If you’ve been holding back in adding podcasting to your content marketing strategy, Edison Research has some survey results that might make you want to get moving.

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Welcome to Episode 230 of the Content Marketing Podcast! 

If you joined us for last week’s podcast, you’ll recall that Josh Haynam of Interact Quiz Builder stops by to show us why quizzes deserve a prominent place in our content marketing strategies. (Need to get caught up?)

Today we look at some eye-opening survey results from Edison Research that may make you want to “get a move on” in adding podcasting to your content marketing strategy.

Give today’s episode a listen to hear:

• How to grab your copy of our complimentary audio and e-book “B2B Content Marketing: From the Blog to the Bottom Line“
• Our latest News Feed segment:
  • Snapchat introduces new tool for on-demand geofilters
  • Facebook supposedly testing a feature that would allow Groups to create online courses for their members
  • Content Hit of the Week: “How to Create Tons of Good Content: Make Yourself a Content Lord of the Rings,” by Jonathan Kranz on the MarketingProfs website
• Results from Edison Research’s survey on The Podcast Consumer 2017
• How much the audience of podcast listeners has grown in just the past year
• Why the demographics of monthly podcast listeners should make us sit up and take notice
• How much podcast content weekly listeners consume (spoiler alert: it’s a lot)
• How much of each podcast episode listeners typically stick around for (spoiler alert: a big ol’ chunk)
• Tip of the Week: Why now is the time to get moving on that podcast strategy you’ve been kinda-sorta thinking about

Please remember that this podcast is about you — your questions, your frustrations, your hopes and dreams for your content marketing program. So please take a moment to send me your feedback, questions, or comments via email, on our Facebook Page, or via Twitter.

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Today’s Podcast Transcript

Content Marketing Podcast 230: Eye-Opening Research on Podcasting in 2017

June 8th, 2017

This is the Content Marketing Podcast, episode number 230: Eye-Opening Research on Podcasting in 2017.

Hello, and welcome to the Content Marketing Podcast. This is the show where we help you grow your tribe and your bottom line through insanely good content. I am your host, Rachel Parker of Resonance Content Marketing, and today is June 8th, 2017.

Hello, hello, or as we say in Texas, “howdy,” and thank you for joining us for today’s episode of the Content Marketing Podcast.

Just a reminder: This podcast is available on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, or Google Play Music, or subscribe to the RSS feed  so if you like what you hear, please feel free to clickon over and subscribe.

I also, invite you to download our complimentary e-book, . Download today to learn how to tap into the power of content to drive engagement at each stage of the B2B sales process. To snag your free copy, go to .

Last week we had a special guest here on the podcast: Josh Haynam of Interact stopped by to chat about why quizzes deserve a prominent place in your content marketing mix. If you happened to miss that episode, feel free to check it out on iTunes or via the RSS feed, or on the website at resonancecontent.com/podcast.

Today we are talking about dome eye opening new research about podcasting in 2017, specifically about who is listening and what their listening practices are? This is really special research and I can’t wait to share it with you. But first, it’s time to check in with our News Feed for this week’s rundown of News You Can Use.

News You Can Use:

If you’ve been listening to us recently you will be thoroughly familiar with the ongoing arms race between Snapchat and Instagram Stories. They have been one-uping each other almost every episode we have something to report from one side or the other. So today we have news out of Snapchat.

According to an article in Ad-Week, Snapchat has introduced a new web tool that makes it easier for users to create on-demand Geofilters. If you’re not familiar with Geofilters, those are the filters that come up, like say if you go to a big event or a big convention, or if you are at let’s say a Mardi Gras, if you want to upload a snap you might find one of those filters that say Mardi Gras New Orleans 2017 or something fancy, with some fancy graphics.

Previously if a brand wanted to create a Geofilter they had to create custom graphics in Photoshop or Illustrator. So basically you had to have a professional designer to create that for you, while now we can choose from pre-designed templates for special events like birthdays, weddings, prom, business events, food and bars, love, celebrations and graduations. Users can access these templates and then modify their text, colors, and graphics to create their own custom Geofilter.

Geofilters are not free but pricing depends on the size of the area they will cover and the length of time they will be available. So if you want to access the new tool, I will give you the URL in the blog post for this episode. Just go to resonancecontent.com/podcast, click on this episode and you will find the URL there. It’s a little long for me to share here, so I will make sure that you get that. https://geofilters.snapchat.com/org/guest/purchase/upload-asset

Interesting news out of Facebook, The Next Web reports that: Facebook is supposedly testing a feature that would allow Groups to create online courses for their members.  Facebook has not yet officially announced this feature; this is just kind of the rumor that is circulating.

If this is true, this would be Facebook’s bid to compete with online learning sites like Udemy and Udacity. As content marketers, this could be a very interesting opportunity for us, because this would give us the chance to offer online learning within the Facebook platform. So we can offer courses without having to send people to a different site, it could be right there on Facebook. The details are still sketchy, like I said that Facebook has not announced anything officially as yet, but we will of course keep you posted.

Content Hit of the Week:

Our Content Hit of the Week is a post titled “,” by Jonathan Kranz on the MarketingProfs website.

The title of this post immediately grabbed my attention, as many of you know I am a huge Lord of the Rings geek. Now, the post actually has nothing to do with Tolkien’s trilogy, but it does offer an interesting perspective on how a small team can create a steady stream of quality content, which I know for a lot of you, is a challenge that you’re dealing with right now.

So what Jonathan suggests in this post is organizing your content creation around three rings, like the rings in the trunk of a tree. The inner ring is your core content producers. The middle ring is your internal subject matter experts, and the outside ring is your external content creators.

He goes on to offer advice on how to divide and conquer your content workload among these three rings of contributors. Very interesting perspective and I will of course share a link in the blog post for this episode at resonancecontent.com/podcast. (https://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2017/32224/how-to-create-tons-of-good-content-make-yourself-a-content-lord-of-the-rings)

That’s it for this week’s update — if you stumble across something you think might be of interest to your fellow content marketers, please tweet it to me at  so that we can share.

Now it’s time for this week’s spotlight segment: Eye-Opening Research on Podcasting in 2017

Spotlight:

Earlier this year, Edison Research conducted a national telephone survey of 2,000 people in the United States aged 12 and older to ask them about podcasting, about whether they were aware of podcasts. Whether they listened to podcasts? If so what were their listening practices and preferences, and it yields some very interesting results. So I’m looking forward to sharing the same with you.

By the way just by way of background, this is  part of a series by Edison Research that has been covering a wide range of digital media topics since 1998, and some of their historical data specific to podcasting goes as far back as 2006. It’s really interesting to see how those trends have changed. I will provide that in the blog post for this episode over at resonancecontent.com/podcast.

The first thing that they asked was whether or not people are familiar with podcasting:

They simply asked “Are you familiar with the term podcasting?”60% said “Yes”.  More than half are familiar with podcasting, and only two years ago, in 2015, that number was only 40%; back in 2006, that number was 22%, so if you look at the chart for this question, you’ve seen the steady uptick of awareness, of podcasting.

The next couple of questions have to do with people’s Exposure to podcasts:

Whether they have listened to podcasts? 40% of the respondents said they have listened to a podcast, so they have at any time listened to a podcast. “Yes I have listened to a podcast at some point.” and that is up from 36% in 2016.

This is interesting – 24% said they have listened to a podcast in the last month. Folks that is nearly one quarter of the American population that has listened to a podcast, just in the last month; that is nothing to sneeze at.

So as we are seeing here, and I’m going to share more outcomes with you that will hold up this point – that a podcast is no longer a little tiny niche of people, it is getting into the mainstream with a quarter of people said they have listened to a podcast in the last month.

Listener demographics – monthly podcast listeners

So of those folks who say they listen to podcasts, specifically among monthly podcast listeners, people who say they listen to podcasts monthly, we’ve got some interesting demographics to share about those folks 56% are male of those monthly podcast listeners and 44% are female. That kind of surprised me, I don’t know why I tend to think of podcasting as a girl thing, maybe because I’m a girl and I do it, but low and behold the majority, or slight majority of those monthly podcast listeners are male, whatever that may mean to you and your brand, I will leave that up-to you.

The age distribution is also interesting: The largest group of monthly podcast listeners is the age 18-34 group, so that’s going to me your Millennial’s and your Gen Z that is 44%, and then the next largest is age 35-54 (33%). So 1/3rd of those monthly podcast listeners are age 35-54 which for many of us is a prime target audience because those are the folks with; well are on the B2C side who have disposable income to spend on consumer products, and on the B2B side they are more likely to be in decision making positions, so a very key outcome in terms of the age group of those podcast listeners. Again 44% in the 18-34 group, 33% in the 35-54 group.

Let’s move onto income level, yes they got very detailed when they asked those respondents about their income level: 45% of podcast consumers have a household income of $75,000 or more; 16% have a household income of $150,000 or more. So these are folks who have achieved a certain level of income, again very important for both the B2B and B2C side.

Finally education: 30% of monthly podcast consumers have some graduate or advanced degree so nearly 1/3rd have gone beyond the 4 year college degree, and have some kind of graduate degree, whether that is an MBA or some other advance degree, very, very interesting; and then 27% have four-year college degrees.

To Sum up these demographics –we are looking at an audience of   monthly podcast listeners who

1. Are grownups, so it’s not 16 year olds, these are grownups   who are educated and who have money. If this sounds like the kind of people you might want to spend some time with? On a regular basis, then it might be time for you to look into podcasting for your brand.

So those are the monthly podcast listeners, then Edison went on to talk to get into a little more detail on our Weekly podcasts listeners.  

Listener characteristics – weekly podcast listeners

So these are those respondents who said they had listened to a podcast in the past week, and that was 15% of the respondents so if you apply that to the larger American population — Edison estimates that at 42 million in the general population — so if you think 42 million people have listened to a podcast in the past week, that is substantial, and that is up from 13% last year and just 10% in 2015. So larger and larger population has started saying they have listened to a podcast in the last week, we would call those weekly podcast listeners right!

Among those weekly listeners, let’s look at the time that they spend listening to podcasts- 36% spent 1 to 3 hours in the past week listening to podcasts, and 22% spent 3 to 5 hours listening to podcasts. That just; I don’t mean to get Click-Baity here but that just blew my mind. If I had seen this behind a Click- Bait headline that said “This will really blow your mind”, it really did!

O My Gosh 1-3 hours 36%, 22% 3-5 hours nearly a quarter spend 3-5 hours listening to podcasts.

How many podcasts do they listen to? Weekly listeners said they listened to an average of five podcasts per week and subscribe to an average of six podcasts. So this isn’t just one or two podcasts, this isn’t just the NPR folks, getting the lion’s share, they are pretty diverse they are listening to an average of 5 per week and they are subscribing  to an average of  6 and I’d be willing to bet that the podcasts that they listen to and they subscribe to, I’m willing to bet it’s a pretty diverse range, maybe with some personal interest in there, there might be some business interests in there, I’d be willing to bet it’s probably a good mix.

Very telling outcomes, in terms of those weekly listeners and their  habits and their preferences.

Amount of podcast listened to

So when people listen to podcasts, this is going to be the final insight I’m going to share with you; how much do they listen to, how much of any given episode do they tend to listen to – 42% said they typically listened to the entire podcast episode, when they do listen, and 44% said they listened to most of the podcast.  As I said folks this is pretty ground breaking, this is not a tiny, tiny, niche audience that we’re talking about anymore; we’re talking about a substantial number of people, they are listening a lot, they are listening to more than one podcast, they are putting in the time, they tend to listen to, the majority tend to listen to either most of, or the entire podcast.  

Now have I said anything in the last 10 minutes that made you say, “Nah, podcasting’s not worth the effort”? I see an opportunity here. The podcast audience is growing, the average podcast listener is an educated adult with high income, and they listen a lot. They listen to a lot of podcasts, they put a lot of time into their podcast listening, they tend to listen all the way through.

So my question for you is, and this is something to ponder with your team this week: what are you going to do with this opportunity? Are you going to continue to put off podcasting saying “We don’t know, we don’t know for sure if it’s effective, we don’t know if there is an audience?” What are you going to do with it? And I’ll talk more about this when I get to the Tip of the Week.

Those are the insights I’m pleased to share from this Edision Research, by the way Edison is a highly, highly reputed research firm, I totally trust what I hear from them, from their report on . Again if you’d like to download a free copy of this report, I will provide the link in the blog post for this episode at resonancecontent.com/podcast 

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If you have any questions on what I just shared, or want to add to the conversation, feel free to tweet me at  and of course you can always reach me through the website resonancecontent.com

Now it’s time for our Content Marketing Tip of the Week

Tip of the Week 16:25

Speaking of podcasting, I want to look back a couple of weeks on this podcast, to when we talked about the 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from Social Media Examiner. We shared some of their results with you a couple of weeks ago. By the way, if you happened to miss that episode, you can check it out at resonancecontent.com/podcast. I believe it’s number 227 or 228 something like that.

One thing that we reported from this survey is that- the study revealed that only 8% of marketers are using podcasting. 8% of all marketers are using podcasting, and 60 percent have no plans, no interest in getting involved in podcasting. Like, ever, ever, ever.

Given what I just shared with you from Edison’s research about the podcast market, I don’t know folks – is it me, or is there a huge disconnect, between the opportunities out there and the number of marketers that are willing to take advantage of them, and I don’t know what the hurdle is?

You know you talk to brands about video’s and they say ” yeah we are all over video, we are on YouTube, we’re on Facebook, we’re on Facebook live, blah, blah, blah, and if you ask about podcasting you hear crickets, but I’ve just shared with you that the audience is there, and they are hungry for that audio content.

So my tip for you this week is – if you have the slightest inkling of an interest in exploring podcasting for your organization, now is the time! Get your resources in place and get it going. Here’s one valuable piece of advice that I want to share with you- “It doesn’t have to be forever”. If you have an interest and you believe you have and audience, give it a year, commit to podcasting for one year and then decide if you want to continue. That will give you a good years worth of data, you can see if it’s working for you, and if you walk away from it, then at-least you gave it a try, because folks the opportunity is there, and it may not be there forever, maybe someone will “discover podcasting” and then it’s going to be a big pile on, and then the blue ocean is going to turn red, as the sharks start feeding, so if you’ve been considering podcasting, jump on in and give it your best shot, and start tapping into this tremendous opportunity that is out there, available to you today.

OK, campers, that’s it for me today — I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of the Content Marketing Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard today, please feel free to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Play Music or via our RSS feed. And if you REALLY like what you’ve heard, please leave us a quick review on iTunes. I would so appreciate it.

Also, if you want to learn more about content marketing, you’ll want to grab a copy of my book, The Content Marketing Coach: Everything You Need to Get in the Game … and Win, which is available in book and Kindle format on Amazon. To learn more about the book and to download a free chapter, visit contentmarketingcoachbook.com.

Just this week, I published a blog post about what Abraham Lincoln’s “The Gettysburg Address” can teach us about content marketing, and what brought that about was, I’ve just finished watching Ken Burn’s documentary ” The Civil War” so I’ve had Lincoln on the brain. So today I want to share a quote with you from Abraham Lincoln and this is one of my favorite quotes of all time. He once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Again, this is Rachel Parker with Resonance Content Marketing.

Thank you again for listening and we will see you again next week. Take care!

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About the Author

A self-described geek who can recite entire episodes of South Park by heart, Rachel Parker has had a passion for content ever since she was old enough to hold a crayon (purple, please).

As Founder and CEO of Resonance, Rachel helps businesses publish content that connects with their audience … and converts those followers into customers. She’s also the host of the Content Marketing Podcast and author of the book The Content Marketing Coach: Everything You Need to Get in the Game … and WIN!

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