I have a question of all questions! I run a radio station in a small market of about 10,000 people. I have 2 radio stations in a town of 5,000 just south of me, and not much business to the north of me. It has been 6 months since we have had more than a quarter inch of moisture and we thrive on farming and cattle industries. This is the worst the economy has been, and the FM and AM station I am competing with has soaked up all sports sponsors and some on top of that for regular advertising. Do I try and sell really cheap in hopes that the farming and cattle industry start thriving again, or cut my losses and move on? It really makes me nervous with what is going on in our small area. As a locally owned radio station, we just can't support ourselves without advertising dollars coming in. We do broadcast football and basketball, but have had to cut our pricing back about 60 percent of what it was just to get businesses to sponsor their own children's sports on radio... ANY and I mean ANY ADVICE would help me out so much!!! Thank you.
Austin, remember that when the pie is smaller, you are selling "share of mind" to create market share for advertisers...by that I mean, people are still buying products and services..and it is the smart advertiser that continues to market to these people to increase their own mindshare/market share. The pie grows smaller, but their share of that pie can grow much larger. Also, focus on annuals...just annuals...branding schedules.
Chasing a number by charging less, never works.
Thank you for the input, Scott!!
I think aside from the rain, it's harder and harder to convince businesses to spend money on advertising. With the advent of "free" website builders and social media, many of them fancy themselves experts in the digital age. We hear this all the time - "We have a website" or "We have a Facebook page." However, we have a hardware store that says this and we watched their posts for a month and recorded their likes and shares. They posted 30 times and had 5 likes and 2 shares. For the next month, I shared their posts to my radio page and we had 390 likes and 23 shares. I told them it doesn't matter what they do on their own, if they don't have the interest there, people don't care what they post. People do care what we post on our radio station pages and people care what's "ON" the radio so if people are talking about our programming, then our sponsors want to be there. IF you have compelling content, promotions, giveaways, etc. the businesses will - at the least, want to put some money on the radio station just to see what happens. Sometimes it works right off, and sometimes it's a "tough sell" to keep people on there. Sometimes you have to move people around to different parts of the day to get them in a spot where they get results.
Do you have any ag programming? That seems like that would sell if you get market reports in the afternoon and do some livestock and dairy updates during the day.
