The Best Way to Grow Your Business in 2018

Collin Graves
ART + marketing
Published in
3 min readOct 3, 2017

If you have never heard me say it before, here it goes:

Podcasting is the single most powerful way to grow your business, and will be for the foreseeable future.

This is important to clarify, because many of you will read this and think, “Yeah right, Collin. Everyone knows video is king.”

While it may true that video reigns supreme in terms of attention, there’s a purity to podcasting that offers many critical benefits to businesses and brands that video has trouble keeping up with.

First, the very nature of podcasting is passive, meaning it can be consumed by listeners without the same level of attention necessary to watch a video. You can listen to podcasts during your morning commute, while doing yard work, or during playtime with the kids. But this interaction with listeners isn’t just awesome from a time-savings standpoint. It means listeners are letting you into their daily routines — into their personal lives. And when that happens, a certain caliber of relationship is formed between the listener and the podcast host. It becomes a relationship more akin to friendship.

The second benefit to podcasting is due to the ridiculously powerful demographics of podcast listeners.

Monthly podcast listenership has grown by 14% since 2016, up to 67 MILLION listeners. That’s 24% of the American population over the age of 12, and that number continues to be made up of older and older adults, which is good for business.

85% of podcast listeners are sticking around for all (or most) of an episode when they begin listening, and 65% of podcast listeners are able to recall an advertisement they heard on an episode consumed 24 hours prior. Try pulling off those numbers with social media ads!

Podcast listeners make more money, too. According to Nielsen, the average podcast listener makes $12,000 more per year than a non-listening American counterpart, and 16% of podcast listeners make over $150,000 per year.

What’s the takeaway from all of this?

Podcasts have been around for quite awhile, but consumption has climbed to levels that are impossible to ignore. Listeners are savvy, affluent, and well-educated. They are also more engaged with their particular shows, as demonstrated by their ability to recall information from an episode more than a day later.

Launching a podcast in 2018 will put your business in front of engaged, educated consumers with more disposable income than the average American. The upward trend of listenership all but guarantees that more businesses will be launching podcasts, too, so your show’s quality will be important as listeners become more picky as a result of additional supply. Pick a niche your business specializes in, and pack each episode full of value. Your business will thank you!

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Collin Graves
ART + marketing

Founder of North Labs. We lead companies through their cloud-native modernization efforts focusing on DevOps and Data & Analytics Enablement