When a holiday break approaches, like the summer travel season or a winter break, you might start feeling a bit of pressure. Your podcast team takes time off, guests become harder to book, and suddenly your show’s editorial calendar is thrown into disarray. You don’t want to abandon your audience, but a holiday break doesn’t mean your podcast is going to turn into a ghost town. Holidays can be the perfect time to retool, refresh, recharge, and keep your listeners tuned in and engaged.
Let’s dive into what industry data says about podcast consumption during holiday breaks, and explore some strategies you can use to get the most out of this time. If you want a team to help you build a strategy around your holiday break, reach out to us about our podcast consulting services.
What actually happens to podcast listenership during a holiday break?
Whether you publish episodes daily, weekly, or along some other cadence, there’s always a level of pressure to maintain a consistent schedule. And when it comes to a holiday break, keeping that rhythm going is tough when your audience is either taking time for themselves, traveling to a destination or spending time offline with family and friends.
Let’s look at December, which is a natural time for a break since it includes several winter holidays and comes at the end of the year. According to data from Bumper’s 2022 analysis of nearly one million podcast episodes, there is a noticeable dip in new episode releases during the final week of December between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Based on added insights provided by Simplecast and independent podcasters, Bumper’s overall analysis showed that downloads also dropped during this period, but not drastically.
What’s happening is a shift in audience behavior. Listeners’ consumption habits are either increasing because they have more free time or they are decreasing due to travel or other obligations. The net result here is a modest dip in downloads and listens that both rebound during the first couple of weeks of January.
While Bumper’s data is focused on what happens during a winter break, it’s safe to assume that this behavior also happens during holiday breaks at other times of the year. Checking your Apple Podcasts Connect and/or Spotify for Podcasters dashboard(s) can provide the best snapshot of how and when your audience is consuming your podcast by looking directly at their listening behavior.
In short, taking a holiday break won’t tank your show; just think of it as a temporary slowdown, not a signal of long-term decline. Let’s explore some strategies you can utilize to make the most of a holiday break and prepare for when your audience comes back.
What should I do with my podcast during a holiday break?
Now that you have seen the data prove that a holiday dip is a natural part of a podcast’s production cycle, the next step is planning your approach on what to do during that time. You can use this pause to strategize for the future, experiment with something new, or batch record episodes to publish so you can come back to the mic rested and refreshed. Let’s go through the available options.
Audit your podcast production workflow
A holiday break is an ideal time to go through your podcast production setup, identify any bottlenecks, and look at implementing new tools, assets, or methods. When you’re in the regular cycle of recording, editing, and publishing episodes, you might overlook these problems or concerns just so you can keep a consistent schedule. Use a holiday break to give the necessary attention to those issues to optimize your podcast and create a more efficient workflow.
Here are some example tasks:
- Produce a new podcast trailer or intro/outro
- Review and redesign your cover art, social media assets, and any related marketing materials
- Review your podcast title, description and keywords, using The Ultimate Guide to Podcast Marketing for assistance
- Reorganize your podcast file storage system, including locations and naming conventions
- Map out recurring tasks for yourself or your team and create templates or standard operating procedure (SOP) documents
- Review your analytics on your audio host, Apple Podcasts Connect, and/or Spotify for Podcasters dashboard
Plan your editorial calendar
Your editorial calendar is so much more than a schedule of when you’re publishing episodes. Whether you’re a solo podcaster, or you work with a team of professionals, an editorial calendar is a great way to get a bird’s eye view of the year, create a logical flow of episodes around specific topics, and manage your time effectively.
Use a holiday break to look at the months ahead and create a roadmap that aligns your podcast episodes with any holidays or other natural peaks and valleys during the year. If your show covers more business-centric topics, for example, you can include industry conferences on your editorial calendar and plan episodes around them (whether you’re attending the events or not).
Also, for specific holidays or awareness months (such as Women’s History Month or Hispanic Heritage Month), adding those to your editorial calendar means you can find potential guests that fit with those themes. This type of planning lets you return from your holiday break ready to approach the coming months with clarity and purpose.
Share episode content with similar podcasts
Cross-promos are a great way to tap into new audiences, and a holiday break is an extremely effective way to make that introduction.
For example, if you are a show focused on food (like the James Beard Award-winning podcast Gravy), then you are primed with food-related episodes that would be a perfect fit for Thanksgiving in November. Other shows may want a break from their active production schedule around that time of year, so you could send them a note in September or early October to see if they would like a feed drop (essentially, dropping your episode into their feed) in the lead up to or around the Thanksgiving holiday week.
This kind of opportunity not only helps the external show with their workload, but also acts as an invaluable marketing tool as it puts your show in front of a group of listeners that may already be naturally into what you cover in a way that is both easy and intentional. Bonus: you could do multiple feed swaps with different shows and throughout the year as other holidays emerge. (See why planning your editorial calendar is such a good idea?)
Check out our articles on identifying an ideal cross-promotional partner and writing a podcast cross-promo script to get started with the process of swapping feeds.
Continue publishing episodes
Yes, it’s a holiday break. But if you want to stay in your audience’s feeds, publishing episodes is how you maintain that presence (even if the data tells you that listeners and downloads will take a dive).
There’s one thing to keep in mind here: communication is key. The most successful podcasts don’t live or die based on a skipped week or two – if you choose to go dark, that is – but you don’t want to leave your audience hanging. Even a short holiday message at the beginning or end of your last episode before a holiday break will set the expectation for listeners and clear up any confusion when your show goes silent for a while.
So what should you publish? Here are a few ideas:
- Publish new episodes you recorded before the holiday break. If you want to keep your regular publishing schedule without interruption, recording 3-4 episodes well before the holiday break begins is a good option. It maintains the routine your audience has around your podcast, and you don’t have to lift a finger during the break – just schedule them to publish and kick back and relax. This approach is best for shows with evergreen topics.
- Publish a past episode with a new introduction. Choose a top-performing episode from your archives, an episode that you really like that you think deserves another moment in the spotlight, or an episode with a topic that’s currently in the zeitgeist. Record a short introduction before the episode explaining why you chose it, what’s changed since it first aired, or any specific points in the episode listeners should remember. This approach is great for all kinds of shows because new listeners get to hear something they might have missed, and current listeners get to remember the past episode which now holds current relevance.
- Publish a “best of” episode. This type of podcast episode strings together highlights from throughout the year into a single episode. You can relive the funniest moments, remember the most insightful quotes, or resurface topics that generated the most response from your audience. Add a stinger or a brief explanation before the clips to give the episode some structure, and now you’ve got something that can feel fresh and interesting even though it’s technically recycled content.
Conclusion
For podcasters, holiday breaks are inevitable. Whether you choose to record your way through it, plan through it, or just go silent for a few weeks, there’s several ways you can use this time effectively. The best thing about the podcasting industry is that its foundation is between creators and listeners. And real people need to take a breather sometimes! Not only will your audience understand, but the data supports you, and you’ll come back stronger for having taken that time away.
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