Radio Promotion Goals

RADIO PROMOTION GOALS

Listeners’ perception of what radio stations presents can be much more significant than the reality of the stations’ programming (in the short term, at least). In the longer term, the programming needs to the deliver on the promise of the promoted perception or there’s negative mismatch. If the listener perceives the station sounding better, then for that listener, the reality is that the station does indeed sound better. For example, a station that heavily promotes long music sweeps between commercial blocks may be perceived as less commercial, even when (counting all dayparts) it actually carries more commercials than its competitors.

Successful promotion managers undertake activities that will generate talk about the station (buzz) and design multimedia (websites, social media) positioning campaigns to create perceived advantages.

GENERATING BUZZ

Word of mouth can be the most powerful marketing channel available. Strategies that get audiences so interested in a station that they’ll talk about it with their friends can be powerful tools for promotion directors in critical format change periods or other major audience acquisition efforts. Stations have used a number of stunts over the years to announce programming changes:

a) From playing a single song over and over,

b) To running for days or weeks without commercials or DJs.

In each case, the idea was to do something so bizarre, so unexpected, that people would have “did you hear…” conversations with friends and family members. Buzz also comes when other media pick up on a stunt; it is harder to generate that coverage if the stunt can obviously be tracked on a station.

Nevertheless, “anonymous” giveaways of large amount of cash in public places and similar strategies have been employed, resulting in newspaper and TV news stories about strange goings – on…before the station springs the surprise and reveals its identity.

An Oklahoma City station created perhaps a...