By Holland Cooke
Consultant
As TV is touting its coming attractions, take a step back. We – inside the box – live-and-breathe radio.
Listeners have their hands full just living and breathing. Their day is time-crunched and financially-challenged, and we want to be its soundtrack. But listening is free, unlike umpteen other purchase decisions they agonize. So what’s high-stakes to us is low-stakes to them.
We only matter if we matter, and we’ve never had so much audio competition.
- This month, as the school year begins in so many places, the listeners local retailers want as customers revert to “normal.” Their tempo changes, and builds to a holiday season climax. Do they know who you are and how you can help?
- Off-air promotion (remember that?) merely says give-us-a-try. When they do, does what they hear deliver? Even with scant (or no) off-air promotion, much of what you can do to become more habit-forming costs nothing. As consultants do, I’m talking about “the fundamentals,” the blocking-and-tackling stuff. For starters, think: recognition and relevance.
Who are you?
- Are call letters or station nickname delivered frequently? PPM myth: call letters matter less. Baloney. Awareness drives use. Ditto your dial position(s) and how to listen via smartphone, smart speaker, and streams. Name-and-address.
- As your listeners cume 3 stations this week, help ’em remember yours more than the other 2 (not to mention streams and satellite radio and podcasts). And are you selling — or merely reciting — call letters, dial position, and slogans? This is often an issue with veteran talent, creatures of habit.
“Who cares?”
Or as my WTOP successor Jim Farley (RIP) asked: “W.G.A.S.?” He hung a sign in the newsroom there, meaning “Who Gives A Shit?”
- Are topics relatable and useful? Enable listeners with helpful information, and they’ll keep coming back.
- Do you say “you” and “your,” a lot? It’s a litmus test for relevance.
- Do you keep setting the stage as audience tunes in? Someone JUST got in the car.
- Are you teasing the next quarter hour? And what you’ll offer same-time-tomorrow?
- Even with apps in the dashboard, weather and traffic are super-local and can be super-impactful.
- Is your on-air imaging about the station? Or about listeners’ lives? “Because ONE traffic jam can jam-up your whole day…”
There’s more from radio’s right-now To-Do list at HollandCooke.com
Holland Cooke is a consultant working the intersection of broadcasting and the Internet. Follow HC on Twitter @HollandCooke and connect on LinkedIn