The 2026 State of Podcasting in Professional Services (Key Findings)

Download the free research report.

If you’re running—or thinking about launching—a business podcast, this episode breaks down what’s actually working in 2026.

John Tyreman unpacks the 2026 State of Podcasting in Professional Services report, based on insights from 147 podcast hosts and listeners across industries like marketing, consulting, AEC, accounting, and technology. In this episode, you'll learn:

• What separates growing podcasts from stagnant ones
• Why frequency is one of the biggest drivers of success
• The real ROI of podcasting (and why it’s NOT sponsorships)
• How listeners actually discover new shows
• Why long-form content is still winning
• The biggest challenges business podcasters face today

One of the most surprising findings? Nearly two-thirds of podcast hosts say their show directly generates new business opportunities.

If you're trying to turn your podcast into a growth channel—not just a content asset—this episode will give you a much clearer roadmap.

This episode was produced by Red Cedar Marketing.  Need help launching and running a business podcast that actually produces results? Visit www.redcedarmarketing.com. 

Transcript

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Now, think about that. The average commute time is 25 minutes. The average time to mow a lawn is about 45. The average. Exercise length is about 20 minutes. So you'd think that a 30 minute podcast would be a sweet spot, and I think that that's the case, for a lot of shows. But the reason I'm pointing this out is there is absolutely a market for long form content. Hello business podcasters and welcome to another episode of Podcasting and Professional Services. First of all, I just wanna apologize real quick. For the extraordinarily long gap between episodes, red Cedar Marketing has grown significantly and has commanded all of my attention serving, serving my clients, but then also putting together the 2026 state of podcasting in professional services research study. And that is the topic du jour of our episode today. We're actually going to unpack the executive summary from that research, which is available, um, for free on red cedar marketing.com. So if you are interested in getting your hands on a copy of that executive summary, there's a lot of insights from business podcast hosts and listeners in the professional services industries. I'll be frank with you, I, uh, am am blessed with a moment in time to be able to record this, um, a little behind the scenes. I, I was actually scheduled to record an episode of Breaking Biz Dev, uh, with Mark Wainwright, but. Mark's Mark lost his voice last night and he is unable to record today. So I have a rare moment where I am set up in the studio and ready to record, and I've got a block of time to do so. So I thought, hey, let me, um, I've been putting this episode off for too long at this point. I needed to record it, uh, so that I can share these insights with you, our listeners, So let's dive right into the report. the reason why I wanted to do this research study was when I, when I launched Red Cedar Marketing, this was in 2022, and quickly found out that I needed to niche down and specialize. I knew this, um, from all the research that I did it at my past stops. Uh, so I focused on podcasting and professional services, and I, when I went to look at market statistics and research out there, there wasn't a whole lot of information available. And so I knew that I needed at some point to go out and do this kind of research. It took me a few years to get to the point where it made sense. Seasons one and two of this podcast that you're listening to was really the start of that going out and interviewing business podcast hosts first, friendly contacts within my network, but then branching out beyond that and interviewing, people in hosts of business podcasts that I had heard of and researched and looked up, uh, some of the top pod podcasts in the accounting industry, in the architecture industry. Ryan Willard of the business of Architecture, Randy Crabtree of the unique CPA, Keelan Cox of a EC marketeers. These are folks that I knew of and had, gone back and forth with on social media a few times, but I had never really had a conversation with them. But this podcast gave me an opportunity to do that and then to learn about, all these different perspectives from different business podcast hosts. And from there I knew that, oh, okay. Well there's, there's some common themes from these interviews, but what does this look like in aggregate? What does the market look like? I needed to go out and get a little bit of more clarity on, you know, are these, are these trends common? Are these pain points common among the marketplace? And so that's why, I did this research. Uh, it's really, you know, part of the core mission at Red Cedar Marketing, which is to amplify the voices of experts and help those existing business podcasters grow their show. And there's seven key areas that we focus on here at Red Cedar Marketing around podcasting, and that's number one, the foundation of your show. How does that podcast connect to your marketing objectives and your growth goals? Number two, how is that podcast positioned in the marketplace? And how can your show stand apart from others? Uh, the third part, foundation is production. How can you build your studio and workflow to balance production quality with efficiency in professional services? The people who have opinions and who have points of view around their areas of expertise. Their calendars are jam packed, so they don't have a whole lot of time. So the production workflow really needs to fit their schedules. Uh, the fourth is launch. How can you bring new shows, new spinoff shows even to the, to market with momentum? The fifth pillar is growth. How can you expand your reach and acquire new listeners and subscribers? Number six, measurement Based on those goals, what does good look like? How do you measure it? What are the mile markers along the way? And then number seven, monetization. How can you structure your podcast to generate revenue? So those are the seven pillars that we really look at at Red Cedar marketing, and that's really the holistic, maturation of a podcast is all the way from foundation to monetization. So when we started this research, um, first of all, I just wanna give a shout out to the folks that helped me along the way. Um, a special thanks to Perrin Olson and Ryan Kovac from Alt CMO. They helped promote the survey to their network. So we ultimately ended up with 147 business podcast hosts and listeners combined, and that broke down into 76 podcast hosts and 71 podcast listeners in the professional services spaces. Also, I want to shout out to Fedor Shimic from Own the Narrative. Fedor provided some thoughtful feedback on the survey design and some of the outreach methods. I also wanna give a quick shout out to Joe, Mary Blanche and Austin from the Spiraling Up Podcast for, use of their likeness on the cover of this report. So thank you to all those folks who helped make this report possible. Again, you can download it@redcedarmarketing.com. So, uh, let's get into some of the results. So we had a hundred, a sample of 147 hosts and listeners, and they, uh, were across a range of different professional services industries. If you're watching this on YouTube, we've got a pie chart. Up on the screen that shows the industry represented in the sample. And these are derived from the podcasts that are represented in the sample. So about 30% were marketing podcasts about 20%. A EC shows 20% consulting shows 10% technology, about 10% accounting and finance. And the rest were a mix of government contractors and legal podcasts. So. A pretty wide mix of industries. Um, the common theme is that they are all professional service providers as part of this research study, we do have the ability to break out reports, for specific industries. So for example, I mentioned Ryan and Perrin from Alt CMO. They helped me tremendously add to the sample, so I created an a EC breakout report specifically for them. That just highlights what a EC podcasters do differently from. Non a EC podcasters, what are the strengths of that industry? And then what are some, what are some things that other industries are doing that maybe a EC firms can learn from? Specific channel breakout reports may become available, at the request of business podcast collective members. So if you're not familiar with the Business podcast or collective, it is a vetted member only community exclusively for business podcasters. If you wanna learn more, go to red cedar marketing.com and apply to become a member today. Alright, so let's get into some of the key insights from the business podcast hosts, and then we'll get into some of the key insights from the business podcast listeners in the sample. So first of all, I, I had pre-qualified a list of about 400 podcast hosts that fit these industry, uh, parameters. And I reached out to them, as part of the vetting process. Hosts who participated in this research, provided a link to their podcast. And, some of them gave branded URLs. Some of them gave Apple Podcast URLs, Spotify. But the, the point was to, number one, verify that their show existed. But number two, I wanted to see what kind of URL folks would, uh, send our way. And there were some interesting results. There really were, um, branded URLs. So www.yourpodcastname.com was the most common. About 50% of the hosts gave that, but the other 50% gave YouTube links, apple links, Spotify links. Um, and I, the, the reason why I'm bringing this up is because if someone asks, Hey, can you send me a link to your podcast? What are you gonna send them? Are you gonna send them a link to Apple? Are you sure that they're an, that that's their preferred channel to listen to podcasts? What if they're more of a YouTube person? What if they're more of a Spotify person? What if they are completely off the wall and they use Overcast? I mean, there's so many different places that folks can get their podcasts today. It behooves us to send links to people who are interested in learning more, that have a directory of different platforms that they can. Click and choose. So I think that's why branded URLs to a specific page on your website, or maybe it's a Buzz Sprout website, something very simple where folks can click into and select the platform that they wanna listen anyway, asking the podcast hosts to provide a link to their show helps us un to understand a little bit more behind the scenes. Now it also helps us because it, it allowed us to go in and look at what is the episode publishing frequency. We didn't need to ask that of the hosts. We can go and get that information out there on the interwebs and of the business podcasters who participated in this study, 45% publish weekly or more frequently, another 28% published twice monthly and then a quarter. Published monthly or less frequently. So think about that. Nearly 75% of the active business podcasters in this study published multiple episodes per month. In my research, that is one thing that I've noticed is frequency. A key driver linked to podcasting success. Podcasting is a very rhythmic medium. It is what some might call a publication strategy where new, new content is coming out at regular intervals. Listeners, subscribers can look forward to new episodes coming out. They know to expect it. They know that new episodes will be coming out. Um. So frequency is a big driver. Alright, another key insight. Uh, we asked these business podcasters, how are your episodes structured? Are you an interview show? Are you a monologue show? Do you do co-hosted commentary episodes? Respondents were able to select multiple different episode types in this question, and we found that more than 85% of the business podcasters in this study followed a guest interview format. So they had guests on their show that they interviewed. About 40, almost 41% said, uh, that they, they did monologue episodes so much like this one where it's one host talking to a studio audience. And then only 26% of business podcasters do co-hosted commentary episodes. So it's like how Mark and I do breaking Biz Dev, where it's he and I going back and forth and bantering and talking about a specific topic. It's the two of us on each episode. Sometimes we bring in guest voices, but most of the time it's just Mark and I. That's a co-hosted commentary type of episode. It's less common, but because guest interviews are used by so many podcasters, it presents an opportunity to differentiate your show against some of the others in your niche. We asked business podcast hosts to identify what they believe are the biggest benefits of hosting a podcast. And not to be surprised, increased online visibility was the top response. 82% of business podcast hosts said that, um, this was the ben. One of the biggest benefits of podcasting was that their online presence increased. What I find very interesting is that 63%, nearly two thirds of these business podcast hosts, said that their show, uh, is directly attributable to new sales opportunities in their pipeline. So if you are getting into podcasting and you wanna know, Hey, what's the ROI on podcasting well leads. Leads that can turn into clients, that is the fastest path to ROI. Positive marketing Investment in your podcast is structuring the show in a way where it generates leads. Now that can look like inter interviewing guests that represent your ideal client profile. That could be interviewing referral sources, it could be interviewing past clients. Uh, w. Teeing that up for either a testimonial, a client success story, or per even perhaps a referral down the line. So those are just a couple examples of how a podcast can be positioned for lead generation. Now, a lot of prospects that I talk to, a lot of folks that I talk to out there who want to start a podcast, there's this misconception that, oh, I launch a podcast, I run it for a few months, and then I get a sponsor. To offset the costs. Well, attracting a sponsor, especially in uh, a niche air niche pocket of the market can be a bit challenging. Now, the tighter your podcast focus, the more focused on you are on a niche. The more valuable a sponsorship is to a specific type of company, A company that serves that same niche, maybe from a tangential service offering, or maybe it's a tech provider who serves that. Your niche as well, your target market. However, those sponsors still need to see that the media has value, that you do have a captured audience. So. It's kind of a balancing act there where if you want to pursue sponsor revenue, you'll need to grow your show to the, to a point where you get regular engagement from your target audience and you can point to specific metrics that show that there is in fact media value. And that's something that we help our clients with at Red Cedar Marketing. We've helped, um, our clients develop sponsorship packages that they've used to pitch potential sponsors. So if you're interested in that, let me know. But only 22% of the business podcast hosts in the sample said that they, benefit from sponsor revenue. So if you're getting into podcasting and want to make it an ROI positive investment, you are three times more likely to generate qualified business leads than sponsorship revenue. So structure your podcast accordingly, people. So, alright, so we talked about the ben, the benefits of business podcasting. Let's talk about some of the challenges. Let's talk about some of the pain points and, um, interestingly of these business podcast hosts, not having enough time was not one of the top challenges. Sure, there was, there was a few folks who said that time constraints was a big challenge, but growing their existing audience. Was the number one challenge. So growing your audience outside of your network, 48%, almost 50% said that as the top challenge. The next biggest challenge facing pod business podcasters today is measuring ROI or measuring business impact. So how does the podcast positively impact the business? And this is something that, um. I spend a lot of time upfront when launching new podcasts for my clients. There's a lot of intention that goes into what is the goal of this podcast? What do we expect this to, to do for the business? And then what are the mile markers along the way that we need to hit before that happens? Right? So you want to generate leads. Okay. First we're gonna need to get the podcast launched, then we're gonna need to see if it's gaining traction. We can use downloads, we can use, uh, social media metrics as leading indicators of, Hey, what's working, what's not, what do we need to tweak along the way to get us to a point where we start to see major jumps in visibility? And once we have visibility with the right target audience are. What is the impact there? Are the guests converting into leads? Are we getting engagement from our ideal client profiles? So measuring business impact has a lot to do with positioning. It also has a lot to do with being able to interpret the data. There's a lot of data out there. There's a lot of data available to business podcasters. Uh, and it can be a little overwhelming and it can be hard to understand what's good, what's working, what are the key metrics we should be focusing on, and what metrics don't really make sense right now. So measuring ROI, measuring business impact, that was the second biggest challenge for business podcasters in this study. The third biggest challenge was monetization, offsetting costs. So yeah, podcasting can be. A pretty big upfront investment, especially because it can take some calendar time to produce results. If you're only publishing one or two episodes a month, then it can take a little bit longer to. Establish traction generate leads than if you were publishing every single week. Now I have a client who runs a weekly podcast, the Ground Transportation Podcast, and it's a, it's a co-hosted between, um, Ken and James. They both are two separate business owners who serve the same target audience. And we'll even structure it where James will go off and do solo interviews. Ken will go off and do solo interviews. They'll come together and do co-hosted episodes. So we've got a lot of flexibility in the kinds of, um, episodes that we produce and put out, but it does take pretty much their every week, their entire Friday afternoon to record. Sometimes we've got, we've, we have to double up and do two episodes in a Friday, and these are how hour long episodes too. So a weekly show with hour long episodes, Ken jokes that it's like a, part-time job on top of owning, uh, driving transactions. But he's also said that the podcast has made a, a huge impact on his business, has generated leads and revenue for him, so it can work. The frequency in which you publish has a major impact on the time that it takes to get to that point where the podcast is having a positive impact on your business. Now, the full report goes into much. Deeper into all the data, um, that we put together. The full report is available for sale on red cedar marketing.com. Um, you can purchase that for 1 99 or if you're a business podcaster and you join the Business Podcaster Collective, you get access to that full report as a part of that membership. Alright, so let's get into some of the key insights from business podcast listeners. All right. First of all, how do listeners discover new shows? This is something that is, um, super important to business podcast hosts because you need to understand how listeners are finding your show so that you can invest more in those marketing vehicles, in those marketing channels. So we asked. Listeners of business podcasts, if you wanted to find a new business podcast to listen to, how would you go about finding that show? 45% said that they would search on podcast platforms. So for example, they would go to the search bar in Apple or Spotify. We had separate response categories for searching on Google and YouTube. Then searching on chat, GPT, searching on Google and YouTube did not even crack 15% of these listeners. So, and on top of that, searching on AI tools like Chat, GPT and Claude was only about 3%. So listeners of business podcasts go to those platforms, apple and Spotify to search for new shows. What does this mean for business podcasters? Optimize your titles and episode descriptions. Make sure that you tag your episodes properly with the right tags. Structure your episodes so that it hooks listeners right out of the gate to increase your content consumption. Your percent of the episode consumed. All of these algorithms look at that data to say, this is content worth serving in search queries and suggestions for you. These podcast platforms say You might like this, you might like this. All of that is dependent on the performance of your episodes and how well optimized they are for the keywords that your audience is searching for. So just like you would optimize your webpage for Google search. Optimize your podcast episodes for Search on Apple and Spotify. The next, the next biggest way that listeners discover new shows is word of mouth. They ask their colleagues for recommendations. Hey, I wanna learn about this. Oh, well, I was listening to, uh, breaking Biz Dev the other day, and John and Mark were talking about three option pricing tables. You should go check that out. You could, it might help you with your proposal. So word of mouth is a great way, um, to discover new shows. You can encourage your listeners to share it with a friend, and I think that's probably the, the best way to do it. Um, the, some podcast hosts have referral programs in place, interestingly enough. Um, so I think that what that shows is that you can get creative with trying to generate more word of mouth referrals for your show. Recommendations from other podcasts was another one. So if you're listening to a podcast and they bring on a guest, and that guest is also the host of a different podcast, and they plug that show right there, you have a recommendation or referral from a podcast that you listen to. This is why I think that there's a huge opportunity. For podcast hosts to go and be guests on other shows so that they can plug their podcast. What better way to, uh, promote your show than to get access to an engaged audience of podcast listeners? Alright. Interestingly, the fourth top way that listeners discover new shows is from industry conferences and events. More and more I am starting to see pop up podcast booths at conferences. I was at the, uh, the Association for Accounting Marketing Summit in 2025, where Spiraling Up had a live podcast booth on the show floor right next to them. Resound Creative had a pop-up podcast booth for the Amplify Podcast. One of my clients, Aaron Ker, is the owner of Pipeline Design and Engineering. He hosts the Being an Engineer podcast and he does Man on the street types of interviews from his PDX, the Product Design Expo conference, which is held in Phoenix in the fall, I believe, October. And he wants to do more with podcasting at that live event. I was talking with, um, a guy who manufactures pop-up podcast studios out of recycled surfboard materials. Like this is a thing and people are craving in-person experiences. Um, and a podcast is a great way to. A live podcast is a great way to showcase personality. It's a great way to capture the energy of these live events. Um, so industry and conferences, and then rounding out the top five ways that listeners discover new podcasts. They run into video clips on social media, so almost 20% said that this is how they discover new shows is they are introduced or they find or stumble across those short form clips. And, uh, as someone who produces the short form clips and who sees all the analytics, I can tell you that the, the tools that say. We can pull hundreds of clips for you. That's true. They can. And what the, the, the product is perfectly reasonable if you, if you just wanted to share bites from your podcast. But the role of video shorts on social media isn't just to. Share your point of view. It's to capture attention. And what I've found is, um, the talking head videos pulled straight from Opus Clip or Riverside, they don't really move the needle a whole lot. But when you add some production value, like, um, having a still frame in the first few seconds, um. That hooks visually the listener's attention, or if you transition to b-roll every few seconds to visually shake it up for the listeners. Or if you add an awesome music track behind it, or if the captions are engaging and if you have data that you can share and other, other visual movements on screen. This is what holds people's attention when it comes to short form video and these AI tools today. They can give you a lot of content, but sometimes volume doesn't work. Sometimes you really need to go and look at is this an asset that is going to capture and hold attention, and is it going to draw? Our ideal clients into our marketing ecosystem, are they going to want to click through and consume the longer pieces of content? Alright, so those, those are the five top ways that listeners discover new shows. They search on their podcast platforms. They ask colleagues, colleagues for recommendations. They hear recommendations from other podcasts. They hear about podcasts, at industry conferences and events, and they run into those short form clips. On social media platforms like LinkedIn. The, the group of listeners in our sample, uh, we asked them, how often do you consume podcast media? And this is an active, uh, bunch, three and four of these podcast listeners reported tuning in at least weekly. Uh, a quarter of them said that they consume podcasts every single day. This just kind of blew me away. I was not expecting the listeners of podcasts to be this avid, but as a podcast listener to myself and reflecting on my own experience, yeah, I mean, I fall into this, this camp too. I listen to podcasts at least once a week and, um. Most days I don't even commute. I work from home. Um, so I'm listening in the car sometimes, but I'm also listening just, you know, tuning in on my phone and putting it in my pocket or putting it down on my desk as I work. Um, or I'll tune in as I'm folding laundry or, doing chores around the house, mowing the lawn. So. I fall into that camp and I think what this shows is that, you know, if folks are consuming, if there are Avid business podcast listeners out there and you are only publishing once a month, then you are, and you are competing against other shows that are putting episodes out every week. You're gonna get lost in the shuffle. I mean, it's just the mere exposure effect. Uh, and so I think that's what another reason why frequency plays into it is because the, the, the target clients that are active business podcast listeners, they're tuning in every week. All right. So how long should your podcast episode be? Now this is a topic that, um, I received a lot of really good feedback on when I, uh, published this topic on my newsletter. Uh, if you're not following the newsletter on LinkedIn, check it out. Podcasting and Pro Services, uh, you can sign up for the newsletter@redcedarmarketing.com. And, um, interestingly, we asked, uh, these listeners of business podcasts of your top shows. What is the typical podcast episode length that you listen to? 36% said that the podcasts they listen to are over 60 minutes long. More than 60 minutes. 60 plus minutes. 36% said that another 35% said that their. Top podcasts run between 40 and 60 minutes, so more than 70% of listeners said that the shows they listen to are more than 40 minutes long. Now, think about that. The average commute time is 25 minutes. The average time to mow a lawn is about 45. The average. Exercise length is about 20 minutes. So you'd think that a 30 minute podcast would be a sweet spot, and I think that that's the case, uh, for a lot of shows. But the reason I'm pointing this out is there is absolutely a market for long form content. There is demand for long form content. It's clear people are willing to sit down and listen for 60 minutes. I see it in the analytics from the hour long shows in my portfolio that we see consumption rates of up to 80% on those shows on average. Um, so folks are listening deep into these episodes and I think that has a lot to do with this next finding, and that is that business podcast listeners were nearly three times more likely to tune in while driving in a car than working at a computer. While driving in a car, their eyes are free to look at the road, but they're captive in listening to what you have to say. They don't have distractions like notifications, email, social media, where, or switching between tabs, needing, looking at the clock saying, oh, I've gotta pause this podcast episode 'cause I have a Zoom call coming up right when you're driving in a car. It's just you and the podcast. I think that plays into the podcast episode length in that sure. The average commute might be 25 minutes, but 25 minutes to work. 25 minutes home. That's about 80% of an hour long episode. So, um, I'll leave you with this. I. If you are a business podcaster and you're thinking, how can I improve my show? Download this executive summary, I think you'll find a lot of value. Um, reach out to me on LinkedIn. Go to red cedar marketing.com. Send us a contact form, and let's have a conversation and let's chat about where your podcast is, what it could do to improve, Then we, and then let's explore what we can do to support and make that happen for you. Uh, hopefully you found this podcast helpful, insightful, um, go to the, go to red cedar marketing.com and download a copy of the study. And if you're interested in joining the business Podcaster Collective, apply to join@redcedarmarketing.com. We'll have all the links for everything in the show notes as well. If you made it this far, please leave a rating and review of podcasting in professional services wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you next time. Happy podcasting. I.