5 Ways To Deal With An Unexpected Drop In Podcast Listenership

A Simple Five-Step Recipe For Sorting Out Dwindling Downloads

Are you noticing your downloads and listen metrics beginning to tail off? Don’t panic, but it might be time to make a few changes to help your podcast listenership.

After several years of logarithmic growth, 2020 was witness to some rocky download numbers. While those grim statistics seem to be a blip, it got me thinking about how to deal with a declining audience.

After all, nothing good lasts forever. Well, nothing lasts forever, but that’s a different post.

So what do you do when the gravy train begins to dry up? As luck would have it, there are some tweaks you can make to your podcast that should help your listenership rebound.

If they don’t, it’s always a good idea to have an eye on your escape plan. With that, let’s jump right into how to deal with declining listenership.

Step 1: Step Back and Analyze Your Podcast’s Situation

The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. And unless you are taking a good hard look at your show, you can’t know if you have a problem. Let alone a solvable problem.

Like I said, the pandemic gave the industry as a whole a bit of a rough go in 2020. But that’s a once in a century global pandemic. Not exactly within the locus of your control.

The first step is to determine if you have an internal problem you can address. Or, do you have an external problem you can try to ride out.

A listenership problem you can solve comes down to one of two tranches:

• Audience retention
• Audience acquisition

So then, how do we deal with those issues?

Step 2: Revisit Your Listener Avatar

Nothing stays the same. Including audiences.

Trends shift, interest wanes, and proclivities change.

People evolve. That’s true of your audience the same as it is with the content creator. A good podcast producer or producer/host checks in with their audience avatar regularly. They ensure they have a good, objective, feel for their metrics.

Scott Galloway often mentions, in passing, that his audience skews younger and male. That’s a good sign the show has an intimate understanding of their listener base.

Now is a great time to revisit your listener avatar. While you’re at it, set a recurring calendar reminder to do so at least every six months.

The folks at Digital Marketer have created an excellent episode on this subject.

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Step 3: Cultivating an Audience

Now that you have a good idea of whom you think is listening to your show, and have juxtaposed that against your actual listener base, it is time to deliver.

Revisit Familiar Content

The first place to look for content that works for your show is to look at content that has already worked. This means it’s time to unseal the archives and see what works.

While looking back at your old shows may feel stale to you as the content producer, it won’t for your listeners. You have to remember, and keep reminding yourself, that you’ve been there for every show you’ve produced. By definition, it’s going to feel intimate and familiar.

But for the audience, that isn’t the case. A new subscriber may not have heard the original episode. A longtime listener may have missed the episode because they had the kid’s carpool that day and never got back to it.

Your archives are a gold mine of engagement.

Step Up Your Social Engagement Game

There’s a misconception in podcasting that it’s a lonely endeavor. That a podcast is single person creating. Or a podcast is a few people having a conversation into a microphone while pressing the record button. Send that creation off into the interwebs and BAM!

The reality is that a successful podcast is a social one. A successful podcast is a conversation with the audience. Only one person is talking, but there’s a back and forth that needs to happen.

The most cost-efficient way to get those wheels turning is social media.

It can take some time to set up, but you aren’t starting from scratch. All that work you did on your listener avatar should give you a good idea where your audience is hanging out. Choose the platform that makes the most sense for your show. 

Invite your listeners and guests to engage with each other there.

If you’re able to facilitate legitimate networking, your show provides extraordinary value.

Step 4: Audience Acquisition

If your audience hasn’t reached critical mass, or your listener attrition is too high, you are going to have to focus on marketing.

Hub and Spoke Approach

Your podcast is your main focus, right? The goal is to get new years tuned in to your audio. The unfortunate reality is that not everyone who hears your podcast is going to come to it by way of an algorithm.

That may have worked early on when there were a few thousand podcasts. But the past few years’ exponential industry growth has changed that. There are a million podcasts now. A million.

That’s a lot of noise to cut through.

Think of your podcast as the hub of a wheel. And around that wheel are spokes. Each of those spokes is a marketing channel to get new years to your show.

Then you’ll want to focus on what’s most effective.

Blogging

If you haven’t considered a blog for your show, you should. As a broadcaster, you might not feel like a writer, but considering the fact that you’ve got the bulk of the content already created, it is hard to pass that up.

While a broad swath of the population has listened to a podcast, it’s nowhere near how many people read blogs.

If you don’t want to write the blog yourself, you can post a transcription, or hire a service to translate your audio into a proper written format.

Brett McKay’s Art of Manliness podcast started out as a blog way back in 2008. Ancient really. Brett and Kate have kept blogging at the heart of their brand, and each podcast produced is tightly interwoven with their blog.

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Video

There’s no question that video consumption is going to continue to rise. And, like blogging, there’s more fish in that sea to catch.

Filming your show can boost your engagement numbers significantly. Potential listeners might discover your show when watching YouTube in their flat. They might end up downloading some audio shows to take with them on their commute.

Video is particularly useful for interview formats, and the technology is baked right into your phone.

I actually stumbled upon NPR’s Code Switch podcast not through any podcast aggregator, but on YouTube while doing “Karen” meme research. Now I’m hooked. It just goes to show that you don’t even need to film the show so much as just have a YouTube presence.

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Guest Interviews

Take your message to someone else’s audience. I’ve covered this before, but being a guest on another podcaster’s show is a phenomenal way to get in front of potential listeners.

Not only are you getting more content out there, you’re getting promotional help. It’s tough to go wrong being a guest on another show.

Step 5: Winding Up

Every once in a while, declining listener numbers means that a show is coming to an end. Nothing lasts forever after all.

A show that ends intentionally leaves you, as the content creator, with several opportunities.

Remember that million podcast number? Estimates vary, but there are nowhere near a million podcasts actively producing content.

Set a Wind Down Schedule

Let your audience know that you aren’t going to be producing new content for this show. Let them know what is next for you and where they can support your new venture.

Treat your listeners with respect and as part of the show. A significant portion of your core listeners will follow and support your endeavor.

Ezra Kline’s departure was well done. He spent a few weeks recording intros for shows from the archive. Shows that were of particular interest around the time the show was ending. It put a nice little bow on the whole project before it transitioned to become “Vox Conversations.”

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A Note on Podfading

Podfading refers to pulling a disappearing act. As if the show was cancelled, midstream, without warning.

While this does happen and it can feel like a reasonable response to a dwindling audience, try to avoid it.

Your content lives on. It’s not beamed out into space never to be heard from like some pedestrian radio broadcast. What happens if someone stumbles upon your show three years from now and decides to binge it?

You want to leave them with some expectations and a calling card to find your current work. It’s also a reason to set up affiliate/referral links that you control. That way you can point them wherever you’d like into perpetuity.

Conclusion

Declining listener numbers are something every Podcaster will experience at some point. When it happens, it’s critical that you don’t panic.

Take a big step back and figure out where the water that’s sinking your show is rushing in. And do so early enough that when you plug the leak, you have enough float to bail yourself out.

Look at your numbers, look at your avatars, and make a plan.

And remember, sometimes, that plan is to move on. That’s okay too.

Have a new show you’ve been producing? Let us know on twitter (@discover_pods & @jamesjgriffin) and you can count on at least one new download.