Making the Pod: Conducting a Competitive Analysis

Written By Lauren Popish

✴ Standing Out From the Crowd

Welcome to episode 4 of Making the Pod. Today, I will ensure my podcast stands out from the crowd of other podcasts in my niche by conducting a competitive analysis and definitely my “it” factor.v

 

✴ About Making the Pod

Hey, I’m Lauren Popish, founder of The Wave Podcasting. I help women start and grow podcasts. I recently sunset my original podcast and have decided to create a new one focused on, well, podcasting. I’m taking you along as I build this podcast from day one. Be sure to hit subscribe and hit the bell notification over on YouTube, so you never miss an episode. You can start from the beginning or pick up anywhere in the series and start learning. Welcome to Making The Pod.

✴ Providing New Value for Listeners

When I launched my first podcast, Book Wine Club, I looked around the internet for other podcast book clubs, but I wasn’t very thorough about getting a picture of the entire landscape of competitive podcasts. I talked about this a little in the last episode, but if we want to create a podcast with the potential to grow and make money in the future, this show needs to appeal to my target audience. If there is another podcast out there that’s meeting my audience’s needs in all the same ways my podcast would, then I’m going to have a hard time gaining traction. 

So, I need to make sure that I can deliver unique value and maybe even fill an existing hole for my target audience. To do that, I’m going to get a lay of the land by completing a competitive analysis.

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✴ How to Create a Competitive Analysis

To do this, I’m going to start by identifying my podcast’s keywords and keyword phrases. These are terms that my target listener would search for on Google or YouTube, or Apple Podcasts to find a show like the one I want to create. Since I’m creating a podcast about podcasting, my keywords include: podcasting, podcaster, start a podcast, make money podcasting, podcast equipment, and podcast marketing. I’m then going to use these keywords to search on Apple Podcasts and see which shows come up. I also searched for terms like “best podcasts about podcasting” on Google to see if there were any articles that came up. 

I recommend identifying 5-10 shows that seem like competitive matches for your show in my guide. For my show, I know that podcasting is a pretty niche category, so I wanted to challenge myself to analyze all the available shows on the topic of podcasting. The final list has put 105 shows on it. That might sound like a lot, but there are over a million podcasts on Apple Podcasts right now, and 100 shows make up only 1% of all the shows available, so it is still a pretty competitive niche.

After you put together your list of 10, or in my case, 105 competitive shows, you then want to document some basic data points about the show. In my guide, I suggest the podcast name,  number of hosts, tone of hosts, podcast tone, format type, the average number of guests (if relevant), average episode length, episode release frequency, and target listener/audience. Each of these elements is an opportunity for you to differentiate your show. 

For my analysis, I also included the gender of the hosts, total number of episodes, primary and secondary categories tagged on Apple Podcasts, average rating, and number of ratings on Apple Podcasts. Some of these fields aren’t areas where I can compete necessarily but help me get a complete picture of the landscape. Now full disclosure, filling in all of those fields for 105 podcasts would take me a long time, so instead of doing it myself, I used Upwork to hire a contractor to help fill in the fields. I am a big proponent of outsourcing time-consuming and repetitive tasks. I see the cost as an investment in my business because I can use my time on more profitable activities. We will talk about how outsourcing is an important tool in podcast growth in a future episode, but if you want to learn more about hiring help for this kind of analysis, write to me in the comments, and share my vetting and hiring process with you.

✴ Analyzing the data

After documenting your competitive shows and the associated data points, it’s now time to analyze the data to see where there are gaps or clear places for differentiation. In my case, a big part of my mission is making content for female-identifying podcasters, so I was curious how many shows about podcasting are hosted by women. Of the 105 shows analysis, 3 podcasts have male and female co-hosts, and women exclusively host only 12 shows. That’s a major area for differentiation. A podcast that is hosted by and for women is even rarer. 

Now She Podcasts is both a podcast and online community with a similar mission to mine. Elsie and Jess, the hosts, are absolute legends and have paved the way for women like me long before I even knew what a podcast was. I have so much respect for them, but their podcast style is different from what I want to create. Their average episode length is about 55 minutes. I want mine to be much shorter, at 20-25 minutes. I want my show to be a combination of speaking solo on certain topics plus interviews with women in podcasting. Their show is primarily conversational between the two of them as co-hosts. Mine will be scripted; theirs isn’t. You get the point. I can do this kind of analysis for all of the podcasts hosted by women to make sure that I know exactly how my podcast will serve a similar audience but in a different way.

✴ Conclusion

To finish the analysis, I will write a series of differentiation statements. The format for these statements is straightforward: it goes like this: Unlike ____, my podcast _____. So in the example from before, I would say: Unlike She Podcasts, my podcast will teach podcasting tips to women in a precise and concise way. 

To create your own competitive analysis, use our free template here.

I completed differentiation statements for the rest of the podcasts hosted by women, and I will put the final version in the description. If you want some feedback on statements, put it in the comments, and I’ll be sure to respond. And If you want to follow along with the entire journey, be sure to subscribe and hit that bell notification. In the next episode, we STILL aren’t recording yet. Nope, I will be doing a brand visioning session to determine my new podcast’s personality. I’ll see you next time on Making the Pod. 

 
Lauren Popish
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