Imperfect Marketing
Imperfect Marketing
267:Why 2025 is the Perfect Year to Launch Your Business Podcast
Kendra discusses why 2025 is the perfect time to start your podcast. With a growing audience and less competition than you might think, the opportunities for podcasting success are bigger than ever.
Highlights from today's episode include:
- The impressive growth of podcast listeners worldwide
- Why podcasts are a less crowded space than blogs or social media
- How to overcome “pod fade” and set yourself up for success
- Simple strategies to get started, from content planning to equipment basics
Join Kendra every Tuesday and Thursday as she discusses how to make progress and grow through Imperfect Marketing.
Resources:
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Hey there, welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I'm your host, kendra Korman, and if you are just listening on your favorite podcast platform, do me a favor and jump on over to YouTube, at youtubecom, forward slash at Kendra Korman Kendra with a K, korman with a C and check out the new digs. Today I am recording several episodes of my imperfect marketing briefs from Walsh College here in Troy, michigan, and their creator studio. So we have upgraded. I did not redo my studio, did not move offices, nothing fancy, but I wanted to give it a try because I think it's always good to look and benchmark other things. So, happy new year. If I didn't say that to you already, I hope that you guys had a great holiday and welcome to 2025.
Speaker 1:I think the biggest thing that I'm upset about 2025 is that we do not have flying cars, because, lord knows, I thought that I would have one of those by now, right, but then there's that whole thing of physics. So today we're going to be talking about why 2025 is the year to start your podcast, because I am a firm believer in the power of podcasts and how it can help you grow your business, and today we're going to talk about some numbers that are going to help back that up, because I know everybody tells me all the time everybody has a podcast. There's nothing newsworthy about that. Oh my gosh, all these people have podcasts. I have a friend. She's like I'm going to start a podcast because everybody else I know has a podcast too. Well, it's surprisingly an uncomplicated space. It's not overcrowded like blog writing and social media and other platforms that you could be using, and there's a lot more to it. So if you've been thinking about starting a podcast for years, or maybe you're just not sure what you want to try and do different in 2025, stay with me, because the opportunities from podcasting are incredible, and I'm going to be referencing my notes a lot here today because I do have a lot of stats and information for you to really paint a picture of how powerful podcasting is. So there are 546.7 million listeners worldwide right now. Over half a billion people are listening to podcasts on a regular basis, and these numbers are as of like October, november 2024. So that number is supposed to hit 652 million by 2027. So as the podcast listeners are growing, your podcast could grow with it if you start building that audience now.
Speaker 1:Okay, so one of the cool things. That gets me really excited is advertising revenue hit $4.02 billion in 2024. Again, this is of October, november. Why am I excited about that? Because advertisers are buying access to audiences that they can reach in a unique way. So if you have a podcast for your business, it's not necessarily about getting your share of that $4.02 billion right. It's about building your business, building that audience and creating content that people come back to week after week after week. That's the power of podcasting, right? Is that you're building an audience that you can talk to, that you can relate to, that you can just talk to over a video camera with a microphone, and there's just so much for that. There is value in building a podcast and, again, advertisers are seeing that. So follow the money. Now.
Speaker 1:When I started Imperfect Marketing, these numbers weren't quite as big as they are now. It's been three, four years. I'm going to have to look that up because that's crazy. We're on episode 257, which just blows my mind, because my first podcast made it to episode eight, maybe seven I don't actually know if I made it a full eight episodes and it was a total failure. The reason why I didn't plan I didn't. I didn't have any idea, really, what I was going to talk about. I didn't have any goals for the podcast and I'm not talking listens or anything like that but I didn't even know what value I wanted to add. I just sort of picked up my microphone and started talking for about a half an hour every time I tried to record, which is really not the direction. I recommend that you go so Late in 2024, this new podcast that I launched has grown. I get over 40 downloads per episode on the audio channels and a little bit earlier or later in 2024, I was getting over a thousand downloads on YouTube for video watches on YouTube, which was very cool, and my subscriber base grew to over a thousand, which was very exciting, also by investing some time in search engine optimization with my titles and descriptions and things like that, which reminds me I need to get back on that search engine optimization. So, again, like I said, the podcast space is seeing less competition than so many other platforms and there's so much opportunity here.
Speaker 1:Alex Sanfilippo, who is one of the co-founders of Podmatch, where I get a lot of my guests that you hear from on Thursdays, shared on LinkedIn in November that the podcast industry report that he read showed that 3,684 established independent podcasts ended their shows recently. That's almost 4,000 established independent podcasts ended their shows. Now several of them and I know a couple of them actually started new podcasts. But again, some people are moving on to other things. Some people are maybe retiring or aging out. Again, there is turnover in this industry, but it's basically leaving. His number that he got from this report was about 35,000, a little over 35,000 established shows in the market. How many blogs are there out there? There's millions. So the amazing power of podcasting is again just so powerful and not that crowded.
Speaker 1:43% of podcasters, like myself back in the beginning, quit before episode eight. It's called pod fade. It's real, you can. You can definitely feel it when you don't have a plan, but that's really good news for you because if you're committed to consistency, if you are ready to engage and provide value, you're already ahead and that is amazing. Now, success in podcasting.
Speaker 1:The show's called Imperfect Marketing. Right, because marketing's anything but a perfect science and it's not about being perfect. It's not about watching all your ums and ahs and your so's So's are my big filler word. I'm like getting ready to say so. It's about showing up regularly with value added content, and sometimes that can be hard right. Depending on how narrow or wide you go with your topic and your content. You can run out of ideas sometimes. That's where AI comes in as a great brainstorming tool, so it can help you create things. You can revisit things as they change right.
Speaker 1:Next year, I can do a very similar episode and talk about the new steps. You know, again, everything is evolving and changing as you go. But again, let's talk about how to set yourself up for success. So that starts with strategy. Again, my first podcast had zero strategy zero. Now YouTube's dominating the podcast space with about 31% of the weekly listeners, and Spotify is not far behind with 24%. This space was dominated by Apple podcasts for so long. So it's really interesting to see YouTube and Spotify take number one and number two, and I think both of those happened in 2024.
Speaker 1:So that's pretty cool, but that means that you have to think about the video, not just the audio. Now keep in mind, on imperfect marketing, I did not launch video until episode 100 or 101 because I really didn't want to do my hair, and that's what it came down to. But if you don't want to be on camera, you don't have to be on camera. You don't have to record video to be on YouTube. You can put out an audio version of you on YouTube with just audio wavelengths and things like that. You could scroll through images for every single podcast and lay the audio over it. This is about progress, not perfection. So if you don't want to be on camera, you don't have to start small and build. But YouTube is the number one podcast platform now for distribution and it's actually pretty cool. So you need to make sure again.
Speaker 1:So think about the channels that you're going to be on, of course, and then create content that serves your specific audience. What do they want to hear about? What do they want to know about? I like to plan my my content quarterly every actually, I usually probably do about every two months, so I look at it in like eight week intervals as to what my themes are. So welcome to the podcast eight week interval right now, because we're going to be talking a lot about podcasting and then you also want to build systems that make it easy to stay consistent.
Speaker 1:So Podmatch was a huge help for me when I was looking for guests for my show. A lot of my friends and local contacts, things came up right, and so they would reschedule on Podmatch and other systems like that. I know I'm getting people that really want to be on podcasts and are dedicated to podcasts, and that's really important to me because they have a valuable message to share and they like podcasting and they also want to share the podcast, usually with their network too. And so I've built in several different types of processes. I track my episodes in an Excel spreadsheet, I've got my imperfect marketing brief episodes and then I've got my interview episodes when they're recorded, when they're uploaded. My assistant, carol, and I have a system that we've built pretty well that really helps us stay on track.
Speaker 1:So let's recap why 2025 is your year to start a podcast. First off, there's a growing listener base. It's a place where more and more people are leaning for their entertainment, for their news and for their information. Less competition than ever. Right? It sounds like everybody's got a podcast, but not everybody is dedicated and consistent and providing value, so watch out for that. And then we have a clear understanding of what works right. We know what works because podcasting has been around for a long time now. And, of course, there's multiple platform opportunities between YouTube and all of the audio platforms and then clips for social and all those different places.
Speaker 1:So think about it. If you were to start a podcast, what would your topic be? Plan your first 12 episodes, because I encourage you to record 10 before you launch. That is my magic number recommendation. So plan those first 12 episodes to make sure that you can be consistent and that you build yourself a buffer.
Speaker 1:Set up basic equipment. I know top podcasts that started with their Apple iPhones headset. It doesn't have to be overly complicated. Don't overcomplicate it. Don't go out and buy a million dollars of equipment. Start basic and schedule your recording times. Put it on your calendar and stay true to it. Perfect is the enemy of dawn. So start with where you're at and just start. If you want help getting started and you're listening to this around the time it's released, which is in January of 2025, I do have a podcast bootcamp that's free coming up, taking place January 13th through the 16th 2025. Visit kendracormancom forward slash bootcamp for more information on that. Next week we're going to be talking about planning your podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of Imperfect Marketing. Have a great rest of your day.
