Although technology has made it easier than ever for the average person to start a podcast, it’s still common for podcasters to run into challenges along the way.
Producing and launching a podcast is a massive undertaking, so it’s important that podcasters learn to use all the tools and resources they have at their disposal to make the journey easier.
Some of the most common pain points for podcasters include struggling to sustain podcast growth, a lack of motivation, frequent burnout, and feeling crunched for time. If you feel like you don’t have time to properly invest in podcast growth tactics, then you’re not alone—according to podcast expert and the CEO of Voics Darren Lee, 90% of podcasters don’t make it past the third episode.
The inability to continue past those first few episodes can be attributed to a number of different factors, including a lack of content strategy, systems, distribution, and grit, in Lee’s opinion. But if we may, we would also add that not having enough time to devote to your podcast is another massive hurdle that can get in the way of podcast success.
However, there are several helpful tools you can use to save time and maximize the amount of time you have for content strategy and creation. While these tools may help to free up time in your schedule, we’d have to agree with Lee that podcast success comes down to a whole lot of planning, forethought, strategy, and hard work, so be sure to keep this in mind as you dive into the tools below.
In this article, we’ll highlight the top podcast growth tools that will help you save time and maximize growth throughout your podcasting journey. We’ll cover tools for the entire production phase including pre and post-production, as well as analytics tools that are must-haves for any professional podcasters who are looking to level up their show and gain a deeper understanding of their audience base.
CoHost
Price: Check out our pricing options here.
Features:
- Advanced Audience Demographics: With this feature, you can gain insight into listener demographics like their age, household income, family members, lifestyle, hobbies, and social media habits. This will enable you to better understand your listeners and their preferences, and also determine whether you’re reaching your target audience.
- B2B Analytics: Our B2B Analytics feature allows you to check in on which businesses are tuning into your podcast, including details like their industry, size, location, and average revenue through an exportable list.
- Tracking Links: With our tracking links feature, you can track clicks across several marketing channels to gain insight into top download sources and other individual link analytics.
- In-Depth Analytics Dashboards: Through your dashboard, you can access key metrics like show and episode consumption rates, growth rates, top episode vs. latest episode insights, and downloads and unique listener data for a convenient way to take an all-encompassing view of your show’s success.
- Automatic Transcriptions: Our convenient, in-app AI-powered transcription tool allows you to benefit from effortless editing, distribution, boost SEO, and accessibility, all at no extra cost on top of your plan.
- Hosting Capabilities: If you opt to use CoHost as a hosting site, you’ll benefit from features like one-click publishing, multiple user permissions, custom media player, and multi-show management.
CoHost is one of the only platforms of its kind on the podcasting market. Created by award-winning podcast agency Quill, CoHost was designed with the industry’s need for more robust growth and measurement tools in mind.
Not only is it a comprehensive and seamless hosting platform, but it also provides account management tools, support, advanced audience demographics, and B2B analytics that can help you target other businesses with your podcast.
The platform is a marketer’s dream because it offers everything you need to understand your podcast’s ROI all in one place, and the key metrics you need to continue growing.
CoHost’s Prefix:
If you’re not looking to switch hosting platforms, you can still benefit from CoHost's Prefix, which gives you access to industry-leading analytics and audience insights including Advanced Audience Demographics and B2B Analytics.
That’s right – regardless of your hosting setup, you can understand your listeners and their preferences, drive growth, and find out if your show is reaching your target audience.
Descript
Price: $0-$40 per month
Features:
- Video editing
- Audio editing
- Clip selection
- Remote recording
- Captions
- Screen recording
- Transcription
Descript is a handy platform for a wide variety of creative needs including audio and video editing, clip selection, and transcription. The platform’s features can be huge time-savers for podcasters because they enable you to quickly edit and promote podcast episodes through additional content like transcripts, blog posts, social media posts, and more.
Headliner
Price: $0-$19.99 per month
Features:
- Audiograms
- Transcription
- Podcast growth
- Podcast discovery
Headliner helps podcasters grow their podcast through promotional content like audiograms and transcripts. But what’s really neat about the platform is that it can also help with podcast growth and discovery through its programmatic tool, Podcast Promo, and its widget Disco, which converts web traffic into podcast listens using AI.
ChatGPT
Price: $0-$30+ per month
Features:
- Language translation
- Education
- Research
- Content creation
- Data analysis
While AI will never replace human writers, we can still use it as a helpful tool throughout the podcasting journey as an aid with research, learning, analyzing data, and answering our burning questions. ChatGPT can be especially useful in the pre-production phase because it can help you and your team brainstorm ideas, spark thought-starters, and provide background research for any guests you’ll be interviewing, or topics you’ll be discussing on the show. You can also use it to help repurpose podcast content into other mediums, which is helpful during the promotion stage.
Riverside
Price: $0-$24 per month
Features:
- Podcast recording
- Video interviews
- AI social media clips
- Transcriptions
- Webinars
- Video marketing
- Captions
Riverside is an invaluable tool for podcasters hoping to save time and make the whole podcast process more efficient. . Using Riverside’s software, you can record, edit, transcribe, and promote video interviews, reducing any friction in the process and helping you create high-quality content without ever leaving your home office.
Zencastr
Price: $18-$80 per month
Features:
- Remote and mobile recording
- AI editing and clipping
- Video and audio hosting
- Growth and distribution
- Transcription
Zencastr is another handy, all-in-one platform that gives podcasters the power to record, edit, distribute, and grow their podcast under one roof. Many of Zencastr’s tools are powered by AI, which will help you create and monetize your podcast while freeing up more time in your schedule.
Castmagic
Price: $23-$179 per month
Features:
- Content creation
- Report/summary generation
- Email generation
- Data analysis
Castmagic truly lives up to its name—the platform can turn any audio recording into the kind of content output you need, just like magic. Using just an audio clip from a recorded meeting or call, the AI-powered platform can create podcasts, social media posts, reports, to-do lists, and any other content you need, which could obviously serve as a massive time-saver for people of all industries, from sales to podcasting.
PodMatch
Price: $6-$62 per month
Features:
- Podcast guest and host matching
- Messaging
- Interview scheduling
- Collaborative workflow management
You’ve heard of online dating, but did you know there’s a platform that connects podcast guests and hosts based on their profile information? Aptly named PodMatch, the platform does much more than this, though—it also takes care of boring busy work like scheduling and to-do lists, reducing admin time by three hours and 14 emails on average. If this isn’t a tried-and-true time-saving tool for podcasters, we don’t know what is!
Alitu Showplanner
Price: $38-295 per month
Features:
- Podcast concept generation
- Podcast name generation
- Trailer script generation
- Episode idea generation
- Podcast recording
- Podcast publishing
Alitu Showplanner is another AI-powered podcast tool that works just like magic—in fact, it’s almost spooky. After answering a few simple questions about the kind of podcast you want to launch and your goals, the platform generates a concept, name, episode ideas, launch materials, and even a script for the trailer. If hiring an agency to lay the groundwork for your show isn’t in your budget and you’re not creatively inclined, this platform could be a great solution for you.
Wondercraft
Price: $0-$109 per month
Features:
- Script generation
- Audio/voice generation
- Audio editing including royalty-free music and sound effects
- Convenient sharing tools for quick and easy approvals
How it helps podcasters: Remember when we said Alitu Showplanner was spooky? Yeah, Wondercraft is a lot spookier. Using AI and its library of more than 200 “human-sounding” voices (you can even clone your own voice to be used in the audio content), the platform generates any kind of audio content you need, from ads to entire audiobooks. For example, the text and audio from the Hacker News Recap podcast was generated entirely by AI, and even earned a top 30 spot on Spotify’s chart rankings in its first month, so we can be sure that the content it creates is listener-approved.
Audacity
Price: Free
Features:
- Audio recording
- Audio editing
Audacity is one of the most popular platforms for recording and editing audio for creating music, podcasts, or any other creative audio project you’re working on. Not only is the platform completely free to use, but it also vows to always remain that way. In addition, Audacity is also entirely open source, meaning its source code is open for anyone to view or modify, enabling collaboration and third-party plugins.
SquadCast
Price: $0-$24+ per month
Features:
- Remote Recording
- Audio Recording
- Video Recording
- Progressive Upload, SquadCast’s unique patented technology, which ensures all your recordings are high quality and reliable
- Dolby Technologies advanced audio processing features
Known for its patented technology, Progressive Uploads, SquadCast guarantees high-quality, reliable, and crystal-clear audio and video recordings. Using auto-saved cloud recordings, the platform captures audio at the source so you don’t have to worry about connection issues or even a complete loss of power during your recording. The platform also offers sophisticated editing tools so every podcast episode will sound polished and professional.
What tools do you use to save time podcasting?
To sum up, the podcasting process doesn’t need to feel overwhelming if you have the right tools at your disposal. Adding some of these tools to your podcasting workflow should help you feel less stressed and better equipped to get into a healthy production rhythm for your show.
As AI-powered tools continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, podcasters will benefit from more time to focus on the fun stuff like coming up with creative concepts and leading fascinating conversations with guests. These tools will help you maintain full creative control while taking care of the time-consuming stuff. And really, who couldn’t use a few extra hours on their hands each week?
Reach out to CoHost to learn more about how our robust podcast analytics and audience insights can help save ambitious podcasters valuable time.
