This is an amazing story. It’s a successful business owner telling radio’s success story – and not a radio executive. Mitch Russo is the founder of ResultsBreakthrough.com and the former CEO of the Tony Robbins & Chet Holmes Business Breakthrough.
Russo writes in Forbes that he tried radio. And of course when you only TRY radio, it hardly ever works. But when he stuck with radio he wound up with customers who had a lifetime value worth more than $11,000 each.
Russo says during the early days of building his business he experimented with radio. “At first, it barely worked, but with some patience and a library of six different recorded spots, we began testing one against the other. It started to work a little better. Then, we selected the best of the lot and tested stations. We tried all types of music genres, and then we tried talk radio, which fit our growing company. Once we selected a few talk radio stations, we realized that talk radio listeners pay attention, whereas we found music radio listeners listen passively.”
Russo writes in Forbes that getting the message and finding his audience took several weeks to figure out and that’s when the action really started. “Slowly we increased our budget, and the inbound calls began to increase too. But, we had a problem: We were receiving more calls than our little team of salespeople could handle. So, we scaled back on ad spend temporarily and built our team. After adding and training several new team members, we ramped up our radio efforts again.”
Once Russo figured out his message, and the stations to run on, he says every customer the radio brought him wound up spending more than $11,000 on his products and services over their 4-year lifetime as a customer.
One of the most powerful lines from Russo’s column was this: “Radio listeners are far more likely to pick up the phone, even while driving, than they are clicking on a URL that was announced over the radio. For that reason, it’s best to ensure you can answer every inbound call.”
Excellent success story. PIt also fortells why repetitive music clocks may be a dwindling strategy for radio. Specialty programming keeps listeners more interactive (awake). That’s probably why streaming music platforms are what they are now and suggests that a natural pivot for commercial radio is using data to target listeners based on their interests. Using multiple streams & on demand as well as targeted syndicated programming all focused toward personal, local/regional & yes, even global interests-including music. Using individual, targeted streams, tageted info/spots can be interspursed with tunes from each listeners playlist and delivered right to them.