Marketing To Grow Loyalty

Loyalty marketing (social, data base, telemarketing and target campaigns) should also be a cornerstone of any country broadcaster's long-term plan. 

There is, however, another tool that is so inexpensive and easy to do that many stations overlook it as a good barometer of problems that might require more extensive quantitative research and/or marketing:  ask your listeners! 

Set up a panel of your active listeners, and meet with them on a regular basis.  We recommend airing an ongoing campaign of an nouncements on your air to inform listeners of the existence of your "Listener Advisory Board." 

Set up a link on your website for people to "sign up." 

Send a weekly station newsletter to the entire data base.  Do online research, set up a "get a clue" voice mail line for listener complaints/suggestions, and con stantly invite opinions on station programming on it.  Air listener-voiced comments and/or read their letters in regular promos to let people know you really do pay attention to their gripes and compliments.

Choose listeners at random from the panel to meet for a light dinner (restaurant or hotel trade) monthly with station staff and/or independent research people.  AOB will be happy to perform this function for you if a qualified moderator cannot be found at a local college or university marketing research department.  Keep us informed on problems and results if you choose to conduct the panels in-house.

Keep the groups small - less than 15 persons.  Use the panels to test potential marketing campaigns, TV commer cials, contests, morning show ideas, special programming, poten tially objectionable commercials, new music trends, etc. 

Recognize that you are NOT doing research, since the participants are aware of the station that is asking the questions.  However, since the bias in groups like this is to normally be quite com plimentary, when negatives come out they must be taken very seriously.

Actually, it has been our experience that country fans feel a sense of ownership of "their" radio station, and as a result when they are convinced that honesty will be taken seriously and result in changes on the air, they can be brutally frank and protective about the airwaves of their favorite station.

And, isn't that the way to make them feel involved and loyal to keep 'em listening longer? 

Besides, what competitor can take away your listeners when they feel like they all sit on your "Board of Directors"?

(More On) Loyalty

Country was a format with much greater loyalty 20 years ago. The mainstream AC listeners who were using Country as a P-2 back then are moving away from that format and are changing the face of the country audience now, growing our cume and shares, but reducing loyalty levels that we once took for granted.  And, that's not even mentioning the fickle Millenials who have been turning on to country since they were teens.

Success has it's costs, as the country audience becomes more like the mass culture and less qualitatively unique.

Another price of this growth:  once, country's "conversion ratio" was 1.42, but as average shares have increased, the format hasn't been able to convert ratings to revenue at the same rate.

The country format's growth is clearly less dependent than ever before on retaining long listening spans from a small base of very loyal listeners as less-loyal Gen Y has come into our universe. 

Just a few years ago, country would have been on the top of the list of 'loyal formats.'  Today, shifting demo targets, increased duplication, competition and PPM have made country radio less exclusive.  Diary measurement still picks up exclusive cumes (folks who write down no other radio station in their book other than their favorite one.  The great thing about PPM is the fact that the average radio station's cume doubles.  The bad news is that the average listener is shown to actually listen to almost twice as many radio stations as are seen in diaries and exclusive cume listeners are practically non-existent.

Next time, let's think about ways to improve the loyalty of your audience.

Loyalty: Even More Important Today

As markets become more compressed due to PPM's small samples and owners of the big combines fragment, niche and offer listeners more diverse choices to try to grow their combo share, loyalty is at a premium.

Passionate listenership patterns are the key to understanding what may happen when one station acquires a competitor which is starting to happen more now with deal-making starting to heat up again as station multiples have come down as lender money dried up due to the economy of the last few years. 

Sub-genres that live within a format -- if they create or improve passionate listenership due to narrower targeting of niches within a format-- can actually increase the overall shares for a format.  

My views, shaped by experience and observation:

"Jazz/NAC," Urban, and Urban Adult Contemporary are formats that actually grow when competing amongst themselves. This is because listening to these formats is so passionate that it eliminates outside listening.  For instance, a heritage Soft Adult Contemporary radio station may suffer at-work losses if an Urban AC or Jazz comes on but only from its African-American listeners.

Driving up share is also true in Rock, in that Rock listeners are loyal to the format, and, therefore, move between Rock, Classic Rock, Adult Alternative, and Alternative. The outside formats are the ones that suffer a new Rock station's arrival.

Adult Contemporary listeners are not format loyal, and, therefore, are tougher to convert.  If you have a Adult Contemporary station and you put on a Hot Adult Contemporary station, you'll undoubtedly damage yourself as these listeners tend to share their TSL with many other formats. It's all a matter of shelf space.  This can also happen as a Hot AC or CHR pulls an AC in a more "hot" direction.  Meanwhile, loyalty also diminishes for a soft AC station that fails to recognize the current music trends and remains too "soft" and "warm" for evolving demos.

The Classic Hits Format is not loyal within its life group; nor is Adult Alternative. This can be seen by the various Top 5 sharing patterns of these formats.

Adult Standards, by and large, stays on the AM band and is not format-loyal, but band-loyal.

Adult Urban is a highly loyal listener format. The benefit is that African-American listeners tend to listen longer to the radio than the average non-ethnic listener.

This is also true with Hispanic-targeted formats, but it's becoming less so because "first language" preference also plays a role as well, especially as Hispanic formats have broken into smaller pieces at a tremendous rate in many markets due to the growth of the Hispanic audience.

Business is generally AM band loyal as are News/Talk and Sports, as - for example - Entercom revealed in its recent Buffalo format finder research.  It was this format change that inspired this article. 

Most of the things that move up and down the AM band are loyal to AM, driven by the reality that by and large the difference between FM and AM listeners is age.

Putting Oldies, Standards/Nostalgia or Classic Country on an AM you own and News/Talk on another may be positive in that it limits the crossover between the two, for example.

You may have a tactical strategy to dominate News/Talk and, therefore, you opt to have a major News/Talk station that carries all of the big Talk shows and a secondary, lower-power AM station that presents the competing syndicated programs.

The plus here is that this keeps them off a competitor, but you are attacking yourself. 

It seems to me like moving a big news/talk station to FM or simulcasting an AM and FM cannibalizes the audience and in my view most often wastes an FM, leaving you with a weaker AM.

These are all broad generalizations, of course, and every market situation is unique, creating its own individual parameters.

More on loyalty tomorrow.

"Radio Expands Its Audience with New Platforms"

I didn't say that.  Arbitron did (click to read the press release). 

The report shows radio’s audience increased year over year, adding more than 1.6 million weekly listeners.  Radio now reaches 242.8 million listeners on an average weekly basis.   

Much has been written over the last few years by people much smarter than me about the issue of declining time spent listening (click the links to read a few).

This much I do know:  cume going down is not a good sign in spite of the fact that average "time spent listening" often goes up, at least at first, as fewer people use a medium.

Healthy cume increases often, at first, cause average time spent listening to drop as new folks discover the new product and get familiar with it.

Only good things can happen, whether you believe that cume is "really" going up or not, if content creators act as if we have a problem with time spent listening.

Building cume is hard.  It requires advertising, cluster cross-promotion, social media expertise, buzzy content, raving fans.  Arbitron's optimistic stats appear to demonstrate that new media is helping radio do it in spite of the difficulty.

Growing time spent listening is comparatively easier and free.  Set listening appointments, driven by having engaging, relatable things to say, never wasting the listener's time.

Why wouldn't everyone who opens a microphone work harder to pick that low-hanging fruit?

Act as if you have a TSL problem and work harder to "fix it."  Only good things can happen.

We Get Letters...

Dear Albright and O'Malley folks,

Something really, really bothers me about the Country radio station where I work. It's that the owner of our radio station 'refuses' to advertise! Obviously, I think he's wrong. What do you say? How important is advertising a radio station?

Before trying to change your owner's mind, I think you have some homework to do.

1. How is your signal compared to any other country stations also available to your prospective audience?

Before advertising, you need to be honest with yourself about your distribution and there's no sense marketing a product to people who have other superior choices from that perspective.

2. If you've been in the same format for years and your cume has been stable, you have to ask yourself: is that because the people in your city grade signal area don't know about your existence?

Or, are they aware of you, but simply don't use you?

If the problem is a lack of awareness of what you do, perhaps you should advertise inside the area where you have the best signal available to users of your format.

3. If 90% of the people inside that area do know who you are and what you do but they still don't cume you, I'd suggest you need to do some research before spending marketing money trying to compete with other area stations for new cume. Do listeners see a "unique selling proposition" that fills a need for them? Or, are they not cuming your station because they currently have plenty of other choices available to them which satisfy their needs?

4. If you spend major dollars and actually did double your cume (a huge achievement, not easy to do) would your radio station be able to charge higher rates and recoup the expense plus the profit margin your owner requires to stay in business?

A mature brand - especially a radio station which has been doing entertaining programming, community involvement, remotes and appearances for all that time - street marketing - may actually have a very high level of awareness already.

5. People like new things and are always willing to try something new. As a result, cume is always naturally eroding. So, if your cume has been stable and consistent, that makes a good statement about what you do now.

6. Do you have a database (email/street addresses) of at the very least 20% of your cume? You should. Have you been in touch with those people on a consistent basis? Do they respond to your emails and participate in your promotions? If not, cume building won't work for you. Make sure you have a loyal core of brand evangelists who love you before you consider marketing.

7. Are advertisers on your station successful? Do clients feel like ads on your station work for them?

8. Are you profitable?

If so, perhaps your owner is right.

If he's wrong, you need to convince him that there would be a good return on investment on marketing expenses.

9. Read Wikipedia's excellent beginner's guide to building marketing plans for a start.

Put it all in writing. What percentage of profits would he be willing to invest in trying to increase revenues? What are the odds of success?

10. Do the math. Don't spend marketing money until you know your product is perceived as unique and excellent by its current cume. Once that is the case, find out how many other people inside your city grade coverage area would use your station - people just like the ones you love you who simply don't know about you or what makes you unique and better.

Calculate whether getting another 20%, for example, to cume you every week would be worth the money. Usually, it's much easier to grow your ratings by focusing on improving the number of days per week and times per day your existing cume uses the radio station before trying to convince non-users to sample, convert and become regular users. Until your "time spent listening" is the best among all the other stations you compete with, I'd focus first on that.

11. Is it possible your owner is reluctant to advertise because he has concerns about the quality or your product? If so, work on growing the stats that will prove that he's wrong.

Great TSL and high exclusive cume are two simple measures of "satisfaction" with your programming.

Maximise getting your current core to use no other radio station and enticing listeners to spend more time per day with you.

How you'll know you're "there:" when more than a third of your weekly cume listens to no other radio in an average week and your average listener spends two-thirds of their total time using radio per day with your station, I'd say you're ready to do some marketing if you're not happy with your shares those above-average performance measurements will generate for you.