It feels as though everyone wants a podcast these days.
Brands want them. Businesses want them. Individuals want them. And with good reason. Podcasts have moved firmly into the mainstream and become an established part of how people consume information, entertainment and expert opinion.
More than a quarter of UK adults now listen to podcasts every week, according to Ofcom, and that figure continues to rise. But perhaps more interesting than the numbers is how podcasts fit into people’s lives.
They come with us.
We listen while driving, commuting, walking the dog, exercising, cooking or getting jobs done around the house. Unlike content that demands our eyes as well as our attention, podcasts can occupy parts of the day that other media simply can’t.
For brands, that’s a very interesting space to be in.
But after more than seven years producing the Move iQ Podcast, there’s something else we’ve learned: starting a podcast is relatively easy. Building one that people come back to is much harder.
Seven years of finding our rhythm
We launched the Move iQ Podcast in 2019 as another way of delivering what sits at the heart of Move iQ: straightforward, useful property information for consumers.
It quickly gained recognition as an emerging educational podcast, but what we launched then isn’t what we produce today.
We’ve now created more than 320 episodes and publish every week. Over that time, we’ve experimented, adapted and, importantly, listened to what the audience tells us through both their comments and the analytics.
In the early days, we released content in series, Netflix style, with intervals in-between. The we started to increase schedule and release a mixture of fireside chats and short soundbites that were tightly focused. That suited the way content was being consumed at the time and gave us an opportunity to answer specific property questions quickly.
Over time, we’ve moved towards longer-form conversations.
That hasn’t happened by accident.
We’ve found that when the subject and guests are right, audiences are prepared to spend considerably longer with content. In fact, the conversational nature of a podcast is part of its strength. There is time to explore a subject properly, challenge an assumption, explain the nuances and answer the questions that don’t necessarily fit into a 30-second social video.
Short-form content still has an important role to play – and we use it extensively to promote and amplify our podcast content – but the podcast itself provides something different: depth.
Consistency matters more than you think
One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that a successful podcast needs a rhythm.
If your audience expects an episode every week, you need to be there every week.
That means planning topics, securing guests, recording, editing, producing supporting content, publishing and promoting – consistently.
It’s very easy to launch a podcast with enthusiasm and produce five or six episodes. The challenge is producing episode 50. Then episode 100. Then 200.
Consistency builds familiarity and, ultimately, trust.
You also need to pay attention to what the data is telling you. Which subjects generate the strongest engagement? Where do people stop listening? Which guests resonate? Which episodes continue attracting audiences months after they were first published?
We’ve continually evolved the Move iQ Podcast around those insights rather than assuming we know what audiences want.
Why podcast audiences are interesting for brands
This is where podcasts become particularly interesting commercially.
Podcast listening is intentional. Someone has actively chosen a programme, a host or a subject and decided to spend time with it.
And increasingly, that is significant time.
Edison Research found that 51% of people aged 16+ in the UK had consumed a podcast in the previous month in 2025, while a third had done so in the previous week. Ofcom’s latest figures show weekly podcast listening has since risen to 27% of UK adults.
There’s also evidence that podcast advertising and sponsorship can feel less disruptive than advertising elsewhere. Ofcom found that 40% of podcast listeners consider advertising and sponsorship within podcasts less intrusive than on other media they consume.
But there’s an important caveat.
The partnership has to make sense
Dropping an unrelated sales message into a trusted conversation risks achieving exactly the opposite of what a brand wants.
The strongest podcast partnerships feel relevant to the audience and useful within the conversation.
That’s certainly our approach at Move iQ.
Don’t interrupt the conversation. Become part of it.
We’re deliberately selective about the organisations we collaborate with.
Property is a broad subject. There are hundreds of questions consumers need help answering.
That creates opportunities for brands with genuine expertise to join those conversations.
A partnership might involve sponsoring a series around a particular consumer challenge. It could mean bringing an expert onto the podcast. It might involve developing an educational topic together, or building a wider campaign around podcast episodes, video, social content and other Move iQ channels.
What we don’t believe in is shoehorning a brand into a conversation simply because there’s commercial budget available.
Our audience comes first.
That’s important for us, but ultimately, it’s important for the brand partner too. If a collaboration is genuinely useful to the listener, the brand benefits from being associated with content people have chosen to consume rather than advertising they’re waiting to skip.
The podcast is no longer just a podcast
Another major change we’ve seen is the blurring of audio and video.
People might listen to an episode in the car, watch the full conversation on YouTube, discover a 60-second clip through social media and then return to the full episode later.
That’s changed how we think about production.
Our podcast now sits within a much wider content ecosystem. A strong conversation can create long-form audio and video, short-form clips, social content and opportunities for further discussion across Move iQ’s channels.
For a brand partner, that can dramatically extend the life and reach of the original conversation.
Seven years later, we’re still learning
More than 300 episodes in, we know considerably more about podcasting than we did in 2019.
But we’re still looking at the analytics. We’re still testing formats. We’re still learning what makes someone click, listen, watch – and come back the following week.
Perhaps that’s the biggest lesson.
A successful podcast is something you build.
And for brands that want to reach property consumers through trusted, useful and genuinely engaging conversations, we’re always interested in discussing what we could build together.
