Becoming More Memorable

1. Use all available media to the utmost of your ability, but before deciding which to make use of, choose your message.
2. Promote who you are and what you stand for.
3. Start by using your own airwaves and digital tools.
4. Give away lifestyle prizes as your rewards for listening. 
5. Cash is the easiest lifestyle universal.
6. Create a memorable brand name and catch phrase which encompasses all of the above.
7. Don’t expect it all to work quickly. 
8. Great marketing and branding, let alone product development, take time to be effective.
9. Cume building contests and campaigns still work and must employ outside advertising.
10. Ah, there’s the rub.  Trying to build cume without buying advertising may improve your time spent listening and can generate word of mouth if done very creatively, but that strategy adds to the time it will take.
11. TV morning shows dominate outdoor in most markets today with creative that looks exactly like morning radio used to do.  Small wonder that our pre-8 am audience is gravitating to TV at home.
12. Time spent listening is driven by recycling audience. 
13. Tease with specifics, theater of mind and exact times.
14. Ah, here’s another rub:  everyone else knows that too, so depending on it to drive your growth requires doing all of these things better than all of the other choices listeners now have.
15. Target hot zips, the neighborhoods where your most loyal listeners live and work.
16. Do appearances in “blitzes.”  Create the image that where ever your fans and prospects go, you’re there too. 

It’s impossible to keep this up constantly.  Plan tactically and conserve your researches.  It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

The goal:  make potential listeners feel like you’re constantly visible in their community.

Tomorrow: 16 Ways To Be More Memorable

.. but first, I want you to look in the mirror and ask yourself "is my content consistently WORTH remembering?"

If you can't honestly answer that question with a resounding "yes," you can skip my post tomorrow because it won't work no matter how much you invest in marketing tactics.

You will never be able to sell people long term on something they're not personally committed and connected to.

Who’s Going To Do The Next Remote/Appearance?

This is one of the toughest jobs a programmer has.

Choose a “sales favorite” too often and the rest of the talent will accuse you of favoritism, fail to give each personality an equal share of the work and you risk someone worrying that you don’t “like” them or their work.

Criteria I recommend:

• Quality of remote work in the past (if you don’t pick someone, be prepared to explain WHY).
• Number of appearances that personality has done compared to everyone else (the rest of the staff may start to resent a talent that gets too much love from you compared to the average)
• Exceptional volunteer or unpaid work (give paid gigs as a reward)
• Compatibility with the client (again, you’ll need to be sure the remainder of the team understands this factor)
• Knowing WHERE the appearance will be.  If the business has multiple locations, do they know exactly where this one is?

A pop quiz you can use as you name someone to perform outside the radio station:  “Is your job to a) do nine cut-in’s in three hours?  or b) create three hours of fun and excitement at the location?”

The savvy talent will pick “b.”

Does "How" Matter More To Yogurt Than It Does To You?

I got caught up in Hamdi Ulukaya's rags-to-riches Horatio Alger story recently while watching an online replay of his panel at the New York Ideas Festival.

His interviewer/senior editor of The Atlantic Derek Thompson recommended going to the "How Matters" website for the popular yogurt, which managed to pull off a Daniel-Goliath triumph that restores your faith in the basic laws of capitalism, to learn how values and mission propelled an attack on several of the biggest food companies in America.

It made me ask myself "do people come together to celebrate everything they love about our business?"

Does it matter why you put your show together today?

Does listening to your radio station make listeners feel better about themselves for doing so?

If you are stuck for new ways to deepen the relationship with your target audience and your radio station, click around Chobani.com.

I'll bet it makes you hungry for some great yogurt ... and also for rethinking, then restating, your responsibility to listeners.

Managing Engagement

When Clarke Ingram was PD of KRQQ/Tucson he remembered the old radio programming saw "the more times you say your call letters, the higher your ratings will be."  So, he mandated that his personalities say "K-R-Q" a minimum of 60 times per hour and the station hit a TEN share.

PPM, of course, has changed the metrics in larger markets, but Lord Kelvin's maxim ("If you can't measure it, you can't improve it") still holds true with smart programmers.

• Want to improve the time listeners spend with your radio station?  Figure out how many occasions your average fan spends with you and create ways to grow that number.
• Want to build your email database?  Figure out why your current list subscribed and do more of the things - free concert tickets, discounts on valued planned future purchases, learn how to buy the best seats in advance.
• Want to improve the level of engagement your social and text fans have with your radio station?  It's tempting to begin counting the responses from listeners in answer to questions you post and ask more of those same questions day after day.  

That can grow your numbers short term, but it also will dilute the authentic character of your personality images, making the kind of social interactions you have more like the very same kind everyone else you compete with also has.

Just like a political candidate, it is important to resonate with the values of your target if you hope to win the election.  But, taken too far, everyone stands for the same things, making some positions and content too generic to build memorability and loyalty.

Before starting a count of anything, the savvy programmer figures out what makes each personality unique and appealing to the largest numbers of target listeners, coaching to improve the quality and consistency of those moments.

That way, as engagement stats build, so does the stickiness of each voice on the radio station on all available touch points.

Allow Me To Propose One More Initial

I admire Cox Radio for the way it operates and manages its radio stations as indicated by the titles it uses for programming executives and it was great to see the Drew Bland's appointment this week in Orlando as further evidence of it.

What used to be called a "PD" is now "B&P," and I'll bet it won't be long until that position gets another letter:  "BP & E."

Today's radio programmer certainly protects the brand, spending a lot of time improving programming, but the importance of new media can't be understated as well.

A big part of today's "B&P" job is also overseeing, encouraging and perfecting all forms of listener engagement as well.

Only Seven

According to Christopher Booker, there are only Seven Basic Plots: 

1. Overcoming the Monster
2. Rags to Riches
3. The Quest
4. Voyage and Return
5. Comedy
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth 

His convincing book is really much more than that hypothesis, making it very much worth a careful read.

He explains how and why we are all programmed to imagine stories in these ways and also why storytelling must be a part of your bits, ads, newscasts, branding, marketing and social media. 

As you read it, you'll ask yourself:  does our radio station and its personalities consistently make full use of every one of them for maximum impact?

Daily prep should begin by evaluating everything you "could" engage the listener with through the filter of how can we make sure today's "show" has all of them woven into it and which character on the team is best suited today to bring one or two of them alive authentically and naturally.

The more believable characters living through and coping with them, the more viral you'll be!

Digging Deeper, Unearthing Better News

My blog last week (Country Fans & Republicans) reflecting on the headline of researcher Mark Kassof's latest national "Listener Think" study (Country Fans: Born This Way?) and the fact that after all the great new country music of the last five years the largest group of our listeners proved to be what seems like the same folks who have been listening all their lives made me feel a bit like Reince Priebus, Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, Frank Luntz and other leaders of the Grand Ole Party who are juggling expectations of a life-long-loyal core with their own hopes, attempting to grow their pie.

I took solace in the latest CMA Insider Panel research showing how active, youthful and family-oriented our users are, but also asked Mark to crunch his numbers to see what was there below the headline picked up last week by the trades. 

He was kind enough to do so:

Some observations on his data from Kassof:

    •    RAISED ON/GREW UP WITH IT is #1 with both younger and older country fans.
    •    Younger country fans are more motivated by RELATES TO ME/MY LIFE, REAL/TRUE/HONEST and SOOTHING/CALMING/RELAXING than the older group.
    •    Older country fans are more motivated by UNDERSTAND THE WORDS, LIKE THE SOUND and >THAN/DIS OTHERS (translation: like it more than or dislike other genres) than the younger group.
    •    Men are more motivated by RAISED ON/GREW UP WITH IT  (30%!) and RELATES TO ME/MY LIFE than women.
    •    RAISED ON/GREW UP WITH IT  still ties for #1 with women.  Women are more motivated by TELLS A STORY/STORIES, UNDERSTAND THE WORDS and SOOTHING/CALMING/RELAXING than men.

As strong as country radio's ratings are, it still has more room to grow by leveraging the music's relatability and power to keep building appeal among men and younger listeners.

Country Fans & Republicans

• “I’ve been a Republican all my life." - Phyllis Schlafly
• "Raised on it/Grew up with it." - one of five of the 121 who named country as their preference of 805 18-64′s nationwide on WHY IS COUNTRY YOUR FAVORITE KIND OF MUSIC TO LISTEN TO ON RADIO? when questioned by Researcher Mark Kasoff

This poll came out yesterday just as news of the Faith and Freedom Coalition's "Road to the Majority Conference" chairman Ralph Reed calling on Republicans to learn how not "to preach to the choir," but rather make the message spread also hit my browser.

We've been hearing these comments on both our music and many of our core listeners' vaues for 30 years.

Maybe it's because 18-64 is too wide a swath to accurately reflect what Roadmap 2013 and rating trends across North American are documenting, but as Mike O'Malley said after seeing Kasoff's report "nothing about exciting new acts, nothing about how the format has evolved, nothing about the powerful younger demo growth?"

Fortunately, another new research study on country music partisans also just came out yesterday from the CMA:

The latest member-only research tracking the country music "Insider's Panel" by the Country Music Associations research department shows a young, active, well-educated group of country fans lead active, busy, youthful family oriented lives.

Top single-day family activities include going to the movies, attending a concert or music festival, and visiting family entertainment centers. 

To grow a country brand:  don't be like Republicans.

Be like Disneyland.

Talking About What They Talk About

- Big Research April Executive Briefing - well worth a click for lots of thought- and content-provoking data points.

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.

Why Radio Stations Get Away With Lying

The New York Times' "Debaters" feature last week was a thoughtful analysis on why politicians feel the need to lie and why, as a result, their most passionate supporters start lying to themselves.

Meanwhile, the inspiring author Andy Andrews is on a book tour promoting his new very easy and quick read How Do You Kill 11 Million People?.

I'm not going to wade into those controversial waters today, but all of that focus on the public's lack of trust of institutions that seems to pop up for me each time I pick up something to read right now is also a good reminder that radio stations so routinely lie to listeners needlessly that, just like most of us with politicians, they are turned off and have stopped paying attention.

• Do we really need to "promise" 50 minutes of music every hour when we actually only play 48? Do listeners conduct an hourly auction with their time and only spend it with the station that promises to be the highest bidder? Would they listen less if we told them how much music we really play in the hour?
  
• If the cost of a commercial free hour is a commercial-filled hour in the hours just before and after it, who are we kidding?
• Is saying "the station that cares about the community" believable on a 24/7 voice tracked outlet?
• "12 in a row coming next" is followed by an eight unit commercial break.
• Positioning "best new music" on your radio station is followed by yet another play of Garth Brooks' "The Dance."
  

I could go on. So could you.

Listen to your radio station today and listen for those little lies you're telling so routinely that many jocks think that's "personality" and "entertainment."

Get them off the air. Entertain, interact, make the listener the star. Keep it upbeat and fun. Make me feel something. Paint me colorful word pictures. Tell me a story. Involve me.

Just not a fairy tale, please.

Why do radio stations get away with lying? Could it be because no one is paying very much attention?

For WHAT? Go To WHERE?

Resolve to stop using "dated" radio phrases, like "for more details, go to our website."

Why?

1. "For more" = more what?
2. "Details" = my life is full of distracting details already. Why would I want more "details?"
3. "our" = how about telling me about why I should do something, make it relevant to me, rather than just telling me what you are doing?
3b. "our" = stop using the formal "editorial we." Best, use a name, avoid the general with the specific, but if you must use a pronoun, use "YOU." Engage me. Talk one to one.
3c. Rather than pronouns, BRAND. If every radio station I listen to calls itself "us" or "we," will I remember which one is which?
4. "website" = if it was 1995, I guess the thought that a radio station has a website on the internet would be cutting edge. Today, it's 2011. If you tell me to "go to urlname.com," not only is that more powerful because it's fewer words to say the same thing, you don't sound like you speak like my grandpa.

If you've been saying it the same way for a very long time, I know you can do it in your sleep.

Don't expect me to pay attention.

Talk like I talk, not like all the other radio stations do.

Enduring Guidance

"Relate to your listeners and their "family" or "patriotic" values, but I'd also add my belief in not just reflecting values on-air, but in becoming directly involved in listener's lives. Creating situations wherein you can share and experience those values with them - and wherein you can help them to do the things they want to do. Things like being with their families, helping others, participating in the events they participate in, creating new events to participate in (both on-air and off), and just plain old having fun. That kind of involvement creates a new kind of loyalty and commitment to the station, and substantial top-of-the-mind awareness. You'll go from being a source of music and fun to becoming "friends and family" with your listeners."

There's a reason why Dave Broman has been PD at Citadel's WWKI/Kokomo for 25 years. He explained to me that this was his programming philosophy back when I worked with him in the '80's and '90's.

I wrote it down back then and have never forgotten it.

Trust me. I've used it over and over and it always works.

Pass it on.

Swoosh!

"We've come around to saying that Nike is a 
marketing-oriented company, and the product 
is our most important marketing tool."
— Phil Knight: Co-founder and former CEO of Nike (from Nightengale.com)

Of course, you’ve seen Nike on TV, so you know that they do advertise, but building the marketing into a product you want your users to “wear” every single day sounds a lot like radio to me.

Is your product built to be your most important marketing tool? (Marketing: “placing your product in the mind of the customer, so they can use it.”)

Before you start to advertise, think like Nike.

Is what comes out of the speakers so special and unique in every single minute that it creates buzz and loyalty among the folks who are now aware of it?

If so, you’re ready to advertise and grow your cume. If not, it’s time to research, innovate and develop the "sole" of your on air product to the point that it exceeds expectations.

Country Singers .. What to Wear?

.. tried and true. Always works.

Am I getting old? Or, are the artists getting (too) young)?

Before We Move On

"I'm a big believer of stations sounding real....no, best, most, baddest w/ blips, bips, zips, growls, and zaps.....that is soooo over......just communicate the core values (listener benefits) in as real and as brief a fashion as humanly possible....people are so burned on hype.....if at all possible let others speak about you, instead of speaking about yourself...attached is an example from actor Shia LeBouf.....all we do is identify him at the beginning, and that's it.....the rest of the "co-signing" is all on him....if we added anything else here it would have been piling on and way too much.....make your station sound real, listener focused, and genuinely fun, not goofy, not dated with lasers, and no chest thumping copy......is it any wonder we are a TSL challenged medium, a majority of stations continue to insult the intelligence of their listeners by still insisting they sound like 1986.....younger demos coming up today, just don't give a shit.....so please don't drive them away from our medium.....you are are free to disagree here....I will just close with this.... I travel a lot, and hear a lot of stations driving listeners away...if you are in a PPM market you know how important brevity, sincerity, and creativity are.....yup even more important than they were in the diary system.... " -- Jimmy Steal, VP/Emmis/Los Angeles

Burger-ality

Pulling It All Together This Week (...like last week, one day at a time)

Last week's four-part series of ideas to max your engagement in listeners' celebrations and holidays during February got some nice feedback on why it's so important to do that.

For example, this treatise on stationality from an old colleague, who's looking for his next job right now:

· Local, local, local. Engage the community and get involved and talk about local events and happenings. Radiate civic pride!

· Review, develop and maintain station benchmarks.

· Terms of endearment: Tie into local charities and events that evoke emotion and tug on the heart strings. Find a charity that you can hang your stations hat on and make it a mission.

· Have fun! Develop listener talk and curiosity through little or no cost signature station promotions that are ongoing, fun and not just seasonal.

· Theme It Up. Review and develop station(s) “Theme Weekend” arsenal to make sure it’s fun, always fresh and give some relief to the library.

"Radio Is Life! It’s a culmination of the things going on around us, how we feel and are reflected in the things we do, what we say and the songs we play. Let’s make sure your station and branding is on track. Then we can get those creative juices flowing and build some fun promotions to make people talk about your station and don’t forget to have some fun!"

PS: If you'd like to know in confidence who this savvy/"available" programmer is, just drop me an email and I'll send you the entire package of philosophies this came from.

Part Of Their Life

The radio station - no matter what the format - which dominates “at work” listening has a major edge.

So, everyone’s vying for that marketing niche.

Country’s at work goal is to have about one third of total week average quarter hours from the workplace. Top performing adult contemporary stations often get as much as two thirds of their AQH from “at work.” If a country station had that much I'd worry that it's not being used enough in the other places where the listener uses radio too.

That difference is a clue to understanding a unique aspect of country radio users and other transitional format listeners.

When they are alone in a vehicle or out with their family, they are more likely to listen to country music on the radio.

When they are with others they don't know as well, it sometimes takes a little extra reason to convince them to “fight” (bribe the boss, compromise with coworkers who don’t know they like country yet...) for country on the at work radio.

Weekends are very often country radio’s best audience shares, which means that a top-performing station has to be much more actively involved than more passive radio brands do.

In addition to “at work,” as a major part of lifestyle orientation, country radio must reflect usage of the station at soccer games, yard sales, outdoor activities, going to the movies, attending church, doing chores like laundry, shopping, cooking for the week, doing homework, going to school.

You'll find winning country stations rewarding great bosses, terrific teachers, smart students, for good reason.

Country radio users increasingly have other media begging for their time and attention in all of those places.

They’ll choose media, perhaps without even thinking about it, that appear to reflect their needs and values - at every time and in every place of their busy lifestyles.

Each time you open a mic, ask yourself what "he or she" is doing right now.

Reflect that in your content.

Even better, be there with 'em.