On Being the Best Button
There are many ways to go about Being the Best Button. Here’s our approach:
Know Your Listeners
Be Important to Your Listeners
Fight for Your Listeners
Understand Your Audience
Know Your Listeners
There’s a wealth of information available about public radio listeners – who they are, what they value, why public radio is important to them. Yet, it’s remarkable how little some people in public radio really know about their listeners.
For example, there was the NPR News executive who once insisted that there was no way NPR listeners could like the TV show “30 Something” even though it consistently ranked among the top 5 programs they watched. Public radio listeners are more likely than the average American to be on the board of a church or synagogue. They are more likely than the average American to give money to a religious organization and a lot of them like to bowl.
The stereotypes apply as well. Public radio listeners are global citizens who are concerned about community and committed to social causes. They feel a duty to become involved so they become tree huggers and whale savers and volunteers and mentors. They lead rich and complex lives.
They listen to public radio because the values they hear on the air align with their personal values.
They listen to public radio because it is an easy way to make their time more valuable. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Listeners value public radio because it is an uncomplicated way to improve the quality of their lives.
Understanding these qualities in your listeners helps guide strategies for content, fundraising, marketing, and social media. That means everyone at the station should Know Your Listeners.
In all content you create you should be able to answer the question, “Who are we talking to and why is this important to them?” If the question can’t be answered, then there is an opportunity to make that content better.
Be Important to Your Listeners
Importance can be measured in many ways. Listeners who agree with the statement “The programming on my station is important to me. I would miss it if it were to go away” are far more likely to donate than listeners who disagree with that statement.
But one of the best ways to gauge the importance of a station or program is how well it engages listeners. And that’s something public radio already measures.
For more than 25 years, public radio’s leading thinkers on audience service have understood the importance of Engagement. That’s right, Engagement is not just a digital concept or metric.
In the 1980s, researcher David Giovannoni used Arbitron data to develop the audience metric Loyalty.
Loyalty measures how much of a listener’s overall radio listening is to one station. When a station’s Loyalty is 30 it means the station is earning 30% of the average listener's total radio listening time. He isn’t engaged with the station the other 70% of the time that he uses the radio. He’s engaged with the competition.
Stations with higher Loyalty have a more engaged audience. The station is more important to them so they keep choosing to listen.
Public radio professionals have become so accustomed to this concept that they are forgetting its importance. A listener must make a choice every time he turns on the radio. Most public radio listeners turn on the radio between 800 and 1,000 times per year. To thrive in a more competitive media marketplace, a station must make itself important enough to win the greatest number of those listening choices. The more listening choices it wins, the higher the level of engagement. The more listening choices it wins, the higher the Loyalty. The more listening choices it wins, the more important the station becomes to the listener.
Fight for Your Listeners
Fight for Your Listeners plays out two ways. First, always be an advocate for your listeners. Work hard to represent their needs and interests in every programming, marketing, fundraising, and social media decision. Passion for the listener’s best interest is rewarded with a more passionate listener.
Second, Fight for Your Listeners is about keeping the ones you have and winning new ones.
Commercial radio made it easy on public radio throughout most of the 1990s and in the first part of the 2000s. Ownership consolidation, under investment in programming, and an emphasis on more narrow, more profitable demographics effectively reduced the number of true competitors for the public radio listeners. The result – public radio audiences grew even as overall radio usage was shrinking.
Digital technology is now reaching the point that public radio is facing serious competition for the first time in its history. Station’s new competitors are coming from two sources. First, and most significant, are public radio’s national networks and program producers. Second are the new digital services such as Stitcher, Pandora, and I Heart Radio.
The big public radio networks and program producers are the most significant competition because they are the ones with lots of programming that appeals to and is proven with public radio listeners. Make no mistake about it, every network and program producer has the goal of increasing engagement with every person who visits their web space. Every network and program producer is trying to win one of those 800 to 1,000 listening choices that you currently win.
Winning those listening choices means your button has to be the best button -- whether it is on a radio or a computer or a mobile device or a digital dashboard. At the moment of decision, it has to be better for your listener than NPR.
That might seem impossible, but it’s not. If you’re programming NPR on all of your platforms, then you are offering NPR quality. If the “whole” of your service – national, regional, and local content – is more consistently satisfying to the listener, then you will win most of the draws when a listener must choose between your station and the national competitor.
Making great programming decisions is just one big piece of fighting for your listeners. There’s also striving for flawless execution, effective promotion, and making great use of social media,
Finally, stations will have to fight to keep NPR and other national programs as part of their brand on the web. NPR programs, for example account for up to 67% of all radio listening at stations. Up to 80% of the weekly radio audience’s listen to at least one NPR program each week.
Stations cannot be the best button across all platforms if their best content is not fully available on all platforms. That’s worth fighting for.
Understand Your Audience
There’s a difference between knowing your listeners and understanding your audience,
The listener is an individual who hears the content. Content creators need to understand the qualities of the listener to create compelling content.
Audiences, on the other hand, are groups of listeners whose behavior helps us understand what listeners like about our programs and stations. Understanding audience behavior is central to effectively programming a station. This will be true for digital platforms too.
It is impossible to be the best button without understanding both listeners and audiences.
Understanding audience means expecting high performance out of every program and every daypart. In this new era of real competition, no station can afford to schedule programs that have low levels of audience Loyalty. Low Loyalty means the audience is specifically choosing to avoid your station. It means many, many listeners are choosing to disengage. Programs that have failed to gain decent Loyalty after two years won’t, unless the producer makes significant changes.
Understanding audience means recognizing that most people listen for about 30 minutes per tune-in and they don’t hear a program from beginning, to middle, to end.
Understanding audience means knowing that less than 15% of the weekly audience ever hears a single news report, piece of music, or Car Talk segment on first airing. And the 15% is a peak number. Most of the time less than 10% of the weekly audience hears any one story or piece of music that airs.
Understanding audience means that most of the time listeners choose the competition it is because they are being pushed away rather than pulled away.
Understanding audience means realizing audiences can still be grown even if broadcast radio usage declines. Even our most loyal listeners choose the competition. Stations can still grow by capturing a larger share of the radio usage that remains. People listen to the radio billions of hours each year.
Understanding audience informs strategies that win the listener at the moment of choice. That will deliver robust radio audiences for some time. And winning listeners on the radio will help win listening on the web. It’s a win-win proposition.
Know Your Listeners
Be Important to Your Listeners
Fight for Your Listeners
Understand Your Audience
Be the Best Button.