It’s All About the Audience: How to Survey Your Podcast Listeners

Learn how to run a podcast audience survey and key questions to ask.

Gathering data is essential for any successful podcaster. Surveying your audience can provide valuable insight into what topics listeners are most interested in, what type of content they prefer, and what new ideas you should explore in order to foster a deeper connection with your audience. Knowing your audience is key when launching a survey. What will they respond to? What motivates them? What makes them want to share feedback with you? The hardest thing about running a podcast is trying to find ways to understand who’s listening to you. Read on to learn more about how to create an effective podcast survey, and the best questions to ask your audience to learn about them.

Preparing for Your Podcast Survey 

Before launching a survey, think carefully about who your target audience is and why you’re creating this survey in the first place. Do you want to know which topics keep people engaged or if listeners find your content useful/entertaining? Once you have identified why you are creating this survey, it will help guide what questions you ask and how you phrase them. To get started, consider mapping out the three key things you want to learn, and verify that you are seeking information that you cannot find on your own or with available data.

To encourage respondents to take part in your survey, make sure that you explain why their feedback matters and how it will be used. Consider offering incentives such as access to exclusive content or prizes that will be announced on the Podcast in exchange for taking the time to fill out the survey. This could help increase response rates as well as attract new listeners who may not have heard of your podcast before! 

Types of Questions & Best Practices 

When designing your survey, there are several types of questions that can provide useful insights into listener preferences. Open-ended questions allow respondents to provide detailed responses, and allow you to actually collect content that you can use within your Podcast. This is even more true if you use a multimedia survey tool that lets you collect audience feedback with voice or video. When looking for examples of strong questions to ask, you can consider: whether your audience prefers shorter episodes or longer ones; which topics spark their interest; or if they would like more interviews with experts on specific subjects? Additionally, surveys are great for getting feedback on audio quality, music transitions, cover art designs—basically anything related to improving how users perceive your podcast content and the production quality.

Additional considerations for questions to ask can include: 

  1. Do you want feedback on particular episodes? 
  2. Are you asking about topics they'd like covered? 
  3. Are there certain guests they'd like interviewed? 
  4. How would listeners describe your podcast content to others? 
  5. Why do listeners recommend your podcast?
  6. Why do listeners not recommend your podcast? 
  7. What podcasts do listeners also listen to? 

When crafting questions for surveys, remember that open-ended ones tend to work better than multiple choice ones because they allow respondents more freedom in expressing themselves fully. It's also important to consider best practices when sharing your podcast survey with potential respondents. Promote it through multiple channels such as social media or through email newsletters. If possible, try leveraging influencers within your niche who may have access to a larger audience than yours – this could result in even more responses. Lastly, make sure that the platform used for hosting the survey is secure and private so listeners feel comfortable providing honest feedback, and feel as though they are having an intimate conversation with you! 

Launch your podcast audience survey with Voiceform.

Launching a podcast survey is an important way for you to understand your audience and gain insight into listener preferences and interests. When preparing a podcast survey, consider who your target audience is, explain why their feedback matters. You’ve worked hard to build an authentic connection with your audience, so ensure they understand why this survey matters and what they could get from it.

For this type of survey, creating a survey that feels like a conversation is key. Voiceform is built to help you easily collect survey data from open-ended survey questions, and with features such as multimedia question types like voice and video questions, you can create a survey with your voice, and improve the connection your audience has to your podcast, your survey and the questions you want answered. With engaging voice and video capabilities, interactive design and automatic analytics to measure audience sentiment and engagement over time, reach out and learn more about Voiceform, or set up your first survey for free.

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