Want More Digital Revenue? Start With the Audience.

I’ve read several stories in the radio trades lately about companies putting more emphasis on digital revenue. That shouldn’t surprise anybody. For quite a while now, the larger broadcasters have been making it clear that they no longer see themselves as companies that own radio stations and happen to have some digital products. Radio is one part of a much larger collection of ways they can reach an audience.

I think most local broadcasters understand where things are headed. The harder question is what you actually do about it.

If someone walked into your station tomorrow and said, “We need to grow our digital revenue,” what would you do first?

Would you train the sales staff? Build better packages? Improve the website? Push the mobile app harder? Start a newsletter? Add video? There are plenty of places to start, and I think that may be part of the reason smaller stations struggle with this. “Grow digital” can quickly turn into a dozen different projects competing for the same limited amount of time.

I’d start somewhere much simpler. Find out how many people you’re reaching now.

If the website is going to become a larger part of the business, you should know how many people visit it, how often they return, what brings them there and what they actually use when they arrive. If the newsletter is going to matter, you should know how many subscribers you have, how quickly that list is growing and whether people are opening it. The same goes for the mobile app, streaming audience and whatever else you eventually want to sell.

Those numbers give you a starting line. More importantly, they change the conversation from “we need to do more digital” to something you can actually work on.

Maybe you discover that the website averages 20,000 visitors a month. Great. Now the goal might be 25,000. What could you add or do differently that would bring another 5,000 people through the door? That leads to conversations about local news, contests, high school sports, weather, events, personalities and all of the other reasons someone might make your website part of their routine.

And I wouldn’t try to tackle everything at once.

Spend a period of time concentrating on website traffic. Establish the numbers, work on the content and watch what moves them. Once you have some momentum there, turn your attention to the newsletter. How do we get more subscribers? What would make the newsletter useful enough that people actually want it? Then move to the mobile app. How many downloads do we have now, and what would give listeners a reason to install it beyond simply listening to the station?

That approach does something else that I think is important: it gives the sales department something real to sell.

There is still a pretty large gap between selling radio and selling digital at many stations. A salesperson who has spent years talking about spots, schedules, reach and frequency can be handed banner ads, sponsored content, newsletters, push notifications and app advertising without ever becoming comfortable explaining why an advertiser should care about any of them.

Before asking sellers to sell those products, I’d make sure they understand them. Not just where the banner goes or how much it costs, but who sees it, why those people are there and what makes that exposure valuable to an advertiser.

That conversation becomes a lot easier when the audience is growing.

Instead of saying, “We have banner ads on our website,” a seller can talk about a local digital audience the station has deliberately built. Instead of throwing a newsletter sponsorship into a package as an extra, they can explain how many local subscribers have specifically asked the station to show up in their inbox. An app sponsorship means more when you understand who has downloaded the app and why they use it.

Once you have those two things working together — a digital audience that is growing and a sales staff that understands its value — then I’d start looking harder at the technology and additional opportunities. Maybe the website needs to do more. Maybe there is an opportunity for video. Maybe a new newsletter makes sense. Maybe there are digital products you haven’t even considered yet.

But adding more things to sell before you have an audience for them doesn’t necessarily move the station very far forward.

Radio has always understood this with the product coming out of the speakers. We work hard to build an audience first because the audience is what gives the commercial inventory its value. Better programming brings more listeners, more listeners make the station more valuable to advertisers, and that gives the sales department a stronger product to take into the market.

I don’t think digital is fundamentally any different.

If digital revenue is the destination, I’d start by measuring the digital audiences you already have. Pick one. Grow it. Learn what makes it grow. Then move to the next one.

Give the sales staff an audience worth selling and make sure they understand why it’s valuable.

The revenue has a much better chance of following.