The Secret to a Successful Radio Station

To become a successful radio station you should be drawing in listeners and advertisers rather than having to actively seek them out yourself. Cold-calling, flyers and generally bugging businesses to advertise with you is no longer an effective marketing method due to caller id, spam filtering and ad block.

We are bombarded with hundreds of advertisements every day, and have learnt to deal with this by blocking them out and choosing to completely ignore them. Your radio station must learn to attract businesses and keeps them coming back for more.

Essentially, you should be getting found by people who are looking for you rather than throwing yourself at the masses of people who are just trying to block you out. According to Hubspot, those who follow this strategy are 4 times as likely to rate their marketing strategy as effective.

A simple way to do this is by setting up a website which will naturally attract visitors. Your website should include blogs and social media buttons. It must be perfectly optimised for search engines to display your radio station as one of the top search results.

An effective strategy to draw in listeners and advertisers is lead generation. A lead is someone who has indicated an interest in your radio station. Therefore, rather than having a person receive a random cold call from your radio station, they would hear from you after you have already communicated with them.

For example, it would be very intrusive if someone had received a phone call from you out of nowhere, without them knowing or caring about your radio station. What would be a lot less intrusive would be if someone had received an email about your radio station after having participated in a competition run by your station. As an added bonus, having previously communicated with said person through a competition means that your radio station could have already received details from them, allowing you to personalise the email you are sending them so that you can meet their interests and expectations better.

Lead generation, therefore, is the process of attracting and converting people into potential listeners. Strangers must want a relationship with you rather than you having to force a relationship with them, making it easier for them to want to listen and engage with your radio station.

Now, to find a lead, your radio station must collect information. You can do this by having people enter your competitions or polls, fill out a survey or fill out a form to download a piece of content (such as an eBook or podcast). 42% of marketing professionals state that a lack of quality data is their biggest barrier to lead generation. (BrightTALK) so ensure your data is specific and of high quality. Only then, once you have some information about them, can you contact them to give them more information on your radio station.

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Once you have generated leads, it is now time for your radio station to nurture them. This is the process of building relationships with your prospects, aiming to turn them into listeners.

Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. (Demand Gen Report) so it essential that you do not just leave your leads to wait around twiddling their thumbs. You must nurture them by educating them on your radio station and building a relationship with them. 

A great way to communicate with and nurture your leads in by sending emails. Emails must be relevant and valuable; you do not want your leads to think you are sending spam and irrelevant emails. Emails must seem human and personal. It would therefore be a good idea to send an email addressed to the lead’s name. You should sign it yourself rather than use your station’s name.

The first email you send should establish trust. It must be relevant and must be eye-catching enough to convince your contacts to open future emails.

The next emails must provide information on your radio station and its content. It must have downloadable resources so that you can educate your leads and interest them.

Thirdly, you should send an email with a call-to-action. This email should be direct and to the point and should give the next step for your lead to take.

It is important to see how your leads respond or react to your emails. This helps figure out what kind of email you should send next. In other words, you must personalise each email based on your lead’s response. That way you will not annoy them and they will be step closer to becoming a listener.

For help with lead generating and nurturing, contact us.