23 Jan Wednesday, January 23, 2019
This Week in The Lund Letter:
> Help listeners set appointments
> Are the fish biting?
> The best strategies to expand TSL
> Radio rules the road and the latest media trends
Lund Programming Clinic: Appointment Listening
The audience you have is the audience you grow. Focus on growing more listening from your present audience. Many stations get 2-4 tune-ins per day from each listener. The more times they tune in, the more total listening that gets 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 new episodes of the Big Bang Theory on Thursdays. 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.
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.
Lund Quote: “The more times listeners tune in each day, the more total listening you get…but remember to make a reservation!”
Amp Up Your Radio Show!
Improve the planning, presentation and sound of your radio show – whether you’re in the morning or at any time. The Morning Show Guide has all the tools that radio personalities need to grow and sound better.
This book contains localism and relatability checklists, 50 top talent benchmarks and audience interactives, dozens of radio show essentials, and much more. The 50-page Morning Show Guide is the #1 book written for radio personalities to plan and execute their shows in all market sizes. It’s been newly updated and expanded.
Lund Deep Dive: Fish or Cut Bait
When do you schedule your next “appointment listening” contest or morning show benchmark? 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 strongest times.
Fish Where The Fish Are
Bars and restaurants schedule their Happy Hour promotions during the part of the day 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.
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.”
Angling For Better Ratings?
Want to reel in big cume? The spring Nielsen diary and Eastlan ratings sweep begins March 28. Don’t you want to know that your station’s programming including talents, music, and marketing is the best it can be? Is the competition taking revenue from you because they have more listeners? The Lund Strategic Programming Evaluation details your assets and vulnerabilities and provides an action plan for growth. Contact John Lund for info on how this study will benefit your stations.
Lund Management Memo: Expand Time Spent Listening
Because cume is largely a function of past history, advertising and external promotion, you realistically have more control over the time listeners spend with you. Here are four proven strategies:
1. Extend minutes of listening every time people tune in. Constantly promote elements and music ahead to lengthen TSL into the next quarter hour.
2. Build strong workday listening, the biggest generator of quarter-hours. Remember: not all workday listening is 9-5. It may be 7-3 or 8-4. Playing a full hour of non-stop music to “start your workday” at 9 AM may be a negative to the majority of listeners who start work at 7 or 8.
3. Increase the number of times-a-day listening. Strive for listening on more occasions every day. Ask people to tune in four, five or six times a day to find out what’s happening in the world, to play a contest, or hear a feature. We call this “appointment listening.” Design contests to increase daily tune-ins.
4. Ask people to listen more days a week by selling a reason to tune in tomorrow, over the weekend, and the following Monday. Morning shows should give people a reason to listen the next day and make an appointment to listen at a specific time. Because morning is the most habitual daypart, the chances of listeners buying in for another day are high, especially if you give them a reason.
Planning Your State Broadcast Convention?
“The Science of Increasing Audience” is the topic of John Lund’s positive, fast-moving presentation. It details everything radio programmers need to do to get more listeners and higher ratings in today’s digital world. Topics include the “basics” of radio programming, America’s top formats: who listens and why, tactics to get more listeners, talent coaching, and how to make voice tracking sound live and local. This presentation will be customized and expanded to meet your members’ needs. Email John@Lundradio.com for availability and info.
Lund’s Top 3: Radical Management
Management needs to continuously evolve and adapt. Success is built on delighting the customer, according to business consultant Steve Denning. Denning believes in “Radical Management.” Providing value starts with building a relationship with the customer. For radio, delighting customers is more than just getting the listener to tune in; it’s about creating a connection and becoming their station.
According to research shared by Denning, there are 10 main steps to take in Radical Management. Here is part 2.
1. Innovate in Stages. Launch the product (your new website, Facebook account or regional portal site) and add selectively through upgrades. Add unexpected incentives for long time listeners that continue to add value to the overall connection to the station.
2. Evaluate. Simply adding features can make a product unusable over time. Ensure each upgrade truly enhances and delights the core listener.
3. Customize. Enable listeners to have an experience that meets their needs. Some listeners prefer to receive station updates via text message or Twitter rather than email.
Next week – Radical Management concludes. Visit www.lundradio.com for more Top 3’s!
Promotion of the Week: Six Pack of Sunshine
Design a six-week winter trip promotion where people register for one of six trips to a sunny climate. Entry forms can be tied into six packs of beverages (beer, cola, etc.). Especially effective in markets that have full winter weather (snow, etc.).
Need a promotion for Valentine’s Day? We have over 100 proven sales promotions and programming events to make you money and make your listeners happy. (We will kiss and tell!) Utilize our Winter Promotions Guide to make more revenue. It also covers events like the Oscars, the Super Bowl and St. Patrick’s Day all the way through the First Day of Spring. Order your copy here.
Are you marketing to General Managers or Program Directors and want to reach the 10,500 readers of the Lund Letter? Email John Lund.
Lund Trend Watch:
Radio Still King of the Road
Edison Research recently found that 68% of drivers with a commute of at least 20 minutes listen to AM/FM Radio. Although that has dropped from 83% in 2015, Radio still rules in the car. Some of the lost listening can be attributed to streaming audio and podcasts. But together the two options only control 25% of in-car time spent listening.
More Hours Needed Per Day
US adults spend 10 hours and 24 minutes per day using media, according to Nielsen data analyzed by DEFcom Advisors. The average adult spends 6-7 hours sleeping each night. That only leaves about 6½ to 7½ hours for activities that don’t allow also listening, watching or otherwise using media. We’re guessing this is when people actually interact with each other face to face outside of places (work, home, the car, a store) where media usage is already prevalent. Where is that exactly?.
Symbiotic Media
Also derived from Nielsen data, it’s common for simultaneous usage of two or more types of media. 45% of adults watch TV while using a digital device “very often or always.” 6% watch TV and listen to a separate audio source at the same time. Audio has even more likely cross-media action.
+ 51% of adults use a digital device to look up info related to audio they’re hearing.
+ 31% use a digital device to email/text/message about audio they are listening to.
+ 25% to look up/shop for a product/service being advertised.
+ 20% to write/read posts on social media about the audio content.
+ 14% will switch to different audio content after seeing something online about it.
Radio has been a longtime king of listening while something else is being accomplished. Radio’s most used hours continue to be between 7am and 5pm when people are most active… commuting, working, shopping and doing other errands, etc.
Sales Promotion Questions?
For your sales promotions to be successful and “work” for your client, your listeners and your station, your sales staff needs to ask the right questions. Our 40-point questionnaire covers everything from creation to execution to qualify each sales promotion and ensure the best possible results. This checklist is included with details of the 200 best sales promotion ideas for radio stations. The Lund Sales Promotion Guide is 50% off right now; get your copy here.
Programmer’s Planner:
Feb 2: Groundhog Day
Feb 3: Super Bowl LIII in Atlanta, Georgia
Feb 5: Chinese New Year (Year of the Pig)
Feb 14: Valentine’s Day
Feb 18: President’s Day
Mar 5: Mardi Gras
Mar 10: Daylight Saving Time starts
Thanks for reading
The Lund Letter
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About the Lund Media Group:
For over 20 years, the Lund Media Group has provided programming, music consulting, operational guidance, and research to commercial and public broadcaststations throughout North America and overseas. Whether you program all sports, all
talk, or all music, the Lund Goal is to help stations get more listeners and keep them listening longer. The Lund Consultants are a multi-format custom programming and management consultancy.
Call John Lund for more information about how the Lund Media Group can help your stations achieve more listeners, higher ratings, and more revenue.
Phone: 650-692-7777.
Email john@lundradio.com.