What Podcast Listeners Say About How They Discover Shows (& Why They Stop Listening) | Podcast Listener Psychology

There’s no shortage of advice to be found on how to grow your audience. But how closely does that advice align with how podcast listeners say they actually find, choose (and abandon) the shows they listen to?

It turns out, there are a number of surveys that have asked listeners to share their discovery and consumption habits. And while the data can sometimes contradict itself, it offers us as creators a peek behind the curtain into podcast listeners’ hidden psychology, so that we can better meet them where they’re at with our marketing and our shows.

What’s more, this data offers us a blueprint for the questions to ask (and avoid) when conducting our own listener research.
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Topics Covered

00:00 Should you listen to your listeners feedback? 
05:42 The Mom Test 
08:23 How listeners discover podcasts: Active vs. passive 
16:07 Understanding the broader context behind audience behaviour 
26:33 Discovery doesn't matter without distinctiveness 
31:02 Why listeners stop listening 
39:13 Doing your own audience research

⭐️ Get a free podcast marketing audit with personalized recommendations to help you grow: https://podcastmarketingacademy.com/audit ⭐️

Resource

The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick
Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Life Profitability by Adii Pienaar.
Tom Webster 

Additional Resources

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Podcast Listener Psychology
Understanding why people listen to podcasts—and why they stop—is an essential aspect of improving the efficiency of your marketing—ie. more growth with less effort. Listener psychology encompasses everything from understanding attention spans and content preferences to parasocial relationships and listening habits.

Most podcast creators focus exclusively on content without considering the baked in psychology that is hard-wired into their listeners. The result is unwittingly marketing your show on hard mode. Learn to understand the cognitive biases, emotional triggers, and decision-making patterns that influence how all humans (including me, you, and all your listeners) discover, consume, and share podcast content, you can create shows that not only attract listeners but turn them into dedicated fans who recommend your podcast to others.

About Podcast Marketing Trends Explained
Podcast Marketing Trends Explained is a podcast about data-driven podcast marketing, growth, and monetization. In every episode, we take a peek under the hood of one data point from the Podcast Marketing Trends Report and dig into what it can tell us about how to market our shows better, and grow them faster.

On the show, we'll explore podcast marketing strategies, growth tactics, podcast listener psychology, how to create a better podcast, how to use a podcast to market your products and services and grow your business, and broader marketing trends to help you grow your audience and stay ahead of the competition.

The show is hosted by Jeremy Enns from Podcast Marketing Academy and the Scrappy Podcasting Newsletter, and Justin Jackson from podcast hosting platform Transistor.fm.