When do you schedule your next “appointment listening” contest or morning show benchmark? Unfortunately, many stations select weak hours of listening in hopes listeners will make appointments to listen at those times. Bad move. Instead of addressing a station’s weak listening times, it’s a better tactic to improve on a station’s best times. Schedule your strongest benchmarks in your highest listening hours and treat them like you would treat a power music category, repeat in other hours.
Fish Where The Fish Are
Bars and restaurants schedule their Happy Hour promotions during the time when people get off work, typically in the 4 PM to 7 PM window. Happy Hour is not 2 PM to 4 PM for a reason. When scheduling your appointment listening contest or benchmark, review your weekly cume numbers over several surveys and pick hours of your biggest cume. Your goal is for your cume to listen to your station over multiple days, increasing your listening occasions and thus improving your time spent listening. Drive your hours with the largest cume.
In their coverage of the Winter Olympics, NBC is always promoting the times of when specific events will be aired. This is because they know the viewer of Olympic events will be a likely viewer for other Olympic events. Therefore, there is more opportunity to generate viewership by promoting within the Olympic coverage than promoting during other NBC programming.
Use the Right Bait
At movie theatres, the previews are often the same kind of movie you are about to see – animated film, action, drama, science fiction, etc. Do the same in programming. Choose the right bait in creating your benchmarks. If you’re CHR or Hot AC, don’t have a benchmark that features an unfamiliar current song. If you’re Classic Hits or Classic Rock, don’t feature an obscure song from the past.
Your benchmark needs to appeal to your P-1 listener and needs to fit your brand.
When planning your contests and benchmarks, you’ll improve ratings by following two simple adages:
“Fish where the fish are” and “use the right bait.”
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John Lund is President of the Lund Media Group, a radio programming consulting firm with specialists in all mainstream radio formats. Did you find this article useful? You can leave a comment below or email John at John@Lundradio.com.