Direct control of your product delivers the most tools to create a one-of-a-kind product for your audience.
Each radio station should be its own unique brand, built upon the interests and values of the community it serves. In the internet age, there are no geographic barriers. Focus on building a unique, interesting brand to control your own future.
Make your product as easy to consume as possible.
This means you need to be everywhere. Be available as audio, be available as video, and be available as text. Create as few barriers as possible for people to consume your content. The goal is to build the largest audience possible. Don’t limit yourself.
Don’t sit back trying to protect what you have built.
Be hungry and go forward with new initiatives and projects. Always strive to be better, always strive to earn your audience/clients’ business, and always strive to continue to innovate. Always be on the leading edge. Never rest on your laurels.
Maintaining ownership of your content supply chain from top to bottom will give your radio brand the exclusive, unique content that builds the “need” and the “want” to seek out your outlet.
A strong news department creates the foundation to “drill” for the original source content.
A news department digs up the raw materials that later become talk topics. When an operation has a strong news department, it helps a brand become a “net exporter” of content where other outlets credit your brand for finding the goods. Additionally, with this content extracted in-house, your producers and hosts get first dibs to jump on the story first — adding to the exclusive experience.
Producers take the raw content dug up by the news department and refine it into a more processed product.
This is the step where the shows add value to the raw material generated by the news department. This refined product should stand out to be unique in the marketplace. If the processed content is just like all of the other content out there, it simply becomes a commodity that a consumer can just consume anywhere. More in-house ingredients also helps with the “net export” of the final product.
The raw content is delivered to consumers in a wholesale manner through newscasts.
Newscasts and digital news stories deliver the raw content directly to the consumers. The wholesale nature of the news product delivers a bulk of basic information to the audience. Some minor refining and retailing of the raw product improves the value of the wholesale product.
Hosts are the gas stations — the retail outlets that sell the final product to the consumer.
Talk shows sell refined content to an audience. Proper marketing gets consumers in the door to buy the product. A solid sell and consistent delivery will create a large pool of regular customers to visit the shop each day.
Every interaction a consumer has with your brand should exude the same quality as your radio product.
Quality is always a crucial component of a successful radio station. Your station should sound like one of the best out there. In a direct-competitive environment, the essence of being a fuller, more detailed brand will be more appealing to potential advertisers who will seek to associate themselves with more relatable, quality brands.
Your website is just as important as your radio station. Often, people who are not regular listeners will first experience your brand either online or through social media. Your brand online should match the tone and quality you deliver on the air. It is a major marketing piece — delivering “food court samples” to a potential audience.
Time is becoming more valuable than money.
With so many content options, people have less and less time to allocate to everything they want to do, see and hear. Create a product where people feel like they are getting value from the time they spend with you. When you promote a topic, you must over deliver. Underwhelming a consumer will set your brand behind where it was previously.