In this week’s Programming To Win column, Richard Harker looks at four major tools a radio station can use for marketing itself. Harker breaks down the positives and negatives of a station’s website, email, social media outlets and mobile devices. How can your station improve its efforts in each of these departments?
By: Richard Harker
Richard Harker
Marketing has always played a critical role in the success of a radio station. While programming people want to believe that what comes through the speakers determines success, winning the ratings game requires both a good product and effective marketing.
Whether you work in a diary or PPM market, raising awareness of the station through marketing is the first step in improving ratings. Our goal in marketing is to persuasively communicate with listeners in a way that raises the station’s top-of-mind status.
Successful radio stations also use marketing to build a stronger bond with their listeners. Strengthening the bond brings the listener back to the station time and time again. Years ago, fun contests, a little TV, and handing out T-shirts at shows was the typical marketing bag of tricks. Then the biggest problem was keeping the station van full of gas.
We now have potentially more persuasive new-media marketing options in addition to the traditional “brute force” methods of the past. Today with the help of digital options, we can more effectively market to listeners at a personal level by communicating with them directly.
The expanding options can be a little overwhelming, however, particularly with the reality of today’s skeleton staffs and limited budgets. Each option costs money, takes time to do well, and many are so new that we don’t really know if they work.
So how do you decide how to market the station? What are the most effective new-media tools, and how can you use them in the most efficient way? Read on.
We’ll look at four strategies here: Web, email, social networks, and mobile.
Websites
Most stations have the obligatory web site. The station’s website is the visual symbol of the station. It should look like the radio station sounds.
Unfortunately, most radio station web sites look pretty similar. On top of that, most look pretty bad. They are painful to look at, too busy, seemingly shouting at the viewer.
If your goal is to create a clean streamlined format that flows from element to element, why then represent it visually with a cluttered flash-festooned riot of color and movement hawking and pitching everything from the morning show to who knows what products?
Harker Research finds that few listeners visit radio station web sites more than once, and when they do, they spend very little time on them.
At this point, too many websites have become anti-marketing tools, undoing a great deal of the work put into creating a positive station image.
Product people need to get more involved with website design and make sure the site motivates listeners to turn on the radio station.
Email
Email should be the foundation of every radio station’s marketing strategy. Email has the potential to be the most powerful marketing tool at our disposal because of its ability to reach nearly every listener, its low cost, and its flexibility.
Making email an effective marketing tool requires continual attention, however. Your database of addresses has to be represent a significant proportion of your audience. It has to be regularly updated and old addresses purged.
Emails must be designed to be useful, relevant, and informative. And don’t over-use email.
Social Media
Some believe that social networking has supplanted email as the primary way people stay in touch with friends. It is a little more complicated than that. The two media are complimentary.
Email is the best way to touch an individual, social media is the best way to touch an entire audience. Email should be for personally targeted messages. Listeners should feel that they are hearing from the station regarding something that might individually interest them.
Social media should be for general audience information. It is a broadcast, an extension of what the station does on air.
If your email efforts are up and running, then the next step is adding social media, primarily Facebook. The challenge is creating a steady stream of station posts.
The task needs to be delegated to someone who understands the station’s listeners and what the listeners will find interesting. Dull pointless posts turn listeners off and raise questions about the station’s relevancy.
Twitter has more buzz than Facebook, but it is much more difficult to overcome Twitter noise. With limited resources, investing in email and Facebook should be a station’s top priority.
Mobile
The next frontier in digital marketing is mobile. The telephone is becoming the Swiss-army knife of communication, but at this point, three out of four mobile users are using a plain simple phone. That means it remains primarily a tool for individuals to communicate to other individuals by voice or text.
Don’t get sucked into the hype about smartphones. With only one in four cell phone users having a smartphone, like an iPhone or Android, mobile marketing is still in its infancy.
Don’t design a marketing campaign where participants need a smartphone to participate. Your marketing needs to reach all your listeners, not just mobile early adopters.
At this point, mobile marketing should focus on texting. Texting has replaced voice as the primary means of mobile communications for younger listeners. On average, teens send an average of 3,339 texts per month.
If your station targets listeners under the age of 30, it has to have a texting strategy. In-bound texting should be part of a station’s polling, requests, and feedback.
Outbound texting offers additional marketing opportunities, but should be used carefully. Research suggests that 9 out of 10 people resent unsolicited messages.
On the other hand, texting is the most immediate means to reach young listeners. Since listeners who text generally have their phones with them and on, it can be a very effective call-to-action tool.
The key is to first make sure listeners want you to text them. If a listener has given you her mobile number, she has granted the station a privilege that you should not abuse. Use texting sparingly and only for important things. Save outbound texting to very high value opportunities.
New-media marketing options offer new opportunities to strengthen the bond between station and listener. The key is to focus energy on doing a few things very well rather than dabbling in the entire range of possibilities.
Regardless of the means you ultimately focus on, remember these important rules:
- Regularly communicate with listeners.
- Make sure listeners understand how important they are to the station.
- Be sure your messages are relevant, useful, and entertaining.
- Integrate social networking into the product to make communication a two-way street
Richard Harker is President of Harker Research, a company providing a wide range of research services to radio stations in North America and Europe. Twenty-years of research experience combined with Richard’s 15 years as a programmer and general manager helps Harker Research provide practical actionable solutions to ratings problems. Visit www.harkerresearch or contact Richard at (919) 954-8300.
