Touching Heavy Users

Don't Just Be Format Competitive ... Be Radio Competitive

One of the things that winning Urban stations have discovered recently is that by touching the heavy users of the format in their market, they can maintain a stronger audience base on which to build. Granted, lately that number is shrinking because of competition from other music sources, as well as other radio stations. So what does this mean? It means that now, rather than just targeting a direct format competitor, you have to figure out how you are going to get the Rhythmic, Top 40 and Smooth Jazz listener to choose you at least some of the time. Urban stations have to figure out a way to take our intangible medium directly into the homes, offices and cars of our heavy users. These are the P1 listeners -- those who participate in our contests and promotions, visit our websites, wear and display our merchandise, come to our concerts and carry our loyal listener cards. These are the folks that are most likely to stay with the station longer.

Some stations have used their websites to build a database of names and addresses, which give the stations the ability to reach those heavy users effectively and efficiently. Once you know who they are and where they live, you can touch them. When you understand who they are and can talk to them one-on-one, you can build greater loyalty at the consumer level. It's critical to get the customers you have to move up into the top tier of users.

There is a music theory that says you can improve and expand your station's cume by tightening the playlist and ultimately increasing familiarity. In some cases, it may help; in others, it can cause audience erosion. The object is to create hits ... and you can't really create hits unless you force-feed songs to listeners. Some listeners won't be put out by a tighter rotation, if it's exclusive to the station. Again, this depends on the market and the competition.

Selective Rotation

Another way to touch heavy users is by selective rotation. What you want to do is make sure the typical listener to your station doesn't have to listen longer than your Time Spent Listening (TSL) indicates. If your average TSL is only about five hours for the week, maybe in that particular situation you need to adjust your rotation categories, particularly your power rotations.

If you increase your powers and mediums and shorten the list, you may be able to please your heavy listeners. If, for example, you go into your music scheduler and figure out how many times a track would have to play to attain a frequency of those who represent at least 50% of the stations' target audience, you will know what adjustments you have to make. If you consider that all new artists are initially unfamiliar to most of your audience, you then surround every new song with one that you're confident that the research shows is familiar. The bottom line is to make the station more familiar and more competitive within the market. With Arbitron's PPM, where cume is king, you have to grow your cume to survive. So you change some coding and fix the computer's scheduling system so that songs coded as familiar will be highlighted on the screen. Then you can physically look at the screen and decide "that's a good hour," or "that last hour sucked."

Giving listeners more than they ever expected from their favorite station is the battlefield of the future. Customer service in radio means taking an intangible product and turning it into a "touch and see" media that your audience enjoys. These are things that reinforce the notion that you care about your listeners and care about giving them more than just the best music.

We're also looking at the participation generation as one that offers an opportunity to build audience and increase the number of P1s that a station has - and at the same time, build a component of participation so those bonds become even stronger.

One of the problems that all stations face is the fight for time ... listening time. This means we have to invest more into our own content creation because now we have to compete with our own listeners. Amateurs are creating content that is just as good, if not better, than what we are offering.

There are no clear-cut answers. Perhaps it is possible to score great ratings without doing some of the things we mentioned. It all depends on the market, the competition and the perception. How many times have you heard a station and wondered how in the world did they win? What if they did have their game together and their basics in place? How much wider would their margin of victory have been?

Winning in the future will involve keeping your station fresh and focused. For mainstream Urban stations it also means not trying to be too broad-based in an effort to try to grab some adult audience. Mainstream Urban stations are trying to find an AC slant that works. Being soft and conservative can hurt you. Don't think that adults don't like some young artists or uptempo songs, or that they will immediately switch stations at the mere hint of a rap song. Many of today's hits have incorporated some rap within the body of the song and when you try to edit it or restrict it, it becomes obvious that some tampering has been done.

Your live air personalities (what few are left) still have to sell the music and the other promotional elements and execute the format properly. You may want to keep the station fresh and in a winning mode by using positioning statements and facts as opposed to tired liner cards. That can help to prevent your station from sounding too hyped and predictable.

The whole idea of winning by touching your heavy users is centered around doing many things, including the basics, well and consistently. A lot of wining stations begin to lose because they become complacent and conceited. A conceited station is like a conceited person. They never get anywhere because they think they're already there.

Word!