TL;DR: Podcast listenership just hit an all-time high, and the return data for retail, B2B, and influencer-style campaigns backs up the hype. But the honest answer for most businesses is more complicated than “start a podcast.” Production time and cost have become the top complaint among companies already running a branded show, and we’ve watched several of our own clients pull back from recording for exactly that reason, or because they simply didn’t want to be on a recorded platform in the first place. Podcast-style video and short-form reels have become the practical middle ground: they carry the same trust-building intimacy without demanding a weekly production schedule most small businesses can’t sustain.
The Audience Has Never Been Bigger
Start with the numbers, because they’re the strongest argument in favor of the format. According to Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2026 study, 58 percent of Americans age 12 and older, roughly 167 million people, now listen to podcasts monthly. That’s an all-time high for a survey that has tracked digital audio behavior since 1998. Weekly listening reached 45 percent, and 81 percent of the population listens to some form of online audio at least once a month.
What’s changed is who’s driving that growth. Younger listeners have plateaued. The real gains are coming from the 35 to 54 age group, now at 68 percent monthly consumption, and from Americans 55 and older, who jumped from 52 percent monthly online audio listening in 2024 to 70 percent in 2026. That shift matters for marketers because it’s exactly the demographic with purchasing authority, whether that’s a homeowner deciding on a contractor, a procurement lead evaluating vendors, or a household making a major retail purchase.
Ad dollars have followed the audience. U.S. podcast advertising revenue reached $2.9 billion in 2025, up 17.6 percent year over year, according to IAB and PwC’s 2025 Internet Advertising Revenue Report. Video has also stopped being a separate category. Edison’s research found that among people who have ever consumed a podcast, 57 percent both watch and listen, meaning the audio-only era of the format is functionally over for most listeners.
On paper, this is a channel businesses should be paying closer attention to, not less. The question is where it’s actually paying off, and where the effort stops making sense.
Where Podcast-Style Marketing Is Working
Real Estate Agents
The National Association of REALTORS® launched its own show, REALTOR® News Change Agents, in March 2026, hosted by NAR’s own CEO and executive team. When the industry’s largest trade association builds a podcast to communicate with its membership, that’s a fairly clear signal about where the profession sees attention going.
For individual agents, the practical version rarely needs to be a polished weekly show. The agents getting real mileage out of the format are running short, recurring conversations: a monthly local market update, a recorded walk-through interview with a lender or inspector, a sit-down with a past client about their buying experience. These lean on the same trust mechanics that make video listings perform well already. It’s a local authority play more than a reach play, and it works best when it’s tied to a specific neighborhood or buyer segment rather than trying to compete with national real estate media.
B2B Companies
B2B is where podcasts do the least advertising-shaped work and the most relationship-shaped work. Buyers in this segment already skew toward the demographic driving podcast growth, and advertiser confidence has followed. According to the Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights Podcast Download report, 76 percent of agencies and advertisers said in June 2026 that they currently advertise in podcasts, up from just 15 percent back in 2015.
The format that tends to convert for B2B isn’t a founder talking into a microphone alone. It’s an interview series that puts customers, partners, and industry voices in the guest chair. Every episode becomes a reason to reach out to a target account, a piece of content the sales team can send instead of another PDF, and a small, ongoing demonstration of expertise that a single case study can’t replicate. The pipeline value tends to come less from downloads and more from who agreed to be a guest in the first place.
Retail and eCommerce
This is the segment with the clearest return data attached to it. Podcast advertising platform Magellan AI’s analysis of thousands of campaigns, cited in Improvado’s 2026 podcast advertising report, found an average return on ad spend of $4.90, with ecommerce advertisers specifically seeing $6.70, about 23 percent higher than the $5.44 average for social media campaigns over the same period.
Retail and ecommerce brands don’t necessarily need to produce their own show to see this benefit. Sponsoring a well-matched existing podcast with a promo code or vanity URL gives a measurable, trackable return using the same attribution habits most retail marketers already apply to paid social and search. For brands that do build their own content, product-focused interview and demo formats tend to outperform generic brand storytelling, because listeners are already primed to expect a recommendation in that format.
Influencer Marketing Through Podcasts
Podcast hosts have quietly become some of the most trusted figures in the entire creator economy. In the same Cumulus Media and Signal Hill Insights survey referenced above, weekly podcast listeners named podcast hosts as the figure whose influence matters most to them at 52 percent, more than double the 24 percent who said the same about social media influencers, and well ahead of TV and movie celebrities at 15 percent.
That trust translates into behavior. Research from Acast, reported by eMarketer, found that two-thirds of listeners have purchased something a podcast host recommended, and 55 percent say their strongest connection to a creator started through a podcast feed rather than social media. For brands running influencer campaigns, this points to a simple shift in strategy: a casual, host-read mention during a conversation tends to outperform a polished, scripted read, because the format itself is built on the illusion, or reality, of one person talking honestly to another.
So Why Are We Seeing Businesses Pull Back?
Here’s the part of this conversation that doesn’t show up in the audience growth charts. A 2026 industry benchmark study on branded podcasting, covered by Outcomes Rocket, found that 54.8 percent of organizations running a podcast name production time and cost as their single biggest challenge, ahead of audience discovery, engagement, or measuring ROI. Only 23.3 percent of branded podcasts manage to publish weekly. Most land somewhere between monthly and irregular.
At Brevard SEM, we’ve watched that math play out directly with clients over the past couple of years. A single episode done right involves scheduling a guest, prepping questions, recording, editing for pacing, cutting clips for social, writing show notes, building a thumbnail, and getting it distributed across every platform that matters. That’s a real week of work, and most small and mid-sized businesses don’t have a person whose job is to own that process. When a podcast gets bolted onto an already thin marketing plan instead of built into a real content roadmap, it’s usually the first thing to quietly stop.
None of this means the channel has lost relevance. It means the bar for doing it well is higher than it was when “just start a podcast” was common advice a few years ago. The businesses still getting value out of it are treating episodes as one part of a coordinated content strategy, not a stand-alone experiment.
The Camera Problem
Production time is only half the story. The other half is more personal, and it’s something we run into constantly when we sit down with clients to plan a media calendar. Some business owners take to a microphone immediately. They relax, they get talkative, and within a few minutes they’re asking when the next session is. Others freeze the moment the light turns on, need four takes to get through a single introduction, or cancel a scheduled recording the morning of.
Both reactions are completely normal, and neither one says anything about whether that person is good at running their business. A general contractor can be exceptional at estimating a roofing job and still feel genuinely uncomfortable narrating that expertise into a microphone in front of a stranger. Being skilled at a trade and being comfortable performing that skill on a recorded platform are two different abilities, and most business owners were never trained in the second one.
This is exactly why interview and guest-led formats tend to work better than solo monologues for first-time business owners. Answering a direct question is a much lower bar than filling airtime alone. Spreading the talking across a co-host or a rotating guest also takes pressure off any one person to carry the whole episode. If someone genuinely doesn’t want to be recorded, that’s a legitimate business decision, not a failure, and it usually means the right move is a format that keeps them off camera entirely rather than forcing a show that will feel forced in every episode.
Podcast-Style Video and Reels: The Practical Middle Ground
This is where a lot of our current client work has actually landed. Instead of committing to a full recurring show, businesses are pulling short, conversational segments, an interview clip, a quick Q&A, a two-minute walk-through, and building them specifically for reels, shorts, and stories. It borrows the tone and intimacy of a podcast without the production overhead of a full episode every week.
The audience data supports this shift. Remember that 57 percent of podcast consumers already both watch and listen, according to Edison Research. Attention has already moved toward video-native, clip-friendly formats, and short vertical content built in a podcast-style conversational tone tends to hold attention better than a traditional polished ad. It also solves the camera problem for hesitant business owners, since a two-minute recorded conversation is a far smaller ask than a 40-minute episode.
We build this kind of content regularly through our in-house media production team, which handles everything from studio-style recording space to editing and platform-specific cuts as part of our broader social media marketing work. For clients who want the trust benefits of long-form conversation without the commitment of a weekly release schedule, this has become the more realistic starting point.
How to Approach Podcast-Style Marketing the Right Way
A few principles hold up across every industry we’ve worked with:
- Pick a cadence you can actually sustain. A monthly show that publishes consistently outperforms a weekly show that dies after six episodes.
- Choose the format around the person, not the trend. If the business owner isn’t a natural talker, build around interviews and guests instead of solo episodes.
- Plan the repurposing before you record. Every episode should already have a plan for clips, quotes, and short-form cuts before the first question gets asked.
- Track it like a real channel. Promo codes, vanity URLs, and simple attribution surveys work for podcasts the same way they work for paid ads.
By industry, that generally translates to:
- Real estate: Short, recurring local market updates or buyer and seller interviews with lenders, title companies, and past clients, tied to a specific neighborhood or price range.
- B2B: Interview-led shows featuring customers and partners, published on a realistic monthly cadence, with every episode fed directly to the sales team as a follow-up asset.
- Retail and eCommerce: Paid sponsorships on existing, well-matched shows tracked with promo codes, alongside product-focused interview or demo content for owned channels.
- Influencer and creator partnerships: Host selection based on audience trust and niche fit rather than raw follower count, with casual, conversational mentions instead of scripted reads.
Businesses that want a second opinion on whether a full show, a lighter video series, or paid sponsorships make more sense for their specific situation can see how we’ve approached similar problems for other clients on our case studies page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is podcast marketing still effective in 2026?
Yes, based on listener growth, ad revenue, and return data across retail, B2B, and influencer campaigns. What has changed is the amount of effort required to do it well, which is why more businesses are shifting toward lighter, video-first formats instead of a full weekly show.
Do I need a professional studio to start a business podcast or podcast-style video series?
Audio and lighting quality matter more than most business owners expect, since poor sound quality is one of the fastest ways to lose a listener. A dedicated recording space with proper microphones, lighting, and camera setup makes a noticeable difference, but it doesn’t require building a full media department in-house if that work is handled by a production partner.
What’s the difference between a podcast and podcast-style video content?
A podcast is typically a recurring, longer-form episode released on a schedule. Podcast-style video content borrows the same conversational, interview-driven tone but is cut into shorter segments built for platforms like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok, without requiring a full recurring show.
How long does it take to see results from a business podcast?
Trust-building formats like this tend to compound rather than convert immediately. Most businesses see meaningful traction after a consistent run of episodes, generally several months, rather than from any single episode going viral.
What if a business owner doesn’t want to be recorded?
That’s a legitimate decision, not a marketing problem to push past. In those cases, interview formats where someone else hosts and the owner appears occasionally as a guest, or written and graphic content built from the same subject matter, usually make more sense than forcing a format that will feel uncomfortable in every episode.
Should retail and ecommerce brands host their own podcast or advertise on existing ones?
Advertising on an established, well-matched podcast typically delivers a faster and more measurable return, since it comes with an existing trusted audience already in place. Hosting an owned show makes more sense once a brand has a distinct enough point of view or product story to sustain one.
