While podcasting as a content creation platform has many significant strengths and upsides– specifically as a tool for building trust with your audience–it also presents some district challenges.
One of the most frustrating for podcast is podcasting's one-way directional nature.
While you as the host are able to see some basic stats to understand that yes, people are in fact listening, it can be hard, if not impossible, to get any sense of who is listening.
This lack of clarity around who your listeners are leads to an often lonely experience as a podcast host. But it also makes it hard to improve your show and curate your content according to what would be most beneficial to your listeners.
While there are numerous apps and startups attempting to rectify this issue, the lack of one central platform that acts as the hub for podcasting means that we as hosts will likely always be working with fragmented information.
Much like with Apple, Spotify, or Google's analytics dashboards show only the data from listeners using their individual platforms, any social podcasting apps will only give us information and the ability to communicate with listeners of those platforms.
Luckily for us, there are other ways of learning more about who our listeners are and how we can create the best show for them.
In this post, we're going to look at how to structure an effective listener survey, covering which questions to include, how to encourage participation, and finally, what to do with the information once you have it.
But first, let's quickly talk about why getting this information from (and about) your listeners matters.
There are a whole host of reasons to run a listener survey with many uses for the information you obtain.
But while almost any information you can get on your listeners will likely prove valuable, it's worth taking a couple of minutes to think about what specifically you're hoping to achieve with this survey in this moment.
A few common survey goals are:
Many of the questions you ask will support multiple goals, but your choice of questions, phrasing, and question order might change depending on what you've identified as your most important goal.