Benchmarks for Business Podcasts: The 2025 State of Podcasting in Professional Services

How does your business podcast compare with others in your industry?

In this monologue episode, John Tyreman breaks down findings from research on a sample of 287 business podcasts in accounting, financial services, architecture, engineering, construction, legal, government contracting, technology, and consulting industries.

Listen to this episode and you’ll learn:

• How active business podcasts make up a tiny fraction of active shows
• A show structure that doubles promotion and reduces production cost
• The point at which most podcasts go inactive
• How frequently shows publish episodes in each industry segment

Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johntyreman/

References:

PodMatch Industry Report: https://podmatch.com/report
Backlinko report: https://backlinko.com/podcast-stats

This episode was produced by Red Cedar Marketing. Need help launching and running a business podcast that actually produces results? Visit www.redcedarmarketing.com.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:25 Macro trends
• 4:08 Opportunity for business shows
• 6:39 Sample breakdown
• 8:26 Benefits of co-hosted shows
• 12:03 Inactive show analysis
• 14:37 Episode frequency benchmarks
• 17:04 Episode download benchmarks
• 21:06 Conclusion

Transcript

0:05

Welcome business podcasters to another episode of podcasting and professional services. I'm your host, John Tyerman. And today we have a special episode. I'm going to go over some research that I've done from some secondary sources, as well as for the past year or so, I've been compiling data on different podcasts that serve the professional services space. So podcasts that focus on the accounting industry. Podcasts that focus on the AEC industry, the consulting industry, the legal industry, government contracting, and technology. Those are the different industry segments that I've identified and have started to build out a database of podcasts of shows. There's almost 300 shows that I've identified that are in this sample that I'm going to go over today. So, yeah, so this, this is going to be really, really interesting. If you're listening to this, I'll describe the data for folks that are listening to this on Apple or Spotify, but you can also follow along with visuals on my YouTube channel. So go to YouTube, search for podcasting in professional services. Search for me, John Tyerman, and you should find my YouTube channel. Go ahead and subscribe to that too. So you can get notified of new videos and new episodes. This, this episode today is actually going to kick off season two of the show. My goal is to continue interviewing successful business show hosts in those industries that I mentioned earlier. And also I want to bring you more voices from the podcasting space. So folks that run podcasts about podcasting, again, it's kind of like what I do, but they serve the industry in different ways. So they might be focused on a different niche like sports or entertainment. But their focus is podcasting and they've got experience managing. Many, many different shows across their portfolio. I just think it's, it's good to look at podcasting, not just from the folks that are in business and doing business podcasting, but there are things that we can learn from looking across industries and across genres too. So having folks that focus on podcasting in different niches I think that there is some value that we can extract from those folks and apply it through a business. All right. So podcasts are still relatively new in their adoption by businesses. If we look at the total number of blogs on the internet, there's 600 million blogs. By comparison, there are only 3. 6 million podcasts, and this is across all genres. So there's almost 250 times more blogs on the internet than there are podcasts. So just as a point of comparison if we look at podcast listenership in the Half of Americans will listen to podcasts at least monthly. And that figure will have doubled since 2018, when about 25 percent of the U S population age 12 or older listens to podcasts at least monthly. So 25 percent in 2018, 50 percent in 2025. So that's doubled in that. That time span and the chart that I'm looking at it, it, it went down, it went back all the way to 2008, and then in 2008, 2009, that figure was at, at about 10%. So in the last 15 ish years, the number of the percentage of Americans that are listening to podcast audio, at least monthly. Has gone up five times it is growing. I don't think anyone can refute the impact of podcasting, especially on this last presidential election played a huge role in terms of both candidates. So those are some, a couple of different, like big, broad trends. And if we look at business podcasts, specifically business podcasts represent the fourth biggest genre of podcasts. So number one is society and culture. Number two is education. Number three is arts. And then number four is business. And that represents just under 9%. Of the total shows. If we break out that 3. 6 million by genre and if you're on YouTube, you can see this pie chart with all of the different genres, all the way from religion to comedy, health and fitness, news, leisure, music, sports, TV, and film technology all the way down represents smaller slices of the pie than business across all podcasts. About 17 percent of all the podcasts available, these 3. 6 million, about 17 percent are active. And so they have published an episode within the last 90 days. If we apply that percentage to business shows, Active business shows make up only 1. 5 percent of all podcasts. There's a lot of blue water out there, especially for professional services firms, because the reason why, especially professional services firms is because you are in the business of expertise. You're in the business of building trust with buyers at scale, because, you know, we're not talking about selling a hundred dollar services here. We're talking about selling high ticket, professional services, business to business. There's a lot of trust that needs to be built up throughout the sales process before a decision is made. And that trust can be built at scale through a podcast. Folks that are listening to you for years build a relationship with you. they come to understand your personality, your point of view, how you view the world. Also, just the mere exposure effect of your face on a screen as they're scrolling social media builds familiarity and familiarity is a stepping stone to trust. So there's a lot of blue water for podcasting right now, especially in professional services industries, where it is an expertise based sale. It is all about that human, human connection, those relationships. And podcasting is just such a natural fit into marketing a professional services firm. So let's take a look at the sample that I looked at. Let's take a look at some of the characteristics of podcasts specifically in professional services industries. I started building out this list of shows and professional services about a year ago. And I've got a list of almost 300 shows and they span across accounting and finance, architecture, engineering, construction, consulting, government, contracting, legal, and technology. If you're on YouTube, you can see this pie chart breakdown of those different industries and how that represents in the sample Accounting and finance makes up about a quarter. AEC represents about 30 percent consulting, 22%. And then the remaining 20 percent is split up between GovCon legal and technology. So those are the, that's the industry focus of the sample that I took a look at. And I intentionally over sampled active shows. And I wanted to understand of the shows that are active today. You know, what are the different characteristics of that? I did include about 25 percent of the sample is inactive. And I wanted to include a sample of inactive shows to really dig deep into, you know, why did they stop producing episodes? You know, how many episodes did they go before they shut off the light, so to speak, and it, and that kind of post mortem analysis helps us understand, you know, what runway do businesses give to podcasts? It doesn't give us any definitive answers, but it helps us paint a picture of, you know, how much risk is a business willing to tolerate in investing in a podcast before it turns out the lights. Let's get into some of those characteristics. One of the big takeaways that I saw from this research was the opportunity for co hosted commentary style shows. Now I'll give you an example. One of my clients, his name is Ken. He offers financial services, M and A advisory services, consulting services to chauffeur transportation companies. Super niche. And he was just getting so tired of flying around the country to go to all these different speaking engagements. He does awesome research. He's got a ton of research specifically on that industry. And he's just tired of doing that. And they're all pay to play engagements. So he wanted to launch a podcast so that he could leverage a digital medium to demonstrate his expertise. And we launched a show with a co host. Ken co hosts the ground transportation podcast with James. And now James offers complimentary services to the exact same target audience, chauffeur transportation businesses. And so they're non competitive. their complimentary services, and they co host this podcast together. In which they have co hosted commentary style episodes where Ken and James are going back and forth talking about a specific topic. They also have interview episodes where they bring on owners and operators of chauffeur transportation businesses, talking about their experience, building their business to where it got today. Ken will go off and do, and do one on one interviews. James will go off and do one on one interviews. Ken and James will have group conversations with a guest. So there's a number of different combinations. And what this does is it provides not only variety to the listeners, but it also kind of reduces the burden on the hosts, right? So Ken is able to go off and do a one on one interview. James doesn't need to be there. Same thing. If James wanted to do a one on one interview and Ken didn't need to be there. If they didn't have a guest, they could get together and record content. It gives them a lot of flexibility in their production. It also injects their own thought leadership into the show. So Ken and James are able to talk about topics that are relevant to the services that they provide, as opposed to always constantly putting. The spotlight on the guest and featuring them as an expert and their experience. So it balances out thought leadership with the growth potential of having guests on the show and leveraging their network. When they share the episodes with their. So there's, there's a big opportunity for co hosted podcasts in the sample that I took a look at 63 percent have just one host and there are some monologue shows in that 63%, but the majority of the shows that are hosted by one person are interview based. And as I mentioned earlier, talking about the ground transportation podcast and how Ken and James are able to inject their own thought leadership in their own subject matter expertise, it's really, really hard to do if you run an interview based show. So that's one big opportunity that I, that I noticed about a third of the podcasts have multiple hosts. So there's definitely potential for more there, especially if you run a niche show. All right. So another big finding, and this was when I separated out the inactive shows versus the active shows. And I looked at, okay, what is the total number of episodes published for inactive versus active? And I grouped those episode numbers into different bands. So I grouped them into, do they have one to 24 episodes? They have 25 to 49 episodes, 50 to 99, a hundred to 299 or greater than 300. And what I found was that more than half of the inactive shows failed to reach 50 episodes. And then if we layer on that other 23 percent in that 50 to 99 range, Then we're looking at almost 80 percent of the inactive shows failed to reach a hundred episodes. So there's something that happens between that 50 and a hundred episode. Mark, that's the range in which most podcasts, when, and if they go inactive, that's the range in which they do it. So if you're a business podcast, one of your initial goals is to hit that 50 episode mark, whether that happened, whether it's a weekly show and you're doing it for a year, And you take Christmas and Thanksgiving off, or it's a twice monthly show and you do it for two years, that 50 episode mark is a good way point checkpoint to check back in and say, okay, is this worth the investment? So that's one of the big takeaways that I have there. If we look at the active shows in this sample A combined 60 percent have over a hundred episodes. So a lot of these shows have been on the airwaves for a long time, or they've been publishing. Frequently for the last few years of the podcasters that I've interviewed on this show, many of them started in 2020 during that pandemic, when there was that big boom of podcasts and they've just simply lasted this long. And they found great success in doing that. And there are some shows that have a slower publishing cadence and they've all, and they started in 2016 and they've only recently hit that a hundred episode mark. And so their experience is a lot different and that's one of the big levers that you have is how frequently do you publish episodes? so that begs the question, how frequently are these shows in the professional services? How frequently are they publishing episodes? And so I took a look at all of these different shows, all 287. And if we filter out just the active shows, then 54 percent publish a weekly or more frequently. So that is the most common frequency of these shows and publishing their episodes. 50, 54, almost 55 percent weekly or more frequently, a 24 percent published twice monthly. And so that is a, that's a great cadence. If you're just starting out and you need to figure out your operation. Going back to that example that I shared earlier with the ground transportation podcast, we did start with a twice monthly cadence, and then we increased that to weekly when we decided that this is working, we've got a good operation, let's hit the, let's hit the gas pedal. So you don't, you don't need to. Pigeonhole yourself into just being a weekly podcast right out of the gate, or just being a twice monthly podcast. You can absolutely change your frequency as you go, as you iron out your operations to accelerate your path to podcasting success. some industries were more likely to publish more frequently than others. So when I break down the data by industry, accounting and financial services, podcasts that serve that space. And podcasts that serve the legal space were less likely. To have a weekly publishing cadence compared to shows that focus on the consulting industry or shows that focus on technology. So it's an interesting person. It's an interesting finding in that you're the frequency that you publish your show. You might want to take a look at other shows in your industry, just to help in your positioning. So if you are in accounting and financial services and you want to publish a show, one way to differentiate your show would be to have a weekly show. Because the shows in that market are less likely to publish weekly. So you could stand out and gain more ground. By having a more quick publishing cadence compared to other shows in your niche. So that's just one way to approach the strategy of your podcast. And then I also wanted to include, and this is not proprietary research done by me. This is actually data that was provided by Buzzsprout to a company called Podmatch. And they put out a report and I'll link the report in the show notes here. they look at the top podcasts and they break it down by episode downloads in the first seven days. So the top 1 percent of all podcasts across all genres get nearly 5, 000 downloads in that first seven days. So many shows and pod, especially in podcasting and professional services, they're not going to see that level of success simply because we have a much more narrow target market than the Joe Rogan experience. So if we take it a step down and let's look at a top 5 percent podcast across all genres. A top 5 percent podcast gets 1, 100 episode downloads within the first seven days. So you publish a new episode, you can expect within seven days, that episode will get over a thousand downloads. There's not many shows and professional services that are even a top five podcast, top 5 percent podcast. So let's take it a level down. A top 10 percent show when they publish an episode, that episode, you could expect to get 462 downloads in the first seven days, a top 25 percent podcast a newly published episode would get 109 downloads in the first seven days. Now here's where it gets really interesting. A top 50%. Podcast across all genres, publish an episode, and you can expect 28 downloads in the first seven days. Now that is a reasonable benchmark to hit within the first year of your podcast. Can you get to a point where each time you publish an episode, you're getting at least 30 downloads within that first seven days? And if you can do that and sustain that over five, 10 episodes, and you can confidently say that your show is in a top 50 percent of all podcasts. On the internet. And I think it just, it helps put things in perspective, right? And it helps put your show in perspective and you know, what does good look like? And what are the leading indicators of success? Of course you want your podcast to generate leads. Of course you want your podcast to generate revenue. You know, of course, you're going to want a sponsorship to offset production costs, but those things don't happen overnight. And what are the mile markers to look at along the way? The goal should be. At the onset, it could be, Hey, let's publish 50 episodes. And if we can get it to 28 downloads in the first seven days. For each episode, then we're on the right track. And I think that's the right mindset to look at podcasting and professional services, especially because it's such a long term investment, right? You know, I was talking with two Bob's with David C Baker and Blair ends of two Bob's. And they told me that they do have folks reaching out to them. Leads that listen to their podcast, but they say that, you know, Oh, I've been listening to your show for years and I just haven't had an opportunity to reach out to you, but now that I do, you're the first person I think about. And so if we unpack that a little bit. If your goal is to generate leads from your podcast, it's a long term investment and it's a content vehicle to share your expertise. Now that, you know, there are other ways of generating leads through a podcast, you know, interviewing your ideal client profile. I'm working with a couple of clients on interviewing referral sources to build relationships with referral sources. And making deposits into those relationships to increase the chance of referrals. That's another approach that you could take. There's a number of different ways that you could approach lead generation with a podcast. In conclusion, what I would love to do is to create an annual report of the state of podcasting and professional services. This was very much a an exercise of just, I happen to be accumulating this data anyways, and I wanted to package it up and share it with you. But I realized that there are, there is an opportunity for me to collect even more information from shows and professional services, these interviews that I do, I would love to create a survey and to hear your experience and if you'd like to, you know, share your experience or be featured on the show. If you're a business podcaster, reach out to me on LinkedIn, reach out to me on my website, redcedermarketing. com. And let's chat. So thank you so much for everybody for tuning in. I know this was a little bit shorter of an episode compared to some of the interviews that I do. But if you made it this far, please subscribe to the show on Apple, subscribe to the show on Spotify, subscribe on YouTube. And we'd love to hear what you think. Leave a rating and review reach out to me on LinkedIn. Send me a note. happy podcasting.