A lot hinges on your branded podcast’s format and cadence. 

From what kind of listeners you attract and how they consume your content to the storytelling options available to you. 

Let’s look at some of my (and maybe some of your) favorite podcasts: could you imagine American Scandal condensed into one 30-minute episode? What about one episode of The Daily stretched into a 6 part series?

The same logic applies to branded shows. Depending on the type of content you want to produce, the type of listeners you want to attract, and the goals you want to achieve, you’ll need to make an informed decision between producing a serialized show vs. an episodic one.

To help you decide, we lay out everything you need to know including:

• What are episodic and serialized podcasts
• Their different consumption patterns
• Marketing best practices for each cadence 
• Which is better suited to your brand’s goals

‍

What is a serialized podcast?

Serialized podcasts are designed to be listened to in a specific order; they tell a story or explore a topic over multiple episodes with each installment building on the last. 

Like TV shows or docuseries, serialized podcasts encourage binge-listening. They’re ideal for storytelling, deep-dive exposés, dramas, and non-fiction narratives, and even branded podcasts like Murder in HR, Bring Back Bronco, and Making an Impossible Airplane: The Untold Story of Concorde.

To find more examples, we suggest checking out Apple’s Top Series Chart, which they released this past October. Of the top 100 serialized shows it lists, we can see that it’s dominated by True Crime programs that are all relatively similar, which suggests a significant degree of audience overlap – we’ll come back to this later. 

‍

What is an episodic podcast?

Episodic podcasts are self-contained, with each episode designed to stand alone. These podcasts allow listeners to pick and choose episodes based on their interests, offering greater flexibility, less commitment, and no prior context. 

Because each episode is independent, it makes this format ideal for topical discussions, interviews, or recurring themes that don’t require continuity, such as weekly commentary or expert advice. For this reason, most branded podcasts follow this format – including Hackable, Powering Travel, and Not Just Fluff.

‍

Different consumption patterns

As you’d probably expect, how people consume serialized podcasts is different from how they consume episodic shows. 

Understanding these differences is key to optimizing your podcast’s performance, marketing strategy, and ultimately deciding which cadence works best for the content your brand is looking to produce.

Serialized podcasts: A front-loaded journey

Serialized podcasts — designed to be consumed in a specific order to tell a cohesive story — often see a heavy concentration of listeners in their earlier episodes. 

The first episode acts as the gateway to the series, drawing in the most curious listeners. However, not all of those listeners stick around until the end. This natural drop-off leads to fewer listeners for later episodes.

Interestingly, while the total number of listeners might decline over time, those who stay engaged with the series tend to listen more intently. Retention rates and average listen time often increase for later episodes, as this subset of listeners is deeply invested in the story and less likely to abandon it mid-way.

Put another way: the audience that makes it to the finale is smaller but highly committed.

Episodic podcasts: A steady flow of engagement

By contrast, episodic podcasts operate more like a buffet: each episode stands on its own, and listeners pick and choose what appeals to them without following a set order. 

This format lends itself to steady listenership across episodes, as there’s less pressure to “catch up.” However, episodic shows often face a different challenge: ensuring consistency in quality and relevance, as each episode needs to hook listeners independently.

‍

Marketing serialized vs. episodic shows

Due to the nature of serialized and episodic podcasts and their different consumption patterns, each cadence calls for tailored marketing strategies. While (of course) there will be some overlap, here are some general guidelines we suggest:

Marketing serialized podcasts

For serialized podcasts, the focus should be on the long game: drawing in the right audience early and convincing them to commit to the journey. Building anticipation for the series launch, crafting compelling trailers, and using cliffhangers are all tactics we’ve seen work well.

Plus, as we mentioned before, there’s a large degree of audience overlap among serialized shows. Bumper expands more on this using neighborhood maps: visual maps that use real-world listener data to show audience overlap between podcasts. This helps you identify clusters of shows with similar listener bases, which is important for targeting relevant podcasts to collaborate with on ad swaps, features, etc; You can see neighborhood maps and how they play out here.

Because of this connection, serialized podcasts benefit from targeting listeners who have an affinity for serialized, storytelling formats — think fans of true crime, investigative journalism, or narrative-driven series like Serial and In The Dark.

For example, In The Dark shared the first episode of Sold a Story, a podcast series that challenges the way children are taught to read. This is a particularly effective marketing strategy given the investigative style and serialized cadence of both podcasts lends itself to a meaningful degree of audience overlap.

Plus, given the fact that recent research from Sounds Profitable stated that 74% of US podcast consumers who listened to a limited series this past year went on to look for another podcast to listen to, this collaboration makes even more sense. 

Marketing episodic podcasts

Episodic podcasts, on the other hand, thrive on discoverability and topic-based relevance. Each episode is an opportunity to attract a new listener, so marketing efforts can focus more on individual episodes. 

Think SEO-optimized titles and descriptions, partnering with relevant guests or influencers for specific episodes, and taking advantage of trending topics to draw in a larger audience.

For example, NEI’s Fissionary covers a wide range of topics that all tie back to nuclear energy. The show thrives on inviting a wide range of guests – from scientists and CEOs to a pageant queen and a cartoon chicken. These guests help them integrate nuclear energy into a broader cultural and societal context – namely in TV and movies like Godzilla, Spider-Man, and The Simpsons. 

With this wide range of topics and guests, NEI can attract new listeners with each episode – no prior context required. As such, their marketing efforts are more focused on single episodes tapping into topical events and honing in on subject-specific SEO across social media, blogs, and listening apps.

‍

Why brands opt for episodic podcasts: the push toward being “always on” 

As podcasting evolves, so do audience consumption habits, ad buyers’ preferences, brand goals – the list goes on. At the moment, podcast pros are noticing a shift toward “always on” podcasts. 

Arielle Nissenblatt from Earbuds Podcast Collective told CoHost that “In 2025, more and more podcasters will begin making moves towards becoming always-on shows. Limited-run and seasonal shows are great and can be really impactful for brands and storytelling, but they are limiting when it comes to marketing and eventual monetization.” 

While serialized shows can technically be “always on” if you’re willing to continue to put out extra content each week – like behind-the-scenes, Q&As, and live episodes – serialized shows do have a clear beginning and end. 

While some of your mega-fans will dive into extra content, these numbers will likely fall short of your typical viewership. Plus, there’s only so much “extra content” you can provide until you overextend yourself and stretch out your series too far – which is a risk we don’t suggest taking.

On the other hand, “always on” shows lend themselves much better to episodic podcasts. If you’re looking to maximize your presence in your listeners' ears, expand your monetization opportunities, and boost your discoverability over time, we suggest looking into the “always on” model. 

However, we will say that releasing a new episode each week or every other week for the foreseeable future does require a lot of planning. You’ll need the right tools and team in your corner to avoid podfade. 

If you’re opting for this route, we suggest:

• Laying out a release schedule that’s attainable for you: Whether that’s twice a week, once a week, or bi-weekly, you’ll want to give yourself ample time to plan your content, secure your guests, record, edit, and promote each episode. 
• Diversify your episodes: If your typical podcast episode format isn’t attainable each week, consider adding extended interviews from past episodes, answering audience questions, or re-releasing old content to keep your show top of mind without the extra lift. 
• Outsource: Don’t stretch yourself out too thin. We suggest working with contractors to help take some things off your plate or working with a full-service branded podcast agency if your budget allows.

‍

Why brands choose serialized podcasts: Time is on your side

On the flip side, brands that are keen to dive deeper into their niche and tell a multifaceted story tend to lean more toward serialized shows. Here’s why:

Instead of having to cram a story into a 30-minute podcast episode, serialized shows give the opportunity to connect with audiences on a more meaningful level by giving you the room to dive into the details. 

As a listener, this gives you more time with the story’s “characters” and to immerse yourself in the “plot,” giving the narrative a much greater significance come the end of the series. Even if your brand isn’t choosing to lean into the “story arc” structure, listeners will likely leave with more knowledge and a stronger sense of connection to your subject than they would through a single episode. 

This, of course, is contingent on the fact that you make every extra minute spent together as valuable as the last. Like single episodes, listeners will drop off midway through your series if it strays too far from your focus or doesn’t meet their expectations. 

‍

Things to consider for serialized branded podcasts

Compared to single standalone episodes, there are two important things to keep in mind if you’re opting to create a serialized show:

Fitting each episode into the whole series 

At the heart of all good podcasts lies a well-told story, but the key challenge for serialized podcasts compared to episodic shows is that your story must sustain multiple episodes. I’d even take this one step further and argue that in a serialized show, each episode needs to provide a standalone experience to the listener while still connecting to the whole. 

What I mean by this is that you’re not just creating a 6-hour podcast and cutting it into 8 pieces. You need to highlight key scenes, develop moments of suspense and emotion, and find your cliffhangers. Depending on your content or the story you want to tell, this can be challenging. 

How do you create multiple cliffhangers in a story where we all know the ending? How do you keep an audience engaged for over 8 hours? How do you keep listeners in the know when a story has multiple moving parts spanning over different episodes? 

These are all questions you’ll likely have to ask yourself for a serialized podcast that you’d probably not need to consider for a single episode. 

“I’ve been a radio reporter for ten years, and if I learned anything from my time at This American Life, it’s how to craft a narrative so that even if the ending is ambiguous, it is somehow satisfying. I don’t know that I’ll ever be at peace with what we find or that there will be a definitive verdict.”

–Sarah Koenig of This American Life on creating Serial

Keeping up your threads

To be a great serialized storyteller, you need to keep track of a lot of threads. The real challenge here is not revealing too much but also not leaving too many things unanswered or unresolved. 

This dilemma can often result in producing episodes out of order or tweaking your first episode up until your last one is created. From there, a lot of teams will analyze the series from both directions to ensure you don’t introduce any threads or storylines in the beginning that go unaccounted for in the end. This is also a great exercise to ensure you don’t make any conclusions that you didn’t substantiate throughout the series.

“[Having a strong outline] helpes with gathering material. Instead of simply hoovering up as much as we could, we had a focus: those key scenes we were trying to bring to life. All in the service of answering our core question. That said, journalists must be driven by our curiosity and so we captured ideas and scenes in the field that we hadn’t anticipated. With some hard work fitting them into our narrative, they made the show much better than we could have hoped.”

–Pedro Mendez, Pacific Content/Sequel 

‍

Which cadence is best for your brand?

Ultimately deciding between a serialized or episodic podcast format depends on your brand’s objectives and the type of content you want to create. 

Serialized podcasts offer a unique opportunity to tell deep, multi-layered stories that build engagement over time, while episodic podcasts allow for flexibility and consistency, making them ideal for brands aiming to stay "always on" and relevant in their listeners’ lives. 

Both formats come with their own set of challenges and advantages, but when approached strategically, either can help your brand build a meaningful connection with its audience. 

To learn more about how our team can help you bring your branded podcast to life, reach out to our team of audio experts.