Local Podcasts, Big Payoff: How Broadcasters Are Turning Homegrown Talent Into Digital Gold.

Looking to tap into the local podcast opportunity? Start at home.

Experts say the key is leveraging your local talent, local audiences, and local sales forces to carve out a piece of the still growing podcast marketplace. “This is an opportunity for all of us,” says Jeremy Sinon, VP of Digital Strategy for Hubbard Radio.

Broadcasters start with a massive advantage, according to Steve Goldstein, the former group PD at Saga Communications who now advises podcasters as the owner and operator of Amplifi Media. “They already have brands, talent, production capability, and promotion muscle.”

The most obvious place for radio groups to start is with the audio they’re already producing for broadcast. “Take your best, most relevant material, present it cleanly, and make it available where audiences actually consume audio — not buried three clicks deep on a website,” Goldstein suggests. “Time-shifted audio works when it’s thoughtfully curated, packaged, and easy to find.”

In today’s multi-platform media world, time-shifting is crucial for not leaving listening on the table. Amplifi Media recently studied seven top stations in a major market and found that listeners miss roughly 86% of their morning show’s content every day. 

Original, On-Demand And Local

But time-shifting morning shows only gets at the low hanging fruit. “The bigger unlock is original, on-demand local content — neighborhood stories, business leaders, food culture, local sports voices,” Goldstein says. “People care deeply about what’s happening where they live, and almost no one is serving that as a consistent, modern audio product.”

Creating original online content is the strategy Hubbard Radio has successfully used to build scale in its local markets for the past 10 years. This ranges from developing after-shows and other spinoffs of local radio programs to generating entirely new content. Shows built around beloved local sports teams were an obvious jumping off point. “Purple Rally,” a podcast devoted to the Minnesota Vikings, hosted by long-time radio hosts and former Vikings beat writers Phil Mackey and Judd Zulgad, has an average monthly audience of 254,544 and averages 919,280 monthly downloads, according to Hubbard. It’s part of Skor North, which started as an AM radio sports station before attracting a much larger audience as a digital audio entity. “Rather than fighting the AM battle, we created podcasts and we started seeing audiences grow,” Sinon said during a panel last month at NAB Show New York. Hubbard eventually realized podcasting offered far greater growth potential than an AM station at 1500. Skor North now produces a dozen mostly sports-related podcasts, including shows devoted to the Twins, Timberwolves, Minnesota Wild and Minnesota Gophers. “It’s making real money, and it’s got big audiences,” Sinon said.

But podcasts devoted to local sports only scratch at the surface. “Professor Of Rock,” a rock music history podcast, explores the stories behind seminal songs from the classic rock cannon. Hosted by music historian and superfan Adam Reader, it averages 110,664 monthly downloads and has a monthly audience size of 33,852.

Other local Hubbard podcasts grew out of passion projects air talent have, such as shows devoted to cooking, gardening, lifestyle, business and community culture. “Local voices are local content. You build from the audiences you already have,” Sinon says. After all, station air talent understand the market, know its stories, can identify characters, and already have a relationship with listeners. “Radio has spent decades nurturing personalities — that’s the core asset,” says Goldstein.

Sellers Need Schoolin’

Radio also has an army of local ad sellers with strong relationships with local businesses. However, transitioning them into podcast ad sellers can be a tough putt. Devoting resources to training is key. “It’s definitely a challenge,” Sinon notes. “It’s not only educating your sellers but also educating the clients.” He recalls an early podcast pitch to a local prospect who asked, “What time does the podcast air?”

After schooling local sellers and the marketplace, “It’s a machine now,” Sinon says. “They know 100% how to sell it and the market understands what it is.”

Hubbard says its podcasts are attracting non-radio advertisers.

Goldstein says the simplest way for radio AEs to succeed in podcast sales is to tell a better story about the audience. The median age for podcast listening is about 34. “When sellers understand they can deliver younger, incremental, more responsive audiences, everything changes,” he says. Moreover, podcasting opens doors to categories that traditional radio struggles to attract such as DTC, fintech, lifestyle, wellness, and local direct-to-consumer businesses.

Hubbard recently bundled all its local podcasts into the Gamut Podcast Network. “We’re trying to help our markets, and we’re trying to grow nationally,” Sinon explains.

It’s part of the company’s strategy for competing in a multi-platform world, one where the lines between audio and video are blurring. For a growing audience, YouTube is the top place for consuming podcasts. “YouTube must be in the mix,” Goldstein asserts. “Younger audiences increasingly experience ‘podcasts’ as video. Putting your talent and local content on YouTube dramatically expands discovery, particularly among audiences who haven’t tuned the radio in years.”

Broadcast radio, of course, has marketing power that pureplay podcasters would kill for. “We have these megaphones, we’re speaking to people, not just on broadcast,” Sinon told the NAB New York crowd. “We have these giant megaphones in the podcast space too. It’s trying to leverage those audiences and then grow from there.”