(By Loyd Ford) Just imagine a world where the future speeds up, people work more from home, the general public starts using apps more and more and accessing on-demand audio in a variety of forms based on the content they want. Does this sound like a threat to your local radio business?
Now add back into that to a series of business decisions that divert masses of radio stations from original purpose and continues a pattern of making radio more and more generic in general. Could that happen? It already did, right?
Here is why this is a thunderdome moment for local radio. Radio has forever been dominant in the automobile. This will become much more significantly challenged and you don’t want to wait until this happens to strengthen your local radio business or you may not have one.
So, if you are a local broadcaster, what do you do now?
Brand Development First
Start focusing now on your local brands and be honest about their local strength. Do a strategic review of your entire business to look closely at each of these:
- Strength
- Weakness
- Opportunities
- Threats
Do Your Individual Radio Stations Have A Strong Position In The Local Radio Market?Are your individual radio stations highly rated? Are they well-positioned and targeting a specific audience that will drive revenue for your company? Do you have weaker brands that are not well positioned with audience or advertisers? These questions – if honestly answered – will tell you where to start the most significant work to strengthen your local brands before more compression and potential disruption comes to your market.
Take A Close Look At Your Morning Show Personalities
Are they well known? Are they loved in your market? Highly rated? Leading their radio station in ratings? If you don’t see the answers you like here, know this: This means you have opportunity to get started now. Focusing on developing winning morning shows is worthwhile and adds growth value to your product for you, local listeners, community and advertisers.
How Good Are You At Building Sales People?
A big complaint in radio today is, “Where are the good sellers?” Or “How do we recruit great salespeople?” The truth is you need recruitment that puts the right people on the bus in both programming and sales, but great sellers are built. How is your sales training? How often does your sales manager go on calls with sellers and give positive feedback and special hacks for being more effective in their sales process? How imaginative are you or your sales manager in motivating your sellers with special guests, tools, content meant to make your sellers smarter about how to help clients right now — not ten years ago.
No Company Is Wrong Saying Digital And Social Is Explosive And Already Your Competitor For Ad Dollars
When industries or companies face pressure, they have choices. They can buckle down and pull in the flaps or they can go bigger. Many of today’s large broadcasters have embraced digital at the significant expense of profit margin. Where I come from, focus on profit margin is essential. Given this, I am beating the drum for local radio to make smart purchases of local digital agencies and to operate them separately (with a separate sales team). This isn’t to say that your radio sellers cannot participate in selling these products, but local radio should find a creative solution for using digital opportunities to bring more businesses to radio, deepen relationships with existing customers by helping them with digital and social solutions.
Purchasing your own local digital agency also give you opportunities to create products for upsell past being a reseller only of products owned by someone else. Local radio should be uniquely positioned to create original digital and social opportunities involving your personalities and local brands in a way that secures more profit center for your local business. Don’t do this and the bottom of “The Thunderdome” is likely to eventually fall from underneath you. Do an excellent job of growing your business to become much more unique and helpful to local clients on the air, online, in social, with events and promotions and your business will become stronger in your market.
Additional Things To Think About As You Plan For A Stronger Future
You should give strategic thought to podcasting and local event acquisition (either original events, events you take over or strategic partnerships that allow you to build and benefit financially from the promotion of those events and building year-long advertising opportunities for the businesses involved in them). Radio is local promotion. Think about ‘real estate’ you can own and profit from either by partnering or outright purchase so you are the epicenter of local again and again in your local market.
Now Let’s Get Back To The Truth
If you’ve read my stuff before, you know I say it a lot. “Once you have a radio station, you can get anything else you want.” The future of local radio is what we build. These are not the challenges of the 1980s, the 1990s or even turn-of-the-century. You and I are in the 20s. Are they going to be your roaring 20s? Just like everything else you know: They will be the roaring 20s for the people who do the hard work, think strategically, focus on the keys to strengthening their local brands and really separate from companies who are not using your same business model. That means that if you are in the local radio business, it’s time to get aggressive, innovative and make sure you matter to local listeners, community and advertisers more than ever.
This is why you got in the radio business to begin with and turning to these important decisions and making them is the path to stronger revenues in your future.
Loyd Ford consults radio stations, coaches personalities, and provides behavioral and strategic programming to radio that propel ratings (and revenue) with RPC. Reach him anytime. 864.448.4169 or [email protected].
