How to Understand Your Podcast Listeners

going deep today? Because we are going to talk about understanding your audience's habits. And what that looks like. This is something that I've been getting a lot more follow up questions. If you listen to my recent episode all about how do I know if my podcast message is working? Whenever I did that initial training, and then you know, since that episode has been published, I have done exactly what I said to do in that episode, which is ask then listen, then ask a follow-up question.

Because people will tell me, Oh, that information was helpful. And then the first thing I asked or first thing I say back to them is thank you, what

did you find most helpful? And from there that starts like a follow-up conversation that can help me one understand my audience that I'm actually delivering that message to, but to it helps me realize, oh, man, I totally why have we not talked about this more, we need to talk about understanding your audience, the people that are currently listening to your podcast, as well as who you want to listen to your show in the future. So that's what we're talking about today. So let's

get right to it. Welcome to the profit podcast where we teach entrepreneurs how to start launch and market their podcast. I'm your host, Krystal, Proffitt, and I'm so excited that you're here. Thanks for hanging out with me today. Because if you've been trying to figure out the world of podcasting, think of this show as the time-saving shortcut you've been looking for. So let's get right to it, shall we?

really wants. And this baffles people, like it will have people whenever I tell them, Oh, they want exactly this, this and this, they look at me like, how do you know? Like, how do you actually know, because with podcasters, if you're brand new, you may not know this, you may not know, if you haven't been putting out consistent content for a few consecutive weeks, then you may not know

exactly what your audience wants. But if you've been podcasting for three months, six months, 12 months, then you should have a pretty good idea, especially if you've been podcasting for at least 12 months, what your audience wants from you what type of content they respond to. And what we're going to do today is I'm actually going to dive through some of my own strategies for how I know without a shadow of a doubt what my audience

really wants. But we're also going to dive into some resources that I have used to understand the bigger population of all podcast listeners. So we're going to go pretty micro, as they say right now, and then we're going to go into the macro later on. But I know that if you're listening to this podcast, you want to know what I'm doing. You want to know how I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, what my audience really responds to.

putting out so much content. Because if you're brand new around here, or you haven't heard me say this before, I create around 10 pieces of content every single week. That doesn't even include social post. So I am creating content For the potty report, which is my daily podcast, it comes out Monday through Friday, it's five minutes or less. I also have two episodes that go out for the profit podcast. I also publish three YouTube

videos a week, and I have my email newsletter. And like I said, that doesn't even include social posts, that is just strictly content. And it's also the reason why I can say, without a shadow of a doubt what my audience wants for me, because I'm constantly testing content. And so whenever I share with you, my stats, or how I can understand more about my audience, it's because I'm putting a lot of it out there. And I don't do it just because because let's be honest, it's a lot of

work. It's a lot of work to create that much content every single week. But what I have done in creating that type of content is I've established an authority. It's kind of like, instead of just putting stuff out there that's like, oh, you know, I hope that this one video goes viral, I have put out multiple videos that are now all I'm talking about YouTube, specifically right now. But I put out a lot of videos that are now all linked back

to one another. And they reference each other in a way that keeps people watching my channel and they eventually are coming to my Facebook group, they're coming to the podcast or listening to the potty report. And so everything is kind of steadily growing over time. But with a podcast, what I've done is putting out two episodes a week allows me to see, does my audience prefer my solo episodes more? Or do they love the interviews? Or do they like specific people that are on the

podcast? And how can I tell all of these things between my podcast and my YouTube? Well, I can look at my stats. So first I want to dive into and I'm gonna link to an episode I've done previously about kind of how I've looked at my numbers for my YouTube and my podcast before because we're not going to dive into the numbers today. Don't worry if your eyes crossed earlier, when I talked about like, Oh, we're gonna dive like we're, I'm not going into this specific stats, because I've

already done an episode on that. But what I'm going to tell you is the trends that I look at. And so when I look at my stats, and y'all know I use Buzzsprout, if you didn't know this, you could go check out my favorite hosting site, it's Krystal. proffitt.com, forward slash Buzzsprout, you can go grab a 90 day free trial with them. But what I love about Buzzsprout is they have amazing

statistics that I can look at. So I can go in and see over seven days, 30 days, 90 days or all time, which episodes are performing the best, y'all this is not rocket science. This is what I do. I go in, when I sit down to plan my podcast, I can see,

well, these are my top five podcast episodes. What else can I talk about about these specific topics, which is why if you come to the podcast, you see me talk about if you were to go into wherever you're listening to this show, and scroll back through, you'll see that there's reoccurring topics that I've talked about. So many times, there's probably 20 Plus episodes, about content creation, podcast ideas, just different ways to

plan. And that's because those episodes consistently perform really well on the podcast. So it tells me innately right there. I understand that about my listeners, y'all want to know about planning content, because you don't want to get overwhelmed and you don't want to burn out and you want to make sure you're delivering a good message to your audience. are you nodding along right now? You're like that she knows me? How does she know me? It's because I pay attention. I pay attention

to what my numbers are telling me that way. I'm not guessing behind the scenes, what's actually happening. So how does this translate to you looking at your numbers will simply go into your podcast hosting dashboard and see which podcast episodes are performing the best? Which ones have the most downloads or which ones had a huge spike right after you published it? Because there are

breadcrumbs to success. And you should follow those because maybe it had to do with the big marketing campaign that you are a part of, or maybe it had to do with me. And that topic just shot up because people really wanted to hear about it, or you shared something that was new that you'd never shared on the podcast before. So you have to pay attention to what your numbers are

telling you. Now I also use I talked about YouTube, my YouTube stats I will go in and if you're using YouTube user or for any other platform where you create a lot of content, and you can sort your numbers this way, this is what I recommend. So I will go into my YouTube dashboard. And I see all my videos are listed there. I go over into content. And I can sort by how many views each video has gotten. So I can tell you my

top 10 videos, just by looking at them. And one thing I know about my audience, this is mostly my audience on YouTube, but it translate a little bit to what the podcast is, as well. It's slightly different. But I know on YouTube, people love it. When I put out a solo podcast video, y'all I'm not even kidding. As soon as I put out a video about solo podcasting, it shoots up and shoots up. And I

know this, I know this about my channel. And it's why I put out so many videos about solo podcasting, it's not because it's my favorite thing to talk about. I like talking about a solo podcast. That's what I'm doing today. Like I feel really comfortable talking about how to be more successful as a solo podcaster how to have strategy behind it. But the real reason why I create a lot of content about a solo podcast on my channel, it's because it's what my audience wants.

And I know this about them, because the numbers don't lie they are right there, I can go and see exactly what my listeners want. So I encourage you to do this, if you have another. Let's see a YouTube channel, you could also kind of factor in your social media channels as well. I didn't include that today, simply because that's not where I'm creating the consistent content that's going to make the biggest impact. The most important ones for me are the podcast in my

YouTube channel. Social media is secondary emails, also really important. But those stats are a little bit harder to read. But the other one that I want to talk about, and this is the third one, right, we talked about your podcast talked about YouTube, if you have that. But your third one is your website's. This one right here. This is one that I don't talk about a lot simply because I know a lot of you are in the trenches right now, you are just trying to get your podcast off the

ground. And you can hear me clicking, I'm clicking around on my Google Analytics, because we're going to talk about a little bit of these today. But if you're not here, if you do not currently have a independent website for your podcast, let's say you're just using the one that your hosting provider assigned to you, you know, the one that you have through them, or you're using pod page or using something else like that. I think that's fantastic. That's a great place to get started.

But what I would encourage you, I would encourage you to aspire to have your own website for your podcast, or have your podcasts be a part of the larger portion of your website. But what I'm doing is I'm going to go in, and if you have Google Analytics, you'll understand this, I'm going to go into the site content for my website. And I can see this specific pages. I'm just looking from January 1 2021, to today's date, which is December 13. And I can tell you right off the bat, the top

10 most visited page pages on my website. And the first one is my homepage. The second one is my podcast page. And the third one is episode 93. Now y'all, I can't even tell you off the top of my head what episode 93 is of this podcast. So I'm actually going to click on it. And I'm going to see what is episode 93. Because I need to know what that is. And I this is where the coach in me comes out because I'm really passionate about understanding how all the different factors of

your podcast work together. And this is something that we're going to be doing in our group coaching program that we're launching in January. I'm so excited about it, because what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a podcast audit. And it's not just, Oh, your podcast sounds great. It's like getting into the nitty gritty of the SEO of your podcast, your marketing strategy. We're going to talk about a website if you don't currently have one. We're going to talk about how to get you one

in the next six months. And then we're going to just go into all of these details that are really specific to creating a podcast business, if you will, because that is where I hope everybody is going. Not just I want to put out a content because it sounds fun. I want you putting out podcast content because you love it and it's also making you money. Okay, like that's just that's my pitch for January like our group coaching session. that's going to be amazing. I cannot wait for it.

But I'm looking at episode 93 of the profit podcast, which in the last year has gotten close to 5000 pageviews. Like, that's a big deal. That's a big deal that like, Man, that is a lot of pageviews. And what it is, is this episode is about a podcast tagline, how to create yours. So, again, going back to the initial concept of this episode, How To understand your listeners, I'm also understanding my potential audience members, because maybe because I can tell you right now,

this episode hasn't gotten 5000 downloads. But what it tells me is that there are 5000 people, roughly, let's page views. Let me see about individual users unique page views is 1700. So that means there are 1700 people out there in the world that are wanting to know about podcast taglines, and they went to my webpage because of it. So should I talk more about podcast taglines?

Yeah, I think so. That's a pretty big deal. So whenever I sit down to do more planning, whenever I sit down to ask, Well, what should I talk about on the podcast? Podcast taglines should maybe it should be a YouTube video. Maybe it should be an entire podcast episode. There's another one down here, Episode 137. Let's see what that one is.

See, this is so interesting to me. Because I will go through and I do this probably every quarter to second quarter or you know, every other quarter, I will go in and see okay, I had a feeling that's what this one is. Episode 137, which is the top it's the fifth most visited page on my website is what is explicit content? What does it mean? And the reason why I created that is because people kept asking me, well, if I mark something explicit on the podcast, like, what does that actually

mean? Or how should I mark something that's explicit is damn, like I say, Damn, is that explicit? Well, no, I don't think it is, you should go listen to episode if you want to know more about explicit content, and everything that goes along with that. But I can tell you this is this is important too. And now I understand more about my audience. So if you have a website, like I said, this is a little bit more advanced. This isn't for just if you're getting started, and

you're beginning right now. But if you're someone that's been podcasting, you have a website, go to your analytics, go to your pages and see, well, if I'm doing shownotes, for the podcast, which ones are getting visited the most, because you want to make sure that those are optimized that they have the ability to do some lead generation, get people on your email list, you want to make sure that you have a link to recent episodes, or whatever that looks like for you, whatever your goals are. But

you have to do this. So you understand your listeners better.

getting way too nerdy on y'all? Yes, I am. I warned you earlier. So you can't say you can't turn it off and say Krystal didn't warn us. I warned you earlier that we were getting super, super nerdy. But what they're doing is they did all of this research to understand listeners, and what they call spoken word is actually not just podcasting. And they have a whole bunch of definitions in here. I'm not going to go through

this whole report. It's 5050 something pages, but I am going to jump down to the key findings that they have. So number one is spoken words share of audio listening has increased by 40% over the last seven years 40% So spoken word as in compared to music or just listening to the radio. So this is what their research was done on. I'm like, I want to do my own big survey market analysis on on podcast listeners in a totally different way.

Maybe that's something I'll put together for the next year like the nerdiness in me, My heart just like skipped a beat because that sounds like so much fun. I've told you before market research was one of my favorite classes in school. I know super nerd super nerd over here, whatever. You know, I just I told y'all I'm not gonna I'm not gonna hold who I am behind the scenes. This is really what gets my heart pumping. But the other thing that they found is spoken word has grown 8%, just in

this year just in 2021 alone. And I think it's just telling us, hey, there's a lot of opportunity for podcasters because people are actually listening, people are listening, it'd be different if you were just putting out content. But there are people that are already listening to spoken word audio, that's audio books, podcasts, you know, all kinds of different radio shows that are on like, there's so many different ways that you can define spoken word, but it's so incredible.

It's so incredible. The second key finding that they have is spoken words, audio growth is driven by large increases in young and multicultural audiences. So this is really interesting, because when I look at, like my oldest son, he's 12. He doesn't listen to podcast, but he is in love with watching YouTube, he watches gamers on YouTube, he'll watch, Dude Perfect. I've talked about them before. I love dude, perfect. They're so incredible. I think that they have a great message

that they send to kids. But when I look at them, my son and the people that are his age, they're not really into the podcast space right now. But they will be in the next few years. And so I look at what an awesome opportunity for you to create something that will really be something impactful for this next generation that's coming up right now. And why not go ahead and get better at your podcast as these people get older and start moving into a different demographic of listeners, because

maybe they're not listening right now. But they will be in the next six to 10 years. So I just see that as a huge opportunity. Because I think back to my parents. And I just remember my mom listening to books on tape. And she still calls it that and I love I love you. I love you mom so much. I'm not making fun of you, I promise. But I love it just the other day. She said oh yeah, I'll still listen to a book on tape. And I didn't want to correct her. But I like mom as the audiobook.

That's the audiobook. But it's just it's so funny, because that's what we grew up listening to in the car with my mom is she literally had cassette tapes that she'd put in and that was the audiobook and we would y'all we listened to so many books, I always like made sure and had my Walkman and put my headphones in, so I don't have to listen to her Western or whatever she was listening to. But it's just so interesting. So just know that audio spoken word audio is going to continue to increase

in the coming years. And then the third key finding that they had is while most listeners sight the ability to multitask, one of the main motivations for spoken word audio listening, young and multicultural audiences are more likely to cite other regions. Other reasons, cannot talk, y'all. And I'm trying to read this. That's why this is people ask me all the time, or do you use a script? No. And this is why I feel get tongue

tied to read. But multicultural audiences are more likely to cite other reasons for listening, such as connection, education, new perspectives, and self improvement. This is so awesome. So in other words, and I'm gonna paraphrase what this means is, people aren't just listening to a podcast passively, like Oh, instead of listen to a song, right? You listen to the new Taylor Swift song, when you're washing the dishes or whatever, you're not actively like, oh, I need to take every single

lyric in. Maybe you are if you're a huge Taylor Swift Fan. But most of the time, you're just listening to it passively. But what they're saying here is in their key findings, is that people are listening to it for connection, education, new perspectives, and self improvement. And I know 90% of you listening to this podcast, are in this space is to connect people, to educate people, to give people new perspectives and to help them with

self improvement. So you 100% fall into this category of why people are listening to podcast, okay, so I want you to go like I said, I'm not going to go through this whole thing. It's 52 pages long, but I wanted to just give you a few of the instances of why this report would be super, super helpful for you. And then the other resource is if you do want to learn more about podcasting, and some of the kind of more technical or industry side of it, then I encourage you to subscribe to

the pod news, email News. letter I don't get any kickback for this. I'm not an affiliate for them. But I am subscribe to their newsletter because I want to stick up to or I want to stick up to, I want to keep up with the podcast industry trends. And this is where I get that information. So if you're not ready to go into the podcast industry, or if you're not really you know, you're like, Oh, that's too much for me. That's cool. But pod news

email newsletter, highly recommend it. Okay, let's go into the final way that I try to understand my podcast audience more. And I talked about this again, I'm going to link to the recent episode that we did about how to know if my podcast message is working. And that's serving your audience. When was the last time you asked your audience anything, right? Don't create your content in a vacuum. This is so important. Don't just talk to yourself. And then never ask your

audience what they think. And don't just have interviews and put them out and never say, Hey,

did you enjoy this episode you did? What was your favorite part about it, you want to have that follow up, because you want to understand how you can give them better content in the future, you want to make sure that you are still delivering content that one they've either asked for, or two that you know will help them either get to the next level or overcome something like there's a lot of different ways that you can approach how your content is helping your audience.

or This podcast was made just for you. That's when you should be doing the happy dance because you've really made it as amazing podcaster but that's all I have for you today. All the things that we talked about including the links to all the articles and the videos and the previous podcast episodes we've done about this will be in the show notes. So KrystalProffitt.com/episode316, 316. And if this is your first time tuning in, welcome to

the show. I'm so happy that you're here. Make sure you hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening to this podcast and I would love it if you would leave us a rating and a review. Tell us what you thought about today's episode or about another episode of the podcast or what you want to learn from the show in the future. But that's all I have for you today. So as always remember, keep it up. We all have to start somewhere.