Hi all,
Just throwing this one out there to see what response, if any, I am going to get. I have a big problem with commercial availability at the moment and need to come up with some ideas to generate revenue from our promotions department.
We have 4-5 full time promo staff and sign written vehicles that are able to visit businesses in our market and perform live crosses back to the station reporting on why they are there and why the punters should get down there as quickly as possible. I need to have a 'hook' that they can offer to entice more businesses to use this service.
Any ideas? In other words - Why would you change what you are about to do to attend a site that we are at?
The "hook" to the buyer, whether your NTR prospect or their customer (your listener), must be 1) irresistible and 2) available only for a limited time or in limited supply. Nothing less will yield the desired result.
Perhaps you record an on-site interview with the business. Can be audio-only or audio-video; web-hosted video is a big thing these days. (Read Roy H. Williams' Monday Morning Memo from February 11, 2013 for insights on this, especially the 3rd point on the first page.) Doing it on video will likely require two people. Use a good mic so the audio is crisp and clear. Post the interview on your website and social media. Whoever is on the air can take 5 seconds once in awhile to send listeners there to watch it.
For his part, the client can offer sampling, giveaways, deep discounts, limited availability, etc., etc., to build traffic. But if his offer is less than irresistible, well, meh.
Ask 10 people in your periphery if they'd drop what they're doing to get over there. If 9 of them say Yes, you have a good chance of succeeding.
There was an article by Roy Williams in the 3/18/13 issue of RadioINK, entitled "Local Radio, for Real," in which the Wizard describes some things he did during a three-month period when he ran KICK-AM in Springfield, MO 26 years ago. He was thinking about buying the station and wanted 90 days to experiment with a few "hyper-local" ideas. He writes:
I gave the sales staff a rotating schedule so that each hour, 8 a.m. - 6 p.m., we could feature a live report called in by one of them. "If you see a sidewalk sale in front of a golf shop and they have some cool stuff for sale cheap, call it in. If a pizza joint creates a weird new pizza, call it in. If tropical plants are being sold out of a semi-truck in a parking lot, call it in." To the listener, it felt like local news. But it wasn't hard news. It was the kind of stuff a friend would mention to a friend.
The result?
Hourly call-ins made us sound like we were everywhere, involved in everything....
The call-ins always got quick results due to the urgent, "limited-time" nature of the things we featured.
Now, the Wizard's purpose in doing this was different from yours. You're looking to make money with this effort. Williams gave all this away as a kind of "sampling" program. His intent was to demonstrate the power of his station, so that the businesses who'd received the free exposure might be more inclined to buy a schedule.
Having seen the results from just one live ad, many of these people were open to talking about a schedule when we popped in a day or two later to ask, "Did anyone hear you on the radio?"
One compromise that you might consider: give it away for a period of time, sufficient for the businesses to see how powerful this type of exposure can be for them, then begin to charge whatever the market will bear. That's the whole premise behind sampling anyway, isn't it?
Rod,
Thank you very much for the response and I will be putting these ideas to our group. We have however put up a $250 cash prize to people that attend the 'Street Team Live Crosses'. So each day we collect entries and draw a winner just before 5pm.
Surprisingly this hasn't worked as well as we would have liked. It seems that the chance of winning $250 cash just isn't good enough to 'turn the car around'. So it's back to the drawing board. Maybe we need to offer the client an incentive to purchase the 'cross package'.
I love the idea of the call ins. Thats a brilliant idea. Wonder if we would put our good clients noses out of joint by doing this for free though...... food for thought.
Thanks again,
