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Stephanie Winans

Business & Marketing Strategy Consulting

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Marketing Radio in a Pandemic: 4 Survival Tips

July 5, 2020 by Stephanie Winans Leave a Comment

“Marketing in a pandemic.” Sounds so tough it could be the next hot heavy metal band name. From appropriate messaging to budget and bandwidth stressors, our clients are asking how to market their stations and shows. Here are four marketing tips for surviving the COVID-19 crisis:

1. Consider whether slashing the marketing budget is the right move. Effective marketing drives ratings and ratings drive revenue. You’re in different spots across the spectrum of the COVID-19 struggle so there is no “one size fits all” answer, but I recommend thinking about marketing the way you consider other expenses not traditionally thought of as ‘discretionary.’ In a recession the gut reaction is to cut advertising spend to protect short-term profits, but research shows that companies who keep advertising win every time. (And isn’t this the narrative our radio sales teams are pitching to radio advertisers? They’re not wrong.)

2. Focus on your core. Concentrate on the listeners that drive ratings and the channels that drive the majority of revenue. Andrew Curran, President and COO of DMR/Interactive, says, “Remember that you care first and most about measured listening — the listening that drives ratings — not all listening. Think commuters who live in the Nielsen Hot ZIP footprint for you and your competitors to recruit and engage these High Value Listeners, who comprise just 5% of the population, but can drive more occasions and daily cume.”

“Despite stations promoting station apps, smart speaker skills and streaming for the last decade, over 90% of measured listening continues to come from listening on actual radios,” Curran says. While I’m a champion for digital, now isn’t the time to distract from on-air listening. That means questioning campaigns and on-air promos centered around app downloads, online listening, and website traffic. Digital transformation can wait; there is no digital transformation without the core business!

3. Keep it simple. Listeners are juggling their own COVID-19 struggles. If “keep it simple, stupid” was a tenet of good marketing pre-pandemic, it is even more relevant today. Make your messaging clean to cut through and limit to one CTA. Every message (promo, digital ad, TV spot, social media post, billboard campaign, etc.) should tell the listener to do one thing, e.g. “Listen to [Station ID]” and not “Download our app, visit us at www…, and like us on Facebook.”

4. Apply on-air creativity to marketing challenges. This is universal but especially true in the days of budget cuts: leverage your on-air talent and producers. We’re often so siloed departmentally that we miss opportunities to inject new creativity. Your programming talent know how to engage listeners and aren’t bound by traditional marketing thinking. Engage them in brainstorming (or my favorite: brainwriting) and watch new ideation unfold. Whether you’re strapped for budget and require creative ideas outside the normal advertising strategy or not, the world is different and now is the time to think differently.

And while we’re talking creativity in times of budget reduction, take a look at small markets. No one knows creative guerilla marketing like a scrappy, small market champion.

Whether you’re strapped for budget or fortunate enough to retain your 2020 marketing spend, use this time to get creative and think strategically.

 

This article was written for The Randy Lane Company and published in Radio Ink.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: COVID-19, marketing, marketing strategy, radio

25 Digital Innovations That Have Changed Radio For the Better

October 10, 2017 by Stephanie Winans Leave a Comment

“It’s a fad.” “Where’s the ROI in that?” “How’s that going to drive ratings?” Radio managers and talent alike were skeptical of many of the biggest digital innovations when they first disrupted the industry and its operations. But today? These innovations build our brands, drive deeper connections with our listeners, and provide new platforms for monetization. Here are 25 digital innovations that have changed radio for the better:

[Read more…] about 25 Digital Innovations That Have Changed Radio For the Better

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: digital strategy, disruption, innovation, podcasting, radio, smart speaker, social media, streaming

Instagram’s New Algorithm: Upping Your Instagame

April 22, 2016 by Stephanie Winans Leave a Comment

Remember when (cue Alan Jackson for you country fans)… Facebook was the only social network whose algorithm changes could get your panties or whitie tighties in a bunch?

Instagram recently announced that their feed will change from a chronological feed to an algorithm-based feed.

So what does this mean for your station or show? It means that you need to keep doing what you’re doing and just create good content.

Users are upset because they don’t like change and enjoy the existing Instagram user experience. Marketers are freaking out because they envision (and wisely so) that this change will make it more difficult for their posts to hit follower feeds unless they buy ads.

Instagram Algorithm Change

But you aren’t a marketer. You aren’t pushing a product and trying your best to find a creative way to sell on social. You’re selling the one thing that organically performs well: engaging content.

The trick is that you need to know what “engaging content” is. The silver lining of this change is that Instagram will make that obvious for you if you’ll listen. You won’t have to worry as much about the best time to post and whether you need to repeat posts throughout the day to reach more of your audience. You can focus on testing and measuring what types of content work instead.

So how do you do that? You regularly measure which types of posts drive the best results. If your station doesn’t subscribe to social media measurement or listening tools, you can setup an Excel spreadsheet and track your progress on your own. Here are tips to making the algorithm work for you:

  1. Define “success” first. Are you trying to drive likes, comments, or traffic to the website? Increase your followers? Know what you need to measure.
  1. Research hashtags regularly. Post a combination of hashtags with each post. Limit yourself to 7 or fear looking like a spammer (someone has to tell you that!). Include a mix of station hashtags, market specific local hashtags, relevant to that post hashtags, and trending hashtags to increase your reach. Note whether certain hashtags seem to drive more engagement.
  1. Pay attention to post types. Does your biggest response come from personality-focused posts? Entertainment news? In-studio video? Personal posts unrelated to your radio show? Track your posts long enough and you’ll know what your listeners want to see from you. Here’s a creative example on how to use Instagram video to promote entertainment headlines from Shoboy in the Morning.
  1. Spend time on your captions. The best images or videos fail to get response without a strong caption. Think of the caption as your on-air tease; craft it carefully. Track whether certain types of captions drive more engagement (i.e. short ones vs. long ones, questions vs. fill in the blanks).
  1. Ask for the engagement you want (but don’t sound desperate). “Double tap if you agree” after posting an opinionated caption is a classy way to ask for engagement. “Tag everyone you’ve ever met” is not.
  1. Try new things. If no one likes it, Instagram will make sure it gets buried in the feed. You can take some risks and see how your ideas pan out.
  1. Leverage what you know about Facebook. The Instagram algorithm-based feed will react similar to Facebook’s News Feed. Although Instagram is a visual social media, Facebook (and the rest of the web) is becoming that, too. It’s a fair assumption to begin with that the types of content that do well within the News Feed will do well on Instagram, too.
  1. Re-strategize. That’s right. When you collect this data, you need to set aside time to interpret it and shift your strategy. If no one ever likes your posts about your pet squirrel, it’s time to tell Rocky you’re sorry but he isn’t an Instaceleb.

For an excellent write-up on how all of your favorite social media networks’ algorithms work, check out this Hubspot post.

Photo credit: Flickr/miguelb

 

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Instagram, radio, social media, talent

Measuring the Digital Impact of TV and Radio Ads

May 28, 2015 by Stephanie Winans Leave a Comment

Brands and agencies love digital advertising in part because its effectiveness is easy to measure. You begin a PPC campaign and you can track the results immediately. As long as you’ve built a smart campaign, you can track everything and go down a rabbit hole of granularity.

And what’s better than granular data? Immediate granular data. It doesn’t take long with digital advertising to see what’s working and what needs to be tweaked.

With broadcast media, not all campaigns are as easily tracked. There is the immediacy issue, and some campaigns are also tougher to measure by nature. Just say the words “brand awareness” and many will stutter when answering the question “Is it working?”

Cue Adometry TV Attribution and Google search integration, a new Google initiative which aims to bridge this gap. It measures the digital impact of TV and radio ads, so you can gain insight immediately on your broadcast media messaging. This will help with optimizations to your TV and radio spots, but also with your supporting SEO and PPC campaigns as you can assess which offline messaging is driving the desired online behavior.

This is the beginning to a beautiful marriage between online and offline media, making it easier for brands to optimize marketing campaigns that involve both (especially campaigns that include TV or radio and Google AdWords!)

Read more about the initiative on the Google Analytics Blog.

Photo credit: Al Ibrahim/Flickr

Filed Under: Business, Uncategorized Tagged With: advertising, analytics, marketing, radio, TV

#Instavideo: How Radio Can Take Advantage of Video for Instagram

July 7, 2013 by Stephanie Winans Leave a Comment

Right when you get the hang of Instagram, the Facebook-owned social network comes out with an update to compete with social video powerhouse, Vine (owned by Twitter). You can still add photos to Instagram, but now you can also share 15-second videos.

Much like Vine, Instagram allows you to stitch together video clips into a 15-second montage. You can apply one of 13 Angela Perelli and Stephanie Winansfilters and use the Cinema feature to stabilize your video, too. Don’t forget to choose your thumbnail so users who don’t press play still get a sense of what the video is about.

So what kind of videos should you share? Here are some ideas to jumpstart your brainstorming:

 

  • What’s happening in the studio between commercial breaks?
  • Record one Q&A from your next in-studio guest. Consider captioning the video with your question and leaving the 15-second video for your guest’s answer.
  • Video your next musical guests singing the hook to their latest song live.
  • Share intriguing clips of morning show stunts, driving viewers to the website for longer video.
  • Get creative with promotion announcements. Shoot video of yourself announcing the latest contest or promotion, or of the studio while the promo plays. Giving away a flyaway? Head to the airport to record a plane taking off.
  • Develop a street promotion with a specific hashtag. For example, give away t-shirts or concert tickets on the street and shoot video at different locations. Get client sponsorship to monetize the promotion.
  • Ask your Sales department which clients play the station in their businesses. Shoot the staff dancing to the music.  Better yet, create a promotion and ask local businesses to upload their own videos.
  • See someone jamming in her car to your station? Shoot a quick video (and get her permission to post).
  • Record a ride in the station vehicle.
  • Record hints to trivia contests and post with the time the contest airs. Be sure and comment with the answer after the contest is over, as listeners will comment and guess just for fun.
  • Develop a character for Instagram, or make an on-air character come to life. Shoot regular video and create a hashtag for this feature.
  • Share video of an artist meet-&-greet.
  • Create a feature just for Instagram video. For example, “Ask Steve.” Have listeners email questions and post a video every Monday of Steve answering a listener question. Using the hashtag #AskSteve would allow users to watch any “Ask Steve” videos they’ve missed.
  • Create testimonials. Ask P1 fans at events if you can post video of them sharing why they love the station or show.

 

Whatever you do, just do it. Radio’s only disadvantage is that it’s an audio medium in a visual world. With Instagram video (and other video platforms, too), you have the opportunity to bridge that gap.

Note: If you don’t see the upload video option in your app, check for an Instagram update and make sure your phone’s operating system is up-to-date.

 

Also published on The Randy Lane Company blog.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Instagram, promotion, radio, sales, social media, video

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