Understanding podcast audiences: implications for marketing

Podcasts can serve multiple marketing functions such as tools for content marketing, engagement and advertising vehicles. However, podcasts remain under-researched, and understandings about their audiences are limited to snapshots or aggregates of all podcast listeners. To address this research gap and add new understandings, this research explored audiences of a specific podcast to understand the relationship they had with the podcast and the podcast’s topic. The findings supported prior research that audiences tend to be younger, highly educated and highlighted their engagement and loyalty via the respondents’ interactions with the podcast’s social media, hosts and crowd funding. However, the results also highlighted the narrowness of audiences’ interest in the podcast’s topic.