Before you brief your team or commit budget to a new podcast, there’s an important question to answer first: who are you actually making this for? And while you’re at it, what do you actually want a podcast to achieve?
They sound obvious but most people skip this part and go straight to the more exciting part of the record. Fine if you are playing with a new hobby, not fine if you are investing resource and want it to form part of your marketing or comms strategy.
Understanding your audience properly changes everything about how you approach podcasting, from format and length to distribution and tone. Get it right upfront and every decision that follows gets easier. Skip it and you’ll spend money finding out the hard way.
The podcast landscape has shifted
Listener habits have changed significantly, and the numbers are hard to ignore with the majority of adults in the UK having listened to a podcast and over half listening regularly, not occasionally. Not passively.
Your audience is not sitting around waiting for your next press release. They are spending meaningful time with content that earns their attention and increasingly, they want to see it as well as hear it.
Video podcast consumption is up 40% year on year, with audio platforms and Youtube getting behind this move and showing precedence to video podcasts.
Audio was always intimate. Now it’s visual too, and audiences are building relationships with brands that show up consistently across their feed, their headphones, and their screens.
Absence, in this environment, is not neutral.
Why long form is winning?
Long-form audio is quietly winning, audiences are tired of the doom scroll and are committing 30, 45, 60 intentional minutes with content they trust. That kind of attention is rare. It’s also extraordinarily valuable.
There’s a reason long-form holds its ground regardless of what trend is dominating the conversation. It builds something short-form simply can’t: depth of relationship.
A single great clip can certainly create engagement but that’s not trust. Loyalty and connection, that’s earned through consistency over time. Every episode is a deposit into a trust account with your audience.
And the commercial case is increasingly clear, up to 88 % of listeners trust podcast hosts’ recommendations and 70 % say a host’s endorsement has made them consider a brand they’d never heard of before. Customers arrive at the conversation already trusting you.
Audience strategy comes before everything
So back to those two questions: who are you making this for, and what do you want it to achieve?
Awareness? Credibility? Sales? All three are legitimate goals but they require different approaches. A show built to generate leads looks different to one designed to establish thought leadership. Both look different to a show built for a brand’s existing customers.
Knowing your audience changes the brief. It changes the format, the length, the guests, the distribution channels. It changes whether you’re making a podcast at all or whether another content format serves you better.
Most brands skip this step because it feels like a delay. In reality it’s the only thing that stops you spending six months making the wrong show for the wrong people.
What good planning actually looks like
Good planning starts with honest answers to uncomfortable questions. Not “what do we want to say?” but “what does our audience actually want to hear?” Not “how often can we publish?” but “what cadence can we genuinely sustain and that our audience will actually show up for?”
It means understanding where your audience already spends their time, what formats they engage with, and what would make them choose your show over the hundreds of others competing for the same commute.
This is the work that happens before a single episode is recorded. It’s unglamorous. It’s also the difference between a show that builds something and one that quietly disappears after episode four.
Guest blog written by Becky Lamb-Pritchard, Head of Podcast Growth & Partnerships at This Is Distorted, Board Director, Audio UK – partner speaker at HARK Live 2026