Downloads Are Vanity. Contacts and Contracts Are Sanity.

We surveyed 861 marketing and PR pros with Health Podcast Library. Three numbers should stop you cold:

• 45.8% of non-hosts say they don't believe podcasts work. Not budget. Not talent. Belief.
• 70.8% of hosts track engagement. Only 16.8% track ROI.
• 41.8% spend more on production than promotion. Nearly 1 in 5 puts 80%+ of the budget into production alone.

Put those together and you get the real story. The channel doesn't have a credibility problem. It has an accounting problem. Half the market doesn't believe in podcasting because the other half can't produce a number that survives a revenue conversation.

Two more worth knowing, because they're where the money is:

Only 15.5% of hosts target existing customers. In medtech and healthtech, that's where retention, expansion, references, and advisory relationships live. Almost nobody is talking to them.

Only 10.6% measure AI search visibility. Meanwhile 33.6% of hosts are already building transcript-rich, question-based episodes designed to get cited in AI answers. When a CIO asks an AI assistant about interoperability vendors, the answer gets assembled from cited sources. Your archive is the strongest citation asset you own, and you're probably not treating it that way.

If you have a show: do these three things this week

1. Add one revenue metric to your dashboard. Pick one: pipeline influenced, guests who became customers or partners, or deals where an episode showed up in the buying committee. One metric, tracked consistently, beats a dashboard full of completion rates. You need this before your next budget conversation, not after.

2. Flip 20% of your production budget to promotion. Cut one episode a month if you have to. An episode nobody in your ICP hears is a cost center. Distribution to 400 right-title people beats 4,000 random downloads every time in our market.

3. Pull your top 10 buyer questions and check your archive. Take the questions your sales team answers on every call, then search your transcripts. You've almost certainly already answered them on tape. That's your next 10 episodes, your next 10 blog posts, and your next 10 AI citations, sitting in an asset you already paid for.

If you're thinking about starting one: do these three instead

A quarter of the market plans to launch within 12 months. Here's what the data says about doing it well.

1. Write the guest list before the show concept. 65.3% of organizations publish their first episode within six months, and 32% within one to three. Getting to air is easy. What separates a pipeline asset from a hobby is who's in the chair. Name 20 people you want a relationship with: buyers, KOLs, partners, health system execs. If that list doesn't map to your pipeline, don't launch yet. Fix the list.

2. Pick a cadence you can hold for 24 months, then halve it. Monthly and inconsistent releases account for more than half of all branded shows. Only 23.3% publish weekly. Nobody regrets starting at twice a month. Everybody regrets a feed that goes quiet in month seven.

3. Budget promotion from day one, not day 90. The single most common structural mistake in the data is funding production and hoping distribution happens by itself. Decide your promotion split before you buy a microphone.

The reframe

Stop treating a podcast as a show. Treat it as a spoke in a commercial flywheel: a relationship engine that gets you 45 minutes with a buyer who'd never take a sales call, and a content asset that feeds search, social, enablement, and now AI answers.

Then measure it like one.

Downloads are vanity. Contacts and contracts are sanity.

And if you don't want to do it alone, let us know. Here's the playbook we use →‍

Read the full report →

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