Making Money From Your Loyal Listeners — Part 2: Use Your P1 Audience To Your Advantage
(By Charlie Sislen) Last week I outlined how to use Time Spent Listening to outsell the competition. This week we’ll look at how the emotional relationship that your listeners have with your station is imperative to get true value for your inventory.
Another, and more versatile, tool than TSL is your first preference listening.
First Preference Listening
As most of us know, first preference is the station that a listener spends longer with than any other. In layman’s terms, “What is your favorite radio station?” Clearly a station that can tell its P1 story has a real advantage over stations without that loyalty. It is interesting to note that a sales rep can position strong P1 with four different estimates. They are:
– P1 AQH Persons
– P1 AQH Composition
– P1 Cume Persons
– P1 Cume Composition
Any of these four estimates can document your audience’s loyalty to your station. So how do they differ? Typically, using persons is effective for those top-ranked stations. If you are a market leader in either AQH or cume, you are often a leader in P1 AQH or cume. Typically, P1 cume is a more impactful argument. If you are the top P1 cume persons radio station, position it by saying, “My station has more (or reaches more) loyal listeners than any other radio station.”
Conversely, P1 composition is effective for stations that have first-preference listeners making up a large percentage of their audience. Typically, when it comes to composition, P1 AQH is a more powerful argument. For a station that has a P1 AQH composition of 76% (60% is typical), a sales rep can say, “Over three-quarters of my station’s listening comes from people who spend longer with us than any other radio station.”
Always be sure to convert this feature into a benefit. “Your message will be heard by loyal listeners who have a strong emotional relationship with my station. Therefore it will have a greater impact and will be more beneficial for you.”
Combining P1 and TSL
By combining the demonstration of your strong first-preference listeners with higher TSL, you should be able to convince an advertiser that their message is worth more. Also, because of the loyalty of your listeners, an ad campaign is more likely to build the needed frequency to be effective.
This loyalty does not show up in a rating point or cost-per-point, but can make a tremendous difference in how impactful an advertiser’s message is. You will not get this benefit if you don’t sell it to your potential client with passion and conviction.
We’ll wrap up with Part 3 in a of couple weeks!
Charlie Sislen is a partner at Research Director, Inc. He can be reached at 410-956-0363 or by e-mail at [email protected]. This blog post is part of a series titled “Growing the Radio Pie.” To view past articles, visit The Ratings Experts at Research Director, Inc. online here.
