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Author:	Jerry Williams
Published:	September, 2001

 

Your on air product is as good as it's ever been. You've tested and trimmed your music library. Your PD is working with each jock individually every week. Your promotions have been well planned. Your signal is clean and loud. Your listeners love your station. But your ratings are flat. The scenario described above is all too common among Christian radio stations. Christian music radio is getting better every day, yet as a format we are not seeing any ratings growth. What's the problem? For starters, anything that we do to improve the quality of the on air product will only affect the audience who is already listening. People who don't already listen to your station aren't going to notice that your music selection is made up entirely of great songs or that you're giving away a car if the only way you communicate that is over your own air. And the only way to gain a ratings increase without increasing the number of people listening is to increase the TSL (Time Spent Listening) and the number of Listening Occasions of your current audience. Does that mean it's fruitless to improve your on air product? No! You have to continually strive to make your station the best that it can be to maintain your current listeners. And there will be those listeners who stumble upon your station while scanning the dial. If you're going to have any chance of enticing them to sample you and stay with you then you have to sound great. But relying on increased TSL of your current P1 and P2 listeners and garnering new cume from button punchers isn't a very sound growth strategy. So how do you attract new listeners, those who have never sampled your station before? Marketing. That one word makes PDs drool and GMs and owners shudder. Marketing. But what do we mean by that term? The formal definition of the term is the process of bringing a product or service to market. So according to that definition your tweaking of your on air product is part of the marketing process, a vital part, but only one part. For the purposes of this discussion marketing is the process of exposing your station to potential new listeners. Traditional Marketing There are three major forms of traditional marketing. All have their advantages and disadvantages. Television: TV's biggest advantage is that it affords you the ability to present your message using moving images, text, and audio. You can also target your message to a fairly well defined audience, at least as far as demographically and psycographically. TV's biggest negative is cost. A decent 30-second spot can cost upwards of $10,000 to produce. For that spot to be effective you have to buy a schedule that will cut through the rest of the clutter already on TV. Even a short two-week flight on multiple outlets will run around $50,000, depending on market size and daypart. Outdoor: We're talking billboards. Billboards' biggest advantage is that they reach listeners at radio's POP (Point Of Purchase), in the car. Billboards also allow you to geographically target your message where your signal is strongest and in your hot zips. On the downside, billboards are static (with the exception of some very expensive boards which make use of various technologies to animate or change your message), and people view them at speeds of up to 70 mph, so your message has to be extremely simple. In some markets the billboard clutter along major highways is as intense as that of network television. And while boards are less expensive than TV, when you add up the costs of creative with enough boards to make an impact in even a medium size market, you're talking about $30,000 to $50,000 for a three month run. Direct Mail: Direct mail gives you the flexibility to target those zip codes where you already have a significant amount of cume. As with the other two forms of traditional marketing, cost is a factor. Even a modest direct mail campaign can run around $20,000. And then there's the problem that, no matter how great your offer, a significant percentage of your direct mail pieces are going to wind up unopened in the trash. Does all of this mean that traditional marketing can't be effective for Christian radio? No. There are examples of each of these forms of marketing being used by Christian stations very effectively. If you opt for a traditional marketing plan there are a couple of keys to keep in mind.  1. Keep your message consistent. Your on air has to be consistent with your outside marketing message. And if you're using multiple marketing media all of those messages need to be consistent as well. 2. Keep your message simple. You should already be doing this on air. Pick your major strength, the one point that most sets you apart from the competition and build your marketing campaign around that point. 3. Make your offer compelling. Remember to ask for the sale, in your case, listening. To get that listening you have to give potential listeners a reason that's compelling enough to change their established listening habits. A direct mail piece that simply touts "Great Christian Music" is not going to be very effective. 4. Own something. To cut through the clutter you have to be dominant. That means it's better to own a specific program on TV than to spread a limited budget over multiple shows and dayparts where your message will be diluted. 5. Multiple your effectiveness through multiple media. If your budget will allow it your results will be geometrically increased by supporting one medium with another. A billboard campaign in support of a TV campaign will get you more visible results. 6. Make sure your product is ready. Your outside marketing will at best get you some sampling. Once a listener has tuned in it's up to your on air product to convert that sampler to a listener. The quickest way to waste tens of thousands of dollars is to market an inferior product. Once those listeners have sampled you and been disappointed your chances of ever getting them back are extremely low. So how do you expose your station to potential new listeners if you don't have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on traditional marketing? First, you need to start planning on ways to budget money for traditional marketing. Nothing we're about to suggest will reach as many people as quickly or as effectively as a traditional marketing campaign. Next week we'll wrap up this two-part look at Guerillas in Sheep's Clothing with strategies and examples for reaching new cume without spending tens of thousands of dollars.

 

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