Focus on These 5 Audience Building Lessons from the Worst Ever Year’s Best Podcasts

Did you watch the podcast industry have one of it’s best years ever while the rest of the world was falling apart? Were you concerned that your show might not have been growing at the same rate or keeping pace?

You’re not alone.

2020 was a bonkers year that ground society to a halt and forced every industry to progress 10 years in only 8 months. It was jarring to say the least. Trying to get out of our pajamas, let alone grow something like an audience was damned near impossible.

This year produced some of the best podcasting ever to be committed to hard disk. So it made sense to take a step back and glean a few lessons in audience building from the shows that got it right.

Let’s apply these lessons to our own shows in what is going to be a brighter, happier, and healthier 2021.

Lesson 1: Read the Topical Room

Human beings are terrible when it comes to predicting the future. Even under normal circumstances. But anyone who told you they knew what was going to happen in 2020 was either

• Clairvoyant
• Lying
• Or an epidemiologist… and, it turns out, nobody listens to them anyway.

This left most producers and hosts scrambling. And that’s understandable. I mean, what else were they supposed to do?

The successful shows were able to read the room and pivot programming as needed. After all, 2020 saw the convergence of three major, seismic cultural phenomena. COVID-19 was a once in several generation global catastrophe. Unprecedented in almost everyone’s lifetime. But it didn’t stand alone in the pantheon of crazy goings-on.

Alongside COVID-19 was the presidential election, which was, shall we say, heated. You can also add the Black Lives Matter protests and general civil reckoning that came along with those.

Some of the highest traffic shows this year were dealing with those hot button topics. Though, without staying power. Each of those topics burned bright in the download metrics, leveled off, and quieted down.

But as a tool and lesson for audience building? Addressing topics your audience can’t avoid head on is a solid strategy. It reinforces that intimate relationship between creator and audience. Especially in a world where we’re quite literally, all in this together.

Lesson 2: Experiment and Change

In the same way as reading the room topically was an audience building must in 2020, riding the wave of change was important as well. As Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) explains on his show, COVID-19 was a 10-year accelerator.

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Again, predicting the future is difficult under the best circumstances. We just don’t know what’s going to work, so it’s incumbent upon creators interested in audience building to use this time to experiment.

Take a look at one of the best shows of the year, Nice White Parents. The team behind Serial had a winning formula, without question. They more or less invented the viral binge podcast. In 2020 though? They took a pretty big risk venturing into new, controversial, territory.

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Did this gamble pay off? Looks like it did. Will every gamble? Of course not. But we aren’t here to talk about audience retention… we’re learning about audience growth.

Lesson 3: Embrace Imperfection for More Audience Building

If 2020 wasn’t the final nail in the coffin for the “Instagram Life” then it was close to the last. The idea that perfection is something attainable seems antiquated. The notion that someone at the top of the pedestal lives outside the realm of the fallible feels silly.

One of the upshots of being in this together is that it was a pretty humbling experience for some and empowering for others. If Tom Hanks can get COVID-19, well, anything is possible. Did you see how many A-List productions had major imperfections?

How many kids were in the background of zoom calls? Or can be heard on the audio of podcasts recorded on the fly from home offices while the nanny is in lockdown?

Imperfection was everywhere and it granted us permission to be human. That humanity made the whole experience more authentic and more endearing. And that made for better podcasting.

At all times a good content creator is reaching through their medium to connect with the consumer. In a weird way, that raw humanity made connection that much easier.

Successful audience building creators embraced imperfection and audiences rewarded them for the transparency. Do likewise in 2021.

Within reason… you need to be putting forth the effort. Which brings us to…

Lesson 4: Take the Work Seriously, Earn the Trust

Was it that we got complacent before COVID-19? It’s possible.

Regardless, it’s been a fantastic chance to take a step back and evaluate what we’ve been doing. Speaking for myself, I may have been phoning it in a bit. Maybe I was shooting for that unrealistic level of perfection.

I’m not sure, but I was off the mark and maybe you’ve got a hint of that as well. That’s okay. Looking at some better podcasts this year has helped to recalibrate how to do meaningful work in a meaningless age.

Working this year was hard. No doubt about that. It was hard to create, but it was hard for audiences as well. The entire world was off its axis. Podcasts that were well-received this year and did well audience building served as anchors. They were audio waypoints in a landscape devoid of landmarks.

This meant earning trust. It meant doing your best work, but it meant delivering on what you said you were going to do. It meant keeping promises.

What that may practically look like for your show is doing fewer episodes, but making them better. Set the expectation with the audience that,

“Hey, life is hard, I might not be producing as many shows this year, but you can count on hearing me every other Wednesday from now on.”

When they open their app of choice on that second Wednesday… your show had better be there if you want those download numbers to tick up.

And while you’re doing fewer shows…

Lesson 5: Time Limited Deep Dives

Consider wrapping a few of these lessons together to dig a bit deeper and create some standalone series or segments. Quite a few of the best and most downloaded shows this year happened to be mini-series or topic specific.

It makes sense. The world was looking for escapism from, well, reality in general. With even the experts making guesses, the totality of unfamiliarity was overwhelming. It felt good to load up your favorite podcast app and check out for a couple of hours with a period piece, or a true crime documentary, or a slightly fictionalized story about recent history.

They were podcasts that had an intentionally defined end. An arc with a beginning, middle, and end. Unlike everything else that was going on, these podcasts had a sense of certitude to them.

It felt nice to commit to something finite for a little while.

And as such, the audiences ate them up.

Consider producing some content in the same vein for 2021. Tight, siloed work, that digs a bit deeper than a single episode or interview could provide. It gives you a chance to explore your passions, narrow your focus, and further define your show’s niche.

We won’t always be in such rough waters, but no matter how intense the storm, it’s nice to know there’s a safe harbor to slip into for a bit of rest.

Conclusion

2020 was a strange, fractious, year. On the one hand, some of the best podcasts ever were produced. On the other, even established podcasts had a hard time creating content that resonated. If you found your show having a hard time with audience building in 2020, you weren’t alone.

If we take a step back at what was successful, there are some bright throughlines for our own shows moving forward. Stop trying to be perfect, be more human, and set expectations are a few. And the more we realize that 2020 was one of those years that’s going to take us all a while to process, the better.

Spend some time experimenting to see what gains traction, like on The James Altucher Show. Remember why you started your show in the first place. Get back to drawing effort from that space and audience building should come naturally.

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And if it doesn’t? Well, there’s always a reboot.