Content Strategies For Your Podcast's 3 Different Audiences

Successful podcasters know the importance of making content your audience loves. But your podcast has more than one audience - audiences with different needs. Are you making content for all of them?

Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.

I work with a lot of businesses to help shape their podcasting strategy, sometimes just on a purely consulting level, and it's up to them to do the implementation. But some continue to become clients of mine, either production clients, or they put me on retainer to keep the ideas flowing.

One of the biggest disconnects I see from a lot of the short-term clients or prospects who failed to become a client, has to do with how they see the audience, the listeners of the podcast they want to have. See, for many of these business-minded clients, a listener is a binary object. They either listen or they don't. And I suppose that's demonstrably true, but it's not really a helpful heuristic. I think it's too simple.

The problem is that's how they're used to thinking about their customers. Someone is a customer, or they're not a customer. But this approach, I think, leads to some pretty poor podcast planning, as well as implementation, in my experience because in reality, it's helpful to bucket people into three groups, not just those two.

Group one is people who haven't yet listened to your podcast.

Group two are the people who do listen to your podcast, almost without fail.

But group three is a new one, and that's made up of people who change state, if you will, from listener to non-listener and they go back and forth at that.

Now, all three of these groups need some attention. That means having not just one audience engagement strategy, but three. Not just a handful of tactics that are applicable only to one of those groups, but a slate of tactics that roll up to those three different audience engagement strategies. Yeah, that's a lot of work. But also, when you break down the needs of those groups you'll see there's really not any other way to do that.

Group one, the never-have-listened-to-you group, they need content from you that lets them know that your podcast exists. This is not your podcast episodes. Remember, these people have never listened to your show. They need content from you that makes it quite easy to sample the kind of content that you make. And easy for them to say, "Yes, please, I would like to have some more."

For this group, you have to create content - again, not your podcast episodes - and support the content with the marketing budget that it deserves so that this never-have-listened-to-your-podcast group is not only exposed to your content but they can actually get a taste of what you have to offer.

Let's go to group two, the dedicated listeners. These people still need content from you that makes them never, ever, ever want to leave. They need content from you that makes them want to tell all their friends about your podcast. And yes, this is the podcast episodes that you make. But it's more than that because you need to create content where your dedicated listeners live, which may not be just at your podcast. You have to create that content and support that content with community building and an engagement budget that it deserves, keeping those people well-fed and reinforcing the fact that you do, in fact, have the goods and will always have the goods that they desire.

Let's move to group three, those who dip in and out of your podcast. They also need content from you, but the content needs to give them a compelling reason to listen. They're busy. They need content from you that fits their purpose, not just fit for your purpose. So yes, your podcast episodes, of course, but also your social shares, your newsletter, your videos. You've got to create that content and then you have to support that content creation with some decisions and some research and measurement tools that let you know that your efforts to make all that content are actually worth it for them.

Again, these three groups are very different and you can't do audience engagement the same for all three. Being ultra-responsive in your show's Discord server is not going to help anybody who's not a listener. And unless it's packaged in a compelling way, it'll probably miss many of those who dip in and out of your show.

Of course, you will need to be ultra-responsive in that community in service to your most loyal fans. A properly funded and executed marketing campaign won't have any impact at all on your most loyal listeners or even those who listen to you just off and on because they're already.

A properly funded and executed marketing campaign is warranted if there are huge segments of the population that you've not yet reached. And analyzing the listener experience journey to your show, that's not going to impact anybody who doesn't know about your show. And it probably doesn't even matter to those who listen to every single episode. But, devoting the time to create formats that are more easily consumed by the occasional listener can move them towards that loyalty I know you want.

So all of these audience engagement initiatives, and so many more, are important, they're just important for different reasons. So focus on not just the audience, focus on the audiences, all of them, and the rest tends to follow.

With that I shall be back on Monday with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!

Podcast Pontifications is written and narrated by Evo Terra. He's on a mission to make podcasting better. Links to everything mentioned in today's episode are in the notes section of your podcast listening app. A written-to-be-read article based on today's episode is available at podcastpontifications.com where you'll also find a video version and a corrected transcript, both created by Allie Press. Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media. Find out more at Simpler.Media.

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