Marketing And Promotion For The Digital Age

You Have To Stand Out, Make It Memorable And Make it Last

For years now, Urban radio has been known for its extensive involvement in the community. Through well-established benchmark promotions and innovative marketing, many successful Urban stations have closely aligned themselves with an audience known for its hipness and active lifestyle.

Despite our listeners' active lifestyle, things have changed dramatically. And so must some of the ways we market and promote our stations. The biggest being the Internet. Technology has changed the way we reach out to our listeners. But just because everything has become high-tech doesn't mean listeners don't want the same things from our stations they've always wanted. They still want us to communicate with them. We have to stand out. We have to be focused and differentiate what we do from what our competitors are doing, or are perceived as doing.

Perceived Realities

Sometimes stations' perceptions can make a difference. Often a station that changes formats and/or call letters is perceived as newer, hipper. If you're competing against this station, you've got your work cut out for you. That's when a strong community tie-in can pay off. Since most listeners to a music station are focused on the music, when a new station comes in, eliminates commercials for a few days and plays 10,000 songs in a row, it can grab some attention. All of a sudden, you're under attack. What can you do to fight back?

You have to position yourself as the station that's always been there -- the one that really cares and this new kid-on-the-block as simply a flash in the pan. Eventually, they will add commercials and the 10,000 songs in a row will go away and there you are.

Basic building blocks don't change. What changes from year to year is the spin you put on them. If your community link is strong, it's easier to position this new station as an upstart that just came into the market, while you've been there all the time. Like a master politician, you carefully, skillfully use your promos and stagers to introduce a type of competitive adversity.

Adversity tends to make seemingly invisible walls come down. The good thing for you, as the heritage station, is that this adversity can cause listeners to think differently and casts a shadow on a new station or one that changed formats. These are people who are not locked into market's history.

Expanding Other Media Relationships

Another thing that is becoming quite common now is that with the slashing or eliminating of marketing budgets, a lot of partnerships with other media have surfaced that never existed before. Urban radio has to continue to focus on evolving digital offerings and multiple platforms that our listeners are now almost using universally. We can't continue to allow other media to come in and take positions that should have been ours.

The experiences we have each day are shaped by our senses -- what we see, smell, touch and hear. A delicious meal, a beautiful sunset, the scent of flowers, favorite songs on the radio are all simple pleasures that cause us delight and can help to make a difference in our mood, our lives and how we perceive our surroundings. Our senses help to set the emotional state, enrich our days and even allow for a little exploration.

It's for these reasons that smart programmers put such an emphasis on the sensory experience for their listeners. We must be aware of how the audience temperament has changed. There's a whole new feeling out there. Listeners are using radio differently. And regardless of what format we're in, we all want to lean our stations a little younger.

This is particularly true for Urban Adult stations. It's the "growing-shedding theory" again. We have to constantly be aware of two things. The first thing is that as our listeners age, instead of switching stations we want them to age with us. At the same time we want to replace the aging listeners with younger listeners who fall within the saleable demographics the sales department needs. And second, Arbitron in PPM markets now measures kids as young as six. We need to capture and train them early.

Basics, Fantasy & Fun

One trick that always works is simply to start with and then do the hell out of the basics. Give the listeners the music they love, be at the events they're at and give back to the community. Dish up the contests and giveaways they want and expect. And remember -- fantasy is still king. Give the audience things they can't afford or that money can't buy and you'll live up to their fantasy.

An impressive Urban station on the East Coast just gave one of their listeners a key that unlocked a showroom where they could pick which car they wanted - and in the glove compartment was an envelop containing a thousand dollars (the typical threshold amount for a cash giveaway that will grab and hold listeners' attention) and a pair of up-front concert tickets to a sold-out show. That's larger than life. And in this economy, it's even more meaningful.

Sometimes the most effective thing you can do is to put your listeners face-to-face with artists or bands they love. The hook with new technology is incorporating these artist hook-ups into giveaways that let them live out their fantasies.

Use caution when you attempt to transfer these fantasies to your website. Keep in mind that the station's website is not a dumping ground. You have to be very careful when you take promos off the air and dump them on your website. Be especially careful of burn-out and weak production. If it's not good enough for your air sound, it's not good enough for your website. The website is an extension of the station. You have to take it very seriously It's a great opportunity to put a visual aspect to your product.

When you're talking about a big concert or car giveaway on-the-air, your jocks should not only recap it, but drive listeners to the website to see it.Whether it's on the website or on the streets, your station brand has to be consistent with listeners' expectations. If your site doesn't represent what your call letters do and a listener logs on for the first time, it's going to be tough to make a second impression.

Stations still sell spots, but today they also sell their websites, their e-mails and a variety of events that sponsors can tie into on one level or another to get closer to their listeners. But stations have to be careful what type of events they sponsor or attach themselves to. As long it may take to develop trust with the audience, they could easily lose it if they do too many of the wrong things.

I asked a couple of very successful programmers who pulls on them more -- sales or programming? Both said sales are more demanding because they are driven by revenue goals. The problems often is that sales may want to make something fit that doesn't. So programmers have to work with their sales departments to come up with alternatives that they can take back to the client that make more sense.

As Fall 2010 sets in, we find ourselves still gathering data, examining callout research, Mscores and hoping to make our listeners feel comfortable every minute of their stay with us. In our relentless ratings pursuit, we must also ask ourselves, "What are most of our listeners and potential listeners doing while they're listening (are we dayparting?) and how can we market to them more effectively?"

Finally, viral marketing is very exciting and can be very effective, but you have to keep up with the trends. It all moves very quickly. One day it's Myspace ... then Twitter. Our job is to stay on top of the trends and put ourselves in a position to communicate with our listeners wherever they are.

Most stations, even those in large markets, have limited marketing and promotion budgets these days. So programmers have to find inventive and innovative ways to get and keep their audience's attention. For example, since many of our listeners are into astrology, you might want to consider using a little planetary prodding in your next promotion. Figuring out a creative way to tie it in could make a memorable difference. Effective marketing and promotion starts with being innovative. And radio has always won by innovating better than their competition.

Word.