10. 12. 2012
New Ideas for Your Station
I work with a lot of stations in the course of the year and when I look back I find ideas in one region that I can share with stations in another. Here are a few ideas I have picked up during the past few years.
One of the main problems at stations everywhere is motivating and monitoring sales staff to perform better. A station in the Balkans has arranged its sales staff of 10 (4 full time 6 part time, the station has 20 programming staff) into competitive teams. The team leaders are full time and supervise their members who may be either full or part time.
The leaders meet weekly with the General Manager to brainstorm prospects and divide up the potential advertisers. A team has a fixed amount of time to land an account. If it fails it hands its records for that potential advertiser to another team to try to close a deal. Each team can “protect” only one or two potential clients from being taken by another team if it feels it is close to closing. (Or the team leaders can, by agreement, allow a team more time to close a deal.)
Once a month there is a general sales meeting where all of the sales people gather for training, motivation and to share experiences. (The station also arranges longer trainings for its sales staff.) The peer pressure and competition of the team structure enforces discipline on the sales staff. Team leaders set quotas for the number of sales calls each team member must make a week. The weekly and monthly meetings are mandatory and those missing without prior approval are fined.
Each meeting starts on time and ends in exactly one hour. Internally, the teams develop a spirit of cooperation with members helping each other land a sale. Externally they engage in competition with the other teams to land accounts and win incentives. There are individual and group rewards for performance. I was skeptical of this arrangement because I generally prefer a unified sales effort, and can see a lot of problems in this type internal competition. BUT the station has sold ALL of its available advertising time in a really bad market and is now working on promotions and advertiser incentives to enable it to raise its rates. It is now restructuring its prices to give advertiser incentives to go from 60 to 30 second spots so it can increase the number of ad availabilities without increasing the time devoted to advertising.
In Jordan, a new program, Car FM, has helped one station increase listenership and ad sales. Much of the traffic on the streets in Amman is taxicabs, busses and minibuses. Car FM appeals to professional drivers with information about traffic, roads, and specialized news coverage. The program won the ire of municipal officials because it served as a forum for drivers to organize opposition to a new parking scheme downtown. The station has a loyal listenership among professional drivers and provides a target market for advertisers. A further benefit is that people riding in mini busses and taxicabs listen to the station because the drivers control the radio. It gives the station a large number of listeners who sample the station’s music and news and helps drive awareness of the station beyond professional drivers to the general community.
Several hours south, in Mann Jordan, the local station uses printed door hangers to target neighborhoods for promotions. The hangers are a single piece of stiff paper, or cardboard, shaped with a hook on the top. The station prints the station name and frequency and the promotion it is presenting and then sends students out to hang the promotion notice on the door knobs of houses and businesses in the target neighborhood. This is less expensive than using the mail and can target listeners in a particular area for a promotion or a special program. (By the way, the station in Mann has copied the idea of Car FM from the station in Amman and is also having success.)
In Vanadzor, Armenia a station went to all of the mini-marts in town. It bartered advertising in return for the front shelves in each shop. Then it went to national businesses like Noy Mineral Water and Ararat Brandy and told those firms that if they bought time on the station they would get preferred product placement on the shelves closest to the front of the store. With the number of Maxi stores in Serbia I am not sure if this idea will work but it demonstrates how this station looked at helping an advertiser overcome a problem, product placement in stores, to land sales.
In Gyumri, also in Armenia, a station ran a second anniversary promotion with a contest. The station rounded up 26 local merchants. They sold advertisements at a special birthday rate. To celebrate the birthday the station held a concert and tickets went only to listeners who answered questions in an hourly quiz, and the question? “Name three advertisers you heard mentioned during the last hour.” To pick up the tickets, winners had to go to one of the participating advertisers. The station kept records of how many people mentioned each advertisement, that AND the winners going into shops proved that the station could get people into stores. The station made a recording of the concert and offered CDs of the concert to the participating advertisers to use for their own promotions. Of 26 advertisers signed up for the birthday promotion half renewed as regular sponsors.
One final idea comes from a group of Albanian stations. Like many stations in the region, they find greetings programs a good source of income so they have created, in cooperation with an Internet service provider, a combined “on line” and “live on air” worldwide greetings program. They run it late night in Albania when radio listenership is low, but the program runs in radio prime time in the States for those listening on line. Between songs people from the Diaspora greet each other and people back in Albania. The stations do not get paid cash to air the program (the internet company gets the money for the greetings) but they get, in trade, Internet service, a website and 24 hour local station streaming. At least one station found that this program develops a strong enough evening listenership to be saleable during local breaks. That station created a video New Year greeting card (on YouTube) that listeners can send to relatives in the Diaspora. Diaspora members receiving the card are urged to participate directly in the station’s own local greetings program. (This will work better for Serbia when it can use PayPal.)
These are a just a few new ideas I have picked up from stations with whom I have worked over the past few years.
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Rich McClear is a broadcaster from Alaska who has worked for almost 20 years helping stations develop in emerging markets. He was Director of the Serbian Media Assistance Program from 2008-2011.