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Welcome to Podcasting in Professional Services. Each week, you'll get podcasting research, trends, and examples. Let's dive in 👇

How do active *business* podcast listeners discover new shows? 🔎

Recently, we released our 2026 State of Podcasting in Professional Services research study. Part of that exercise was looking at the behavior of listeners of business podcasts alongside hosts.

In the research, we identified three main reasons listeners tune into podcasts: to learn something, to get inspiration, and to be entertained. So how do they go about finding new shows? To answer this question, we asked listeners, 'When you want to find a new business podcast, where do you go to discover a new show?'

There were some nuance in the 10 different categories, but when grouping like responses together, three main methods emerged:

1. Search

No, this does not mean a Google search. Instead, active business podcast listeners were much more likely (about 2-3x) to turn to the search bar on Apple Podcasts or Spotify before Google/YouTube.

For business podcasters, this means practicing on-platform SEO; structuring episode titles and descriptions in a certain way, including key words, tags, and hashtags, and including internal links between episodes. The same way marketers obsess over webpage optimization for Google? Bring that same energy to your podcast episodes.

2. Recommendations

Peers, colleagues, other podcasters… these are all people who hold influence over podcast listeners. ‘Hey did you hear the episode of 2Bobs where David C. Baker said we’re all closet socialists?’ (Seriously, check it out).

Word-of-mouth is still the best form of marketing and your show should compel your listeners to recommend it to people they know. I’ve been recommending 2Bobs for about a decade at this point. Do you have advocates for your show?

3. Exposure

Social media clips are powerful. But they’re not going to win over an audience right away. Consistency and repetition in publishing will build familiarity and trust, but posting 1-2 clips and then calling it quits won’t work.

Instead, try this: post 3-5 clips per week for 6+ months, diligently tag guests and their companies in posts, and continuously invest in upgrading the video production. That's what we did with the Ground Transportation Podcast, which gets about 10k views/month of short-form content on LinkedIn alone. We even hit 50k views on Instagram in back-to-back months, so our short-form video strategy is starting to work.

Exposure doesn’t just happen on social media. Interestingly, 30% of active business podcast listeners in the study said they discover new shows from industry conferences or events. Maybe there was a pop-up podcast studio on a conference floor, or maybe your firm puts on a new event and incorporates a man-on-the-street style interview on the show floor. As in-person marketing becomes more important, podcasting can play a role in facilitating those in-person conversations.

Another way to get exposure as a podcaster is to be a guest on OTHER podcasts. Think about it; the best way to grow your audience of podcast listeners is to reach other, different pockets of listeners.

Check out the research report if you want to learn more. OK, here are some recent examples of episodes from the Red Cedar Marketing portfolio:

Recent Podcast Examples

Slides Don't Sell

For decades, the 'pitch deck' has become a compulsory part of business development. Got a meeting? Build the deck. New prospect? Polish the slides.

But here’s the problem: slides don’t sell.
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In this episode, John Tyreman and Mark Wainwright beat up this sales crutch, then break down why slide decks are often misused, misunderstood, and quietly sabotaging your sales conversations.

Business Leaders that C.A.R.E.

What if the difference between a flourishing marketing leader and a frustrated one came down to just four letters: C.A.R.E.

In this episode of Spiraling Up, we put leadership strategist and former CXO Jonathan Eldridge in the hot seat to test his 12-attribute CARE framework against real-world marketing chaos.

How Marc Cortez Scaled a MedTech Company from $0 to $4m in 12 months

How do you go from $0 to $4 million in revenue in just 12 months? In this episode of The Scalability Code, Marc Cortez breaks down exactly how he launched Converge Medical Technologies, hit $4M in year one, and built a scalable medical device company from the ground up.

In case you missed it...

• ​History of Podcasting: From '80s Radio Tech to Booming Industry​
• ​Podcasting at Conferences: Turning A Booth Into a Pop-Up Studio​
• ​How to Get Podcast Guests For Your Business Show​
• ​Audio vs Video Podcasts: Which Makes Sense for You?​

Take your show to the next level

Red Cedar Marketing help experts and professional services firms launch and grow podcasts that actually make a business impact. Here are a few ways we help clients:

• New show launch + pilot programs
• Podcast audit, benchmarking, and roadmapping
• Managed podcast growth + marketing
• Sponsorship development + monetization
• Video clip production & distribution
• Guest outreach and guest booking

Want to learn more?
Reply to this email to start a conversation.

Cheers,
- John