Close your eyes and you can probably easily imagine what you think the average sport podcast listener looks like.
At Sport Social Podcast Network, we wanted to further understand who was listening to the 500+ sport podcasts across our slate and so conducted our first-ever "Listener Survey", deep diving into the personas and behaviours of our podcast audience. Even we were surprised by the results.
It revealed that 78% of the audience who completed the survey were homeowners, almost a third had an annual household income of £100k+ and 60% were employed in higher or intermediate managerial roles. Hardly "`White Van Man".
As part of this research, carried out in conjunction with our research partner Mindfield, we also uncovered a greater depth of interest to our listener base.
Information such as 49% of the Sport Social audience investing in personal care products, 52% regularly shopping for books and 73% take regular exercise indicates an audience with richer and more varied interests than we expected, hugely increasing their value to advertisers beyond those brands that typically target sport audiences, such as betting.
>Download the full report now<
Not only does this open up the opportunity for a wide range of brands and products to engage with our audience but it also helps us to target advertising to specific audience groups to ensure messaging remains interesting and relevant - helping deliver full value to advertisers.
It seems we’ve been underestimating both the purchasing power and the broad interests of sports audio fans!
If you layer some further recent research onto this new data, it tells an even more compelling story about the potential value of these audiences to marketers.
Kantar's ongoing GB TGI study into the engagement levels of media consumers illustrates that sport podcast listeners when compared to different media types. Not only do sport podcast listeners engage 4x more with advertising vs other media but they also trust those adverts 2.3x more than if they appeared on other legacy channels (such as The Guardian, The Telegraph and Talk Sport).
When looking at the numbers it becomes very apparent that sport podcast listeners have large disposable incomes, broad interests and respond well to advertising in their favourite shows. It’s a holy trinity!
It’s no massive surprise with these engaged and active audiences that, according to the latest IAB report, podcast advertising spending is up 23% year-on-year and I expect sport’s share of that market to only get larger as understanding of that audience grows.