The audience you have is the audience you grow. Focus on growing more listening from your present audience. Many stations get two to five tune-ins per day from each listener. The more times they tune in, the more total listening that is recorded in ratings. This helps make your station indispensable.
Television is an appointment viewing medium; people schedule their time to watch the Sunday football playoff games or a new episodes of the Bachelor and Emily in Paris.
People set similar appointments for radio.
Set your appointments with the audience with special programming features, programming benchmarks, or special events. Remind listeners of specific events and times. You’re essentially reminding/asking listeners to modify their behavior and tune in again. Contests are another way to set appointments. Promote the specific times a contest will be played to gain valuable tune-in. But choose your times carefully.
Don’t miss the opportunity to promote when the contest will be scheduled again after each contest, chances are if they are engaged with the contest they will listen the next time it is played.
Appointment listening requires promoting ahead benchmarks, features, and benefit-driven reasons to listen. Tell your listeners what you do and give them every reason to set multiple appointments every day. As with contests, it’s best to promote during each benchmark to gain multiple day listening. If they like the feature/benchmark on Monday they will probably like it on Tuesday.
Lund Quote: “The more times listeners tune in each day, the more total listening you get…but remember to make a reservation!”
Don’t be like the cable company and say, “listen between noon and 4.” That’s as precise as saying, “let’s meet downtown (somewhere) for dinner sometime after 5.” Be like your doctor and set an exact time to tune back to the station. That is the effective way to set a listening appointment.
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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.