5 Reasons Why Now is the Best Time to Start a Podcast

It seems like podcasts are being launched left and right these days, with a variety of journalists, brands, influencers, coaches, and everyone in between hosting podcasts on every topic under the sun.?

As of July 28th, 2021, there were 2.9 million podcasts available on Spotify alone, a staggering increase of 544% since 2009, when there were only 450 thousand available via the streaming platform. In April of 2018, Apple Podcasts featured more than 525 thousand active podcasts, which has jumped to more than 2 million* this year.

This may make it sound like the podcast market is oversaturated and not worth delving into this late in the game, but the reality could not be more opposite. Let’s dive into why now is actually the best time to start your own podcast.

Podcasts Make for More Authentic Content

We’re living in a world that, five years ago, most of us could not have imagined. The world has been in a constant state of flux since March of 2020, with travel bans, lockdowns, and quarantines becoming a routine—though still unpredictable—part of everyday life.??

Along with the need to stay home, limit our social activity, and see fewer people in order to follow guidelines and keep everyone safe, we’ve also seen a massive increase in social media consumption. By May 2020, just a couple months into the COVID-19 pandemic, between 46% and 51% of adults in the United States were using social media more often than prior to the outbreak.?

Social media has generally been extremely visual, with a large focus on achieving a perfectly posed and curated Instagram feed. Frankly, audiences of all ages are exhausted by the heavily edited and filtered content they’re consuming. There’s a deep-seated craving for more authentic content—something less polished, more candid, and more real.

Enter the podcast. Though podcasts are typically edited for clarity, pace, and length, this is more about making the podcast audio high-quality and enjoyable for the listener and less about appearing perfect. Podcasts offer an authenticity that traditional visually-focused media struggles to do, allowing the audience to actually hear how the host pronounces words, what their laugh sounds like, and how their voice changes with the emotions they’re experiencing.?

In fact, many listeners even feel closer to the hosts of their favourite podcasts than to some of the people in their regular, in-person lives. This is a concept known as “parasocial interaction.” Parasocial interaction relationships are typically one-sided and leave the consumer feeling as though they really know and care for a celebrity, influencer, or brand, leading to increased trust and engagement.

“The pandemic-induced lockdown drove people to tune into devotional, spiritual, and motivational content. It attracted a wide range of listeners to audio platforms. Podcasts make you feel as if you're sitting next to the host. This sense of friendship is intense, unlike television and other devices, which demand complete attention,” shares Austin LaRoche, CEO of ATAK Interactive.

Podcasts work wonders when building trust with your audience. They feel like they have a front row seat to a real human being with thoughts, questions, quirks, beliefs, and speech patterns that become familiar over time, unlike when they encounter a curated photo in their social feeds.?

Podcasts Establish Genuine Credibility in Your Brand

Blogs have historically been one of the best and most reliable ways to establish credibility of your knowledge, product, service, or brand. They can take on many formats, tackle any topic, and are widely available to anyone with an internet connection.?

The same can be said for podcasts, and podcasts boast an additional benefit we’ve already touched on: they’re more authentic and actually contribute to the sound of your brand, or your sonic branding.

To put it simply, increasing the mediums in which you appear as an authority on a topic serves to further cement your credibility in the minds of your listeners, especially when you show up as a human with genuine thoughts and feelings alongside your knowledge.

Offering more avenues for your target audience to engage with your content and expertise, i.e. via audio-focused channels like podcasts, means you’re giving yourself and your brand more opportunities to not only be seen and heard, but to be believed and trusted.?

Podcasts Expand Content Consumption Opportunities for Your Audience

Having multiple channels to share your content does more than establish your credibility.?

Diversifying the way you present your ideas, insights, and commentary means you can tap into other methods of content consumption, therefore increasing the ways in which your audience is able to access your media materials.?

Creating audio-focused engagement opportunities for your audience, aka podcasts,? delivers a two-pronged benefit when it comes to expanding your audience’s ability to consume content.?

The first benefit is all about convenience.?

Although the pandemic forced much of the world to slow down in some ways, most people are still busy. There’s always something to do: fold the laundry, drive to a friend’s house, exercise, wash the dishes, commute to work, go for a walk, write a report, do homework, and the million and one other tasks that make up daily life as pandemic restrictions begin to lift.?

These sorts of tasks and duties make up a large part of our day and are the perfect opportunity to secure your audience’s audio attention instead of their visual attention, because these are examples of the perfect time to listen to content. Listening to a podcast is convenient and on-demand for anyone performing any of these sorts of tasks at any time of day or night.?

This also creates a positive association between podcasts and productivity. How many times have you realized you’ve spent far too much time scrolling through feeds and staring at screens instead of doing, well, anything else?

By focusing on providing convenient content that actually allows your audience to accomplish their tasks instead of preventing them from doing so, they’re more likely to hit the “PLAY” button on your podcast the next time they need to work on a task, commute, exercise, walk the dog, and more.

The second benefit of expanded content consumption opportunities is accessibility.?

While it’s true that creating your own podcast makes your brand and its content more accessible throughout the day and through a variety of tasks, it also makes you more accessible—and human—to those with visual disabilities.?

Written content like blogs or think pieces can be made audible by text-to-speech and screen readers, but though the advancements in this type of technology are impressive, these assistants are often mechanical, robotic, and lack the humanness of authentic conversation.?

Podcasts, on the other hand, level the playing field for those with visual impairments and those without. As an audio-first experience, the primary method of consumption is via listening, meaning those who are blind or otherwise visually impaired experience the podcast in the same way everyone else does.?

However, it is important to note that podcasts are not as easily accessible for those with hearing disabilities. This is why it’s crucial to ensure your podcast includes high-quality transcripts for each episode, allowing those who are deaf, hard of hearing, or otherwise hearing impaired to join in the conversation visually.

Not only is including transcripts the morally right thing to do, it’s actually in your best interest.?

“Unfortunately for the podcasts that don’t make transcripts readily available, that’s a huge potential audience that is being shut out from participating in a growing entertainment field with an active fan base online,” Joshua Dudley writes.

This may seem like an extra step, but it’s one well worth taking. Remember, expanding the content consumption opportunities for your audience involves not only diversifying your content mediums, but includes making it easily accessible for those with different abilities, too.?

Tap Into the Audio Advertising Market with Podcast Ads

Rather than relying solely on visual content, which is prone to suffering from “banner blindness,” creating your own podcast means you’re operating consistently in the audio space, as well.?

As I highlighted in my most recent piece on audio-first experiences changing the social media and marketing landscapes, creating your own podcast will also create abundant opportunities for interaction with your target market once you’ve reached them, perhaps most notably via sympaphonic advertising.?

Sympaphonic advertising involves adjusting the background audio message to align with multiple music genres and different songs, often streamed through audio platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.?

Dunkin’ Donuts was among the first to capitalize on sympaphonic advertising in audio-first spaces, reporting that their audio ads grew consumer engagement by an impressive 238% and proving that audio is a marketing powerhouse when used correctly in audio spaces.

And even if sympaphonic advertising isn’t in your wheelhouse just yet, regular podcast advertising works, too.

“A staggering 81% of listeners have taken action after hearing audio ads during a podcast. These actions include researching a product online, connecting with the brand on social media, and talking about the brand with others,” research from Spotify showed.

Repurpose Your Content

Every podcast episode brings with it more opportunities to create original content that can later be repurposed.?

These are some of the top ways to repurpose your podcast content:

• Blog post—Did a specific point of interest come up during your podcast episode? Maybe a particularly interesting statistic or piece of data? Or maybe the whole topic just deserves more attention. A blog post is a great way to expand and repurpose your podcast content.?
• Video—Some podcasts are audio-only, while others are both audio and video. Further still, some podcast hosts record both audio and video, but only publish the audio and elect to save the video content to be repurposed for later sharing.
• Social media image—The number of social media users is over 3.96 billion worldwide. If you want to reach global audiences, creating social media content from your podcast is a great way to go.
• Transcript—Not only will transcripts make your podcast accessible, but they actually serve to make your podcast more searchable since they’re indexed by search engines.
• Audiogram—An audiogram is a still image or graphic that incorporates an animated waveform as well as your chosen audio clip from your podcast. This means it’s shareable on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but also on video-based platforms like YouTube.
• Infographics—Sum up some of the key takeaways from your podcast episode into an easily digestible infographic that can be shared far and wide.
• Live Q&A—Hosting a live Q&A is a great way to engage your listeners and followers who may have questions or comments about your last episode.

Whether it’s cover art, audiograms, video clips, or deriving a blog or social post from the podcast’s topic, the possibilities for repurposing your podcast content are endless.?

Now is the Best Time to Start Your Podcast

As we draw nearer to 2022, business strategy planning for the new year is well underway. If you have a goal of increasing your brand awareness, establishing more trust in your brand, being more consistent in your content, or showing up authentically for your audience, a podcast should be part of your plan.?

The way consumers are deciding who to trust—and, consequently, who they’ll be spending their money with—is changing. The desire for perfectly polished advertising and social media feeds 100% of the time is waning. People want to know who you are, why you do what you do, and what drives you. They want to understand you on a more personal level—something that solely visual content can’t foster.

The best time to start your podcast was before reading this. The second best time is now.