Content Is No Longer King

In 1996, Bill Gates famously penned an essay titled “Content Is King.” In it, he predicted, “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet, just as it was in broadcasting.”

But to wear the crown, you must have things that nobody else has: a throne, an army, and perhaps most importantly, command of your people. Being king is a zero-sum game. When everybody is king, nobody is king.

When I began my career in radio decades ago, you needed expensive equipment run by a team of specialists to reach a mass audience: a printing press, a television studio, or a radio tower. The amount of content in the world was limited by the expense and the difficulty of production. 

Now, anybody with a smartphone can create content and distribute it to the world. It’s cheap and it’s easy. We’re all content creators; but we can’t all be kings.

The Battle For Attention

In his 1999 book Permission Marketing, Seth Godin noted, “Human beings have a finite amount of attention.” That attention is what content creators are competing for. As that attention becomes harder to capture, we try to produce more content and better content. But everybody else is producing more better content, too.

The more content we all produce, the harder it becomes to capture people’s attention. The harder it is to capture people’s attention, the more content we all produce. It’s a classic Catch-22.

Radio broadcasters, in particular, are trapped by this phenomenon. As stations are asked to produce more content with fewer resources, they fall behind. 

How can broadcasters cut through all the noise?

The answer: Build community.

Communities Are Content Filters

Stop me if this nightly ritual sounds familiar: After a long day at work, you sit down on the couch with your family and launch a streaming service, only to discover hundreds of unfamiliar movies and shows. You sift through them, watching trailers and comparing online reviews. Before you know it, two hours have gone by, and it’s too late to watch anything, so you go to bed.

This happens to me all the time. Yet somehow, I have managed to find new shows to watch. I find out about them through my community. Every time I am with a group of people, somebody inevitably asks, “What shows have you seen lately?” I have discovered all of my recent favorites through word of mouth.

When there’s too much content to sift through, we filter it through the members of our communities.

What Is A Community?

A community is a group of people who gather for a shared purpose. That can be a group of sports fans who gather to cheer on their favorite team, business owners who exchange leads, or recovering alcoholics keeping each other sober.

One of the world’s oldest types of communities is disciples who gather to worship together. That’s why few media outlets are as well positioned to build community as Christian radio stations.

Communities Vs. Audiences

Communities are not the same as audiences. Community members talk to one another; audience members do not. To attract an audience, you create content. To attract community members, you build a space for them to gather and connect. This connection is the reason people return to their communities over and over again; it’s how you capture their finite attention.

Create Spaces

The space you create for community members to gather can be physical (like a church or a festival), virtual (like a Facebook group), or both. While content plays a role in creating these spaces, you cannot build a space with content alone.

The world doesn’t need more content; the world needs more connection. Christian radio stations can rise above the noise by building spaces for their listeners to come together to celebrate their faith. In doing so, they will not only recapture people’s attention, but also make a deep and lasting impact on their lives.

Create spaces. Connect people. Build community.

Seth Resler founded Community Marketing Revolution to help brands launch their own communities. He will present a webinar on community building for Christian broadcasters on Wednesday, April 10th.

The post Beyond Content: The Call To Build Community first appeared on CMB.

The post Beyond Content: The Call To Build Community appeared first on CMB.

The delay between emails can be whatever you set it to. I like to send out emails more frequently at first, then gradually space them out. For example, the first email might go out immediately, the second email would be sent 24 hours later, the third email a week later, and then the remainder of the emails might be spaced a month apart.

Note that unlike a normal email blast in which everybody receives the same email at the same time, in the onboarding campaign, each person receives the same email at a different time, depending on when they signed up. If I sign up today, I’ll receive email #1 today. If you sign up next Thursday, you’ll receive email #1 next Thursday. For this reason, the emails need to be evergreen; in other words, they need to be relevant no matter when somebody receives them.

When setting up the timing of your onboarding campaign, consider any other automated email campaigns that you send and space them our appropriately. You don’t want listeners to be bombarded by several emails from your station in a single day, so you may want to set up your onboarding emails to go out at different times or even on different days.

Here are the instructions for sending automated email campaigns in some popular email service providers:

These automated campaigns are often referred to as a “marketing automation” tool, and platforms with marketing automation capabilities, such as Hubspot, will also allow you to set them up:

Mapping Out Your Email Onboarding Campaign

Before setting up your campaign, it’s a good idea to grab an old fashioned pen and some paper to sketch out the topics for each email in the series. Here are some topics to consider:

1. How to listen to the station: Once upon a time, the only way to listen to a station was to dial the tuner to the correct frequency. Now there are lots of ways to listen to your station, from Alexa to TuneIn to OTT apps. Consider creating an email that offers a list of different ways to listen, with a link to instructions for each. Alternatively, you could set up a single email in the campaign that focuses on each of the different ways to listen. For example, you might want to send out an email that shows people how to…
2. Download the mobile app: Provides links for downloading the app in both the Android and iOS app stores.
3. Check out the concert calendar: This is usually one of the most visited pages on the websites of music radio stations. Take advantage of its popularity by encouraging your subscribers to visit it.
4. Meet the morning show: Link to the morning show’s webpage for people who want to know more about them.
5. Follow us on social media: Provide a list of links, or create multiple emails, each one highlighting a specific platform.
6. Check out our YouTube channel: If you’ve put a lot of work into your videos, promote your channel to the database.
7. Plug your specialty shows: Let people know about your local music show, your acoustic café, or your public affairs program.
8. Hear key interviews / performances: Get some extra life out of that interview your station did with Snoop Dogg or Linkin Park by resurfacing it in your onboarding campaign.

Review Your Campaign Regularly

Once you set up your campaign, it will send out your emails for you. The hard work is done! But you should make a point of reviewing your onboarding campaign periodically — every six months or so — to make sure you aren’t still sending your listeners a link to your old Debbie Gibson interview.

When looking at the metrics, pay special attention to the click through rate for the different emails. If you notice that the “Download Our App” email gets a lot of clicks but the “Listen to Our Podcast” email doesn’t, you may want to move one up in the sequence order or remove the other email entirely. You can fine tune your campaign using the data you receive in your email analytics reports.

Email can be a powerful tool for radio stations, and by automating your campaigns you can save your overworked staff a lot of time. Invest a few hours in setting up a proper onboarding campaign and you can continually engage with your listeners without a lot of effort.

The post How to Write an Automated Onboarding Campaign for Your Email Database first appeared on CMB.

The post How to Write an Automated Onboarding Campaign for Your Email Database appeared first on CMB.

It’s important for radio broadcasters to step back and think about these questions. If the best answers you can come up with are, “because everybody has a website,” or “because listeners expect it,” or “because branding,” then it’s time to sit down and articulate some better responses.

What do you want listeners to do when they come to your website? Ultimately, you want listeners to do something that impacts the station’s bottom line when they visit. With that in mind, here are some possible goals for your radio station’s website:

1. Stream the Station

You probably want listeners to, y’know…listen. After all, when they stream the station through your website, that counts towards your Nielsen ratings, and your ratings directly impact the bottom line.

2. Sign Up for the Email List

We no longer live in a world where advertisers just want to reach a lot of consumers; now, they want to reach the right consumers. Digital outlets like Facebook and Google have a ton of data that allow advertisers to target people precisely. To stay competitive, radio stations need to be gathering data on their listeners as well and not just relying on the data they get from third parties.

Data gathering starts by capturing email addresses. Sometimes you’ll be able to capture other information at the same time, sometimes you’ll have to re-engage with listeners later to capture more data. But once you’ve got a listener’s email address, your station is in a position to go back for more later. So one of the key goals of your website should be encouraging people to sign up for your radio station’s email list.

3. Enter a Contest

Contests are a great way to capture listeners’ data and build your station’s email list. Contests can also be used to encourage listeners to create online content (photos, videos, etc.) that can be used to share on social media and attract more visitors to your station’s website. Getting contest entries should be a key goal of your radio station’s website.

4. Click on an Ad

If your radio station generates revenue by getting listeners to click on (or view) ads, then this should be one of the stated goals of your website.

5. Buy Tickets to a Station Event

Many radio stations generate revenue through events — both by selling tickets and sponsorships. The more people that attend the event, the more revenue the station can make. So ticket sales is a key goal of the station’s website.

6. Buy Station Merchandise

If your radio station generates revenue by selling t-shirts, hats, or lunch boxes, this should be one of the explicit goals of the website.

7. Download the Station’s Mobile App

If you have a mobile app that allows you to drive listening (and ratings) or generate revenue directly from the app, then the number of downloads can impact the station’s bottom line. Use your website to encourage mobile app downloads.

8. Request Advertising Information

Many radio stations overlook the fact that their website can generate sales leads. But if an email or a phone call from a potential client comes in via the website, it can be worth tens of thousands of dollars. One of the goals of your radio station’s website should be to generate leads for the sales team. 

A few notes on your station’s website goals:

A Website Can Have Multiple Goals…

There’s no rule that says your website can only have one goal. There may be multiple things that you would like listeners to do when they come to the website.

…But Some Goals Are Worth More Than Others

All of your website’s goals should ultimately impact the station’s bottom line, but that doesn’t mean they’ll impact it equally. When you sell a concert ticket, the station may make $40 profit, while an advertising lead may generate $5,000 profit. Know the goals, but also know their value.

 Just Because You Can Measure Something, That Doesn’t Mean It’s a Goal

Notice what’s not on the list of goals for your radio station’s website: Facebook likes, retweets, page views, email open rates, etc. These are all good stats to track, and they can help inform your decisions as you try to increase your website goal conversions, but that doesn’t mean they are important in and of themselves. They are a means to an end, not the end itself. Limit your explicit goals to the things that directly impact the station’s bottom line, and don’t get distracted by other data points.

Everybody Should Agree on the Website’s Goals

In every radio station that I’ve ever worked in, there has been tension between the programming department and the sales department. That’s because the two departments have different goals: one is focused on ratings, the other on revenue. Most of the time, those two goals go hand in hand, but sometimes they don’t, and that’s when issues arise.

Don’t make the same mistake with your digital strategy. Everybody — from the DJs to the digital team to the Program Director to the General Manager — should agree on what the goals of the radio station’s website are. If two people are looking at the same data and drawing different conclusions, you’re setting your station up for internal strife.

Review the Analytics Regularly

It’s not enough to define the goals of your website; you also want to sit down regularly and see how well you’re achieving those goals. I encourage radio stations to conduct a weekly website meeting to do this.

If your station hasn’t taken the time to explicitly define the goals of its website, get the appropriate personnel together and do this. Once you’ve decided what they are, type them up and post them where everybody can see them. Your digital strategy will go farther if everybody is on the same page.

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The post What Are the Goals of Your Radio Station’s Website? first appeared on CMB.

The post What Are the Goals of Your Radio Station’s Website? appeared first on CMB.