Just like all of your digital marketing strategies you need to have a plan and measurable statistics to ensure that you are getting an return on investment (ROI) from your podcast. It is nice for your business to have a presence on the fastest growing content platform on the web, but if you don’t know what success looks like you’ll just be yelling into the abyss without a clear understanding if it is working.

The good news is that most of the work of figuring out how many people are listening to your podcast and who they are is done for you if you pick the right podcasting host. For our podcasts we use Spreaker which is a cost-effective and robust platform that allows us to measure all of the statistics necessary to truly understand the ROI on our podcast episodes.

When you are getting started you need to have a clear objective for your podcast. If you’re trying to sell a product, you may have one objective. If you’re trying to market your services, you may have another objective. Understanding the objective of your podcast will help you determine what your goal should be for the number listeners you should strive for in your podcast performance data.

Let’s think about this example. You are a local bakery that is gearing up for the holiday season. You’re already ahead of the game because you are planning in June, where many other businesses do not take the time to do this. You have decided on one of your marketing strategies being a podcast that gives tips and tricks on holiday entertaining. You don’t deliver your baked goods outside of your local community so your target will be heavily focused on local consumers. How do you set your goal?

Your podcast host will give you location data to allow you to see where the majority of your listeners are listening from so you will have a good idea of whether or not you are reaching your targeted audience. Here are a couple of ways you might think about setting your goals.

1. I want 50% of my podcast audience to be from my local community.
2. I want to grow my podcast from 0 to 100 listeners by October.
3. I want to increase foot traffic into my store by 25% between October and December

These are three very different, but specific goals. Setting out to do a podcast without a goal in mind is like putting up a website and hoping that you will get leads, it just doesn’t work. Creating a podcast for your business should be deliberate and targeted toward a clear goal.

So, to answer the question at the start, how many listeners should I expect from my podcast, the short answer is, it depends. The longer answer is, growing a podcast audience takes time and you should have realistic expectations that are tied into business goals. If you do that, your success will be in hitting your goals and not just the number of listeners you get on a particular epsiode.

If you want to work with us to get a podcast off the ground for your business we can help you with the logistics of getting it set up and identifying the right goals for your podcast.