based content, graphics, (shall I continue?) from one source: the full podcast episode. (Yes, both video/audio.)
The goal of content marketing for brand awareness? Create meaningful, deeper connections with your audience, not promoting a product or service.
When it comes to podcasting, the balance lies in the truths of what makes content marketing great; it’s about educating your audience on problems that tie back to opportunities (aka the problem you solve).
The podcast goal should never be to talk about a product or service. BORING.
Overcoming Challenges in Demand Generation
Brands historically hesitate to use podcasts for lead generation because of the need for attribution tools – when you think of brand building, the conversation of ROI becomes an obstacle.
As supported by industry leaders, Tom Webster (Sounds Profitable) and Fatima Zaidi (Quill and Co-Host) shared the story of Ford creating an ad showing support for women in STEM–and why it worked.
“This isn’t just about selling cars; it’s about selling possibility.”
Showing how Ford is backed by smart, capable people transforms consumer perceptions. And really, that’s the mark of great brand storytelling—you want to be part of the story.
So, instead of focusing on demand generation as the end-all-be-all, we suggest a more holistic approach to understanding success and intent signals. While looking at the brand’s organic growth as a key indicator of the podcast’s success.
Your Audience Matters
Understanding your audience is necessary for success (says every marketer, ever). Providing value creates brand loyalty. It’s not about chasing a million listeners in the first month—just as radio wouldn’t expect such numbers. Or any other channel, from the jump.
It’s about offering quality content that meets your audience’s needs. That content doesn’t just live on the feed; it lives in all the places you distribute it.
The Framework for Measuring Success
With that backdrop in mind, we’re sharing our framework for measuring the success of our podcasts for our B2B clients. The first question is, ‘What’s the story you want to tell about this effort?” That informs where we focus. The rest is the details.
Understanding the Dual Role of Podcasts
Podcasts serve two critical roles: (1) both a channel (the feed) for reaching your target audience and a form of (2) content to drive engagement. Recognizing this dual purpose allows you to evaluate a podcast’s effectiveness more comprehensively. It can never just be measured by downloads when you recognize that your podcast is a channel and the episode is long-form content. And like every plan for long-form content, you have to plan with distribution in mind.
Key Questions to Consider:
- Are we treating the podcast as a content piece or leveraging it as a strategic channel?
- How do you currently measure success for a piece of content?
- What business objectives are we aligning the podcast with? (in other words, what’s the outcome?)
Aligning Podcast Strategy with Business Goals
For a podcast (like a content channel) to be effective, there must be a broader business strategy behind it. This means understanding your company’s goals, the audience’s needs, and how the podcast can bridge the two.
Key Questions to Consider:
- What are the primary business objectives this program can support?
- Who is the target audience, and what are their specific pain points?
- Where in our marketing funnel does this fit (or should it fit?)
- What is our content distribution plan (and who owns the activation)?
Evaluating and Optimizing Podcast Performance
To ensure that a podcast delivers value, you have to evaluate channel and content-level performance (going back to the duality of the podcast). This involves examining audience growth, engagement, conversion, content relevance, and impact metrics.
Key Questions to Ask:
- What metrics are we using to measure the podcast’s success at the channel level?
- How are we assessing the effectiveness of the podcast content itself (e.g., episode consi, listener feedback)?
- How are we activating the content from the feed? (i.e. what got shared from this episode (and where?)
Continuous Improvement through Feedback and Iteration
Just like any creative endeavor, a successful podcast strategy is not static. It requires continuous improvement, driven by feedback and a willingness to experiment with new formats, topics, and distribution methods.
Key Questions to Ask:
- How regularly are we collecting and analyzing listener feedback?
- What experiments or iterations have we tried recently to improve podcast performance?
- How are we adjusting our podcast strategy based on the insights we gain?
Leveraging Podcasts for Broader Content Strategy
At this point, hopefully, you’re clear that a podcast should not exist in isolation. In fact it should be developed as cornerstone content integrated into the broader content strategy, providing a foundation for content across other channels and helping to amplify the brand’s message.
Key Questions to Consider:
- How are we repurposing podcast content across other channels to maximize reach?
- What role does the podcast play in our overall content strategy?
- Are there opportunities to align podcast topics with other marketing initiatives?
Distinguishing Funnels
- Podcast-Specific Funnel: Focuses on reach > engagement > conversion within the podcast channel (the feed) itself.
- Brand Marketing Funnel: Understand where the podcast fits within their overall strategy—whether it’s at the top (awareness), middle (consideration), or bottom (conversion) of the funnel. It will likely never be at the bottom of the funnel because you are educating on product/ service at that stage, and your show isn’t for that.
TLDR; For those looking for a quick framework to understand how your show is performing, this is the 3-question framework to help you understand the success of your channel (the podcast feed) and the content (the episodes combined with the distribution plan)
We’d recommend looking at this quarterly with a quick check-in monthly to see how things are trending.
1. Are We Growing?
Report on TOTAL Reach: Track impressions, downloads, and new listeners, as well as new audiences, across all channels where the content is distributed. If a video clip created from the podcast is on LinkedIn, you want to track the totals to understand the full impact.
Engagement: Measure listener retention, social interactions, and completion rates. Taking that same video clip example, you can look on LinkedIn to see how much time your audience spent on the video job titles of those viewing. That data needs to be added to the story around the success of the podcast content – even though that’s activity off the feed.
Subscribers: Monitor the growth of subscribers across platforms (Spotify, YouTube, Apple). You want to see your reach growing right along with subscribers. Going back to our LinkedIn video clip example, are you seeing brand follower growth?
Bottom line: What channels are performing best for our content created from the show? How can we continue to think of the ‘audience first’ and how we add value to our audience on the specific channels?
2. What Content is Performing?
Episode Performance: Identify which episodes resonate most based on plays, downloads, and consumption rates. If consumption is consistently strong but downloads plateau, this signals a marketing opportunity to increase show awareness (aka reach). High consumption rates indicate that our content is resonating once they find it, allowing us to determine if there is a marketing opportunity for growth.
Platform-Specific Data: Leverage platform-specific metrics, like Apple Podcasts’ consumption data, to refine content planning and identify which topics or formats drive the most engagement. Our standard is 70% consumption on average. This metric allows us to know that the content we’re creating resonates.
Bottom line: You have to know what % of your show people are listening to to make editorial decisions. Aka, earn your audience’s attention.
3. What Topics/Messages Are We Getting Out?
Content Distribution: Assess how effectively podcast messages align with broader marketing efforts. Before you plan the content for the show, ask what messages we want our audience to repeat about our brand. That’s the guiding question for defining your content plan for the podcast.
That answer will help you evaluate your show’s effectiveness under bullet 2.
Bottom line: Does the content we’re creating on the feed serve the larger brand narrative?
