Podcast content strategy, and seven myths that sink business podcasts

Medius sells accounts-payable software. Its buyers run finance teams, and most of them believe invoice fraud happens to other companies. So the Swedish firm made a true-crime podcast.

Accounts Deceivable never walks you through an invoice workflow. It sits down with a fraudster who took $13.5 million from a petrochemicals firm, and a charity director who unwittingly handed $650,000 of charity money to a cyber criminal. In season two, a man opens an old filing cabinet and finds a black book of entries going back decades, in his father's handwriting. He hires an ex-Scotland Yard detective.

The agency behind the show, Fight or Flight, reports more than 86,000 downloads and a 91% completion rate. Of the listeners surveyed, 92% said they were more inclined to buy Medius technology. Campaign named it the best B2B branded podcast series at its Audio Advertising Awards.

Fraud is an awkward subject for a company that sells to finance teams. Nobody wants to admit it happened on their watch. Medius picked the subject its buyers would rather not discuss, and they listened to the end.

That is the job of a podcast content strategy. Choose a premise your audience finds interesting, that you can speak on with authority, and that has enough in it for 30 episodes. Most shows skip the third test. The data on what happens next is bleak, and it upends a few things the industry takes for granted.

Seven myths about podcast topics

The first four come from launch and listening data. The last three are habits of thought most marketing teams have held at some point.

1. There's no room for another podcast

Listen Notes, which tracks public podcast feeds, shows 2026 on course for the fewest new launches since 2017. More than a quarter of recent launches were generated by AI. Fewer people are starting shows, and more of what does launch was assembled by software. A show with a real point of view, made by people who know the subject, has less company than it used to.

2. Most podcasts fade at episode seven

Producers have repeated this for years. Podchaser tracked all 333,723 podcasts launched in 2025. Only 3% of the shows that stopped did so at episode seven. The median show that stopped made three episodes over eight days, and a quarter never published a second.

Content Studio, a podcast producer in India, describes how it tends to go. Seven people at the kickoff meeting. Gaps between recordings that stretch from two weeks to five. Six months on, nobody can say whose podcast it is.

A topic with no depth runs dry fast. Before you launch, write 20 to 30 episode titles. If the team stalls at ten, the premise needs work. Tom Webster of Sounds Profitable suggests making six or seven episodes and putting them "under your bed" for a while before judging them.

3. Short and weekly is safest

Podchaser found the opposite on both counts. Shows released fortnightly were the most likely to still be publishing, at 44%, ahead of monthly at 40%, weekly at 39% and daily at 28%. Shows averaging under ten minutes had a 21% survival rate. Those running 40 to 60 minutes reached 43%.

Podchaser is careful to call these patterns, and teams that commit to longer episodes may be more serious to begin with. Even so, a fortnightly rhythm gives a small team time to research each topic. A longer episode also gives you more to cut into clips and posts.

4. Senior executives don't have time for podcasts

In the US, Signal Hill Insights found executives at organisations with more than 500 staff who listen to podcasts are heavier listeners than everyone else. Of those, 83% had listened in the past week, against 66% of other listeners, and they were more than twice as likely to listen for five hours or more a week. They told researchers they want depth over entertainment. They also lean on audio apps more than YouTube, which now leads among podcast listeners overall.

5. A broad topic reaches more people

When Red Hat, the US software company, worked with Pacific Content on a show for open-source developers, the studio's co-founder Steve Pratt worried there wouldn't be enough listeners. He later admitted he was "dead wrong". Command Line Heroes ran for nine seasons and, by his account, drew more listeners than many shows aimed at a general audience.

For a regional HQ, narrow can mean one buyer across many markets. The same question asked in Singapore, Jakarta and Riyadh is three episodes.

6. Our audience wants to hear about us

Pratt again. "Anytime anybody makes a piece of content that is about themselves, it's an infomercial." Beyond a sponsor read, Medius appears as one in-house fraud expert among the guests. The rest of the time it talks about fraud.

A useful test for any topic on the list. Would anyone listen with your logo removed?

7. Interesting guests make an interesting show

Guests help. Podchaser found that among English-language shows with 11 to 25 episodes, 41% of those with guests were still publishing, against 23% without. Guests bring a steady supply of conversations, and they share the episodes they appear in.

A guest list without a premise is a booking schedule. Jay Acunzo, host of Unthinkable, wrote, "Interviews with smart people in your industry isn't a show." Decide the question first, then find the person who can answer it better than anyone else.

How to choose podcast topics that last

A B2B podcast strategy comes down to a handful of decisions made before the first recording. Podcast content planning is what keeps them honest once you start. For the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, we developed the topics, chose the guests and wrote the questions for more than 20 episodes of its Foreseeable podcast.

1. Write the premise in one sentence. Who it's for, what problem it covers, and the angle only you can bring.
2. Look for the overlap. What your buyers ask about, what your people know from doing the work, and what nobody else in your market covers well.
3. Mine your sales calls. The questions prospects ask in a first meeting, and the objections that stall a deal, are episode titles.
4. Run the depth test. Write 20 to 30 titles and name 15 guests, from more than one market. If either list runs short, narrow the angle or widen the audience.
5. Plan in seasons. Eight to ten episodes on one theme gives you a review point and a clean way to stop. In Saudi Arabia, Aramco's Powered by How was an eight-part series on energy innovation.
6. Let the data choose the next season. Compare listening by theme, check where people drop off, and ask sales which episodes prospects mention. Keep the strongest themes and rework or drop the weakest.

Laugh and linger

Christine Dela Rosa hosts Work Check, Atlassian's podcast on the small arguments of office life, from emoji to cameras on in video calls. She measures a topic by how the audience reacts, the way a speaker reads a room. "Did your audience laugh? Did they linger?"

Pick topics that pass that test, and episode four takes care of itself.

Click2View produces podcasts for B2B brands across Asia, from format and topic planning to distribution. If your show needs a premise with 30 episodes in it, talk to us.