Locality Switch

Just because you’re a community station doesn’t mean you will have an audience. I don’t believe marketing yourself as “community” will get you more than a handful of listeners, at the most.

If this is true, how does a general interest station market themself?

It’s a tough one, but tough problems encourage creativity. And creativity, I hope, is in our domain. After all, we are a creative medium, right?

Firstly, let’s check out what the CBAA has to say in their CBAA Handbook.

Marketing relies heavily on designing programs or policies which satisfy the needs and desires of its target market. It particularly involves research and promotion. Marketing is about discovering your clients and identifying their characteristics. More importantly, it is also about the type of radio station you are, what you want to achieve, how to go about it and how to measure your success.

Source: CBAA Handbook: Marketing

This is very wise advice. In fact, this must be my favorite chapter in the handbook, and is probably more relevant to us now more than when it was first written. At least from what I see of the general interest community stations that are around me (or what I don’t see!), I think we need help at marketing.

So, the CBAA reckons we need to “satisfy the needs and desires of its target market”. That’s all very well and good, but if you’re licensed as a general interest station for a local geographic area, your interests are probably defined as ‘whoever lives in the area’.

There is also the issue of what to market. What should we really be selling to the community? On air programs? Volunteering? Sponsorship? Donating? With so many choices, the default thing to market is everything, all at once! This is great, except people don’t like having a million things shoved down their throats. They need time to digest everything.

What should we do?

What I suggest is placing focus on a particular aspect of your station, and then push that for a couple of months. For example, you may want to have an increased amount of hits on your website (an easy way to measure an increase in awareness and interest). Go crazy trying to get your brand and URL out there. Spend two months trying to push this whole idea into your local community.

Be creative. Find all of the noticeboards in the area and get something interesting posted up on those; something catchy and memorable. Approach the local sports club and ask if you can get stuff in their newsletter. See if the local schools can do the same. What about a notice in the local newspapers?

But wait. Before you go ahead and push something like this, you need goals. This is critical. Without goals, your team won’t know what they’re aiming for. They won’t know if they’re succeeding, or doing badly. After a while of going crazy trying to push an idea, they will loose interest, because they have no metrics to measure up against.

What sort of goals should you set?

Firstly, they should be realistic, but just a bit out of reach of what you are currently are attaining. In the instance of increased website hits, there is no point saying you want 500 unique visitors this month, if you already have that amount of visitors on a regular basis.

It’s important to set goals which are measurable. If you can’t measure the response to a campaign, it’s almost pointless. Saying you want more listeners isn’t a good goal to set, because how do you measure listeners? Sure, you can do a survey, but those are expensive and take some time.

Be creative. Have goals. Have fun!