WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU GET TO #1 Chris Byrnes In a few days the latest ratings will be released. As always there will be some winners and some losers, and a handful of stations may even make it to the coveted number one position for the first time. If that happens to your radio station, do you have a good plan in place? Here are a few areas you might want to consider:
Your Costs Will Increase As hard as it is to get to number #1, it’s even harder to stay there and it all comes at an increased cost. You may have to pay out ratings bonuses, upgrade some staff members who don’t have the skills to operate at the higher altitude or even increase your staff numbers to handle the additional business that comes your way. Look closely at your production and creative departments since these are areas that often come under real pressure when all the orders start flowing in. Your marketing costs may also increase as the station does its best to ensure it stays on top for the next book.
Check the Team Sometimes it’s hard to keep the team motivated and performing at the level you now require. If the staff has been working really hard for months and months to get the station to number one, it can be difficult to keep them at that level, much less get them to further improve. Consider offering appropriate training to upgrade their skills. You may also consider sharing the wealth as a means of motivating the staff, provided the radio station stays at #1 in the following book. Also, you might want to check the employment agreements and decide if you need to renegotiate or modify them in order to protect your investment in the staff. I am not a big fan of using non-compete clauses as a means to prevent your competitor from poaching staff. I think stations that create a fun professional work environment have no trouble with staff retention and loyalty.
The Competition Radio is often its own worst enemy, especially when it comes to competing for advertising buys. Instead of going after newspaper money, which often represents a greater opportunity in most markets, radio stations often fight each other, which can result in a rate war. It becomes even worse when the rank order of the stations changes in a market. Often the other stations will cut rates and even bad mouth the ratings process, and generally try to create a feeling of uncertainty in the market. The other thing to watch for is your competition may try and unsettle your momentum by stealing some of your key staff.
Clean Up the Clutter Often when a station gets to #1 it not only gets overflowed with advertising orders, the station also gets asked to run additional promotions and on-air activity that creates clutter. Too much clutter will impact your time spent listening and in the next book your station may slip back in the ratings. Hopefully, you review the “clutter” problems from time to time and clean up the formatics, the clocks and any redundant announcer chatter. In short, you need to develop specific plans so that both programming and sales know the agreed parameters and not go beyond these limits.
How To Market the Position The old saying “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword” can be applied to the ratings game. The radio station needs to decide ahead of time how it will market its number one position. Do you run ads in the newspaper, buy billboards or get into the direct mail business? There is often a great deal of client distrust in the weeks that follow the ratings release date because so many stations get their variation of number one message out to advertisers that it confuses them. Some make it to number one in TSL, others in cume and then there are all the different age groups and day-parts. You need to develop a plan ahead of time, yet remain flexible enough so you can modify the plan and still achieve your desired goals.
Inventory Control Unless you plan for managing advertising inventory, the station will quickly get into a sold out position. But be careful because the bottom line may not grow at the rate it should. This is because demand quickly exceeds supply, and the station failed to increase the rates as quickly or as often as necessary in order to compensate. So examine the number and length of spot islands and plan ahead to determine the additional units you will run. If both sales and programming get together and closely examine each other’s needs, the end result will be a win-win. Sales no doubt will want to add units, while programming will not want to play fewer songs each hour. I was at a station recently where the owner agreed to increase the programming and marketing budget to allow the PD to put in place some listener benefits in return for higher inventory levels. In effect, the owner gave up some of the profit of the additional units knowing that he was reinvesting in the product.
Watch the Local/Agency Ratios Ad agencies mainly buy on results. If your station reaches the most listeners in a specific demographic or life group you will get most of the buy. While agency business is wonderful and can even make the station sound better, the level of profit per spot is often lower than retail, not only because of the commissions, but also because of the way agencies negotiate the buys. You may find that the agencies use up a lot of your inventory but you are not meeting your budgets. So decide ahead of time what percentage of spots will be sold to agencies and how much they will have to pay. Don’t be afraid to turn down agencies if the price isn’t right. It will make them more eager to pay the right price next time. Additionally, if you are “on a roll”, you’ll get the buys from the higher paying retailers. I know of stations that make more money at number two than number one for this reason.
The Rear View Mirror Examine what it was that helped make the station number one. What strategy and tactics were used to achieve your result? Which of those can and should be retained? Often, a station will immediately adopt a defensive position when hitting the top spot. It’s easy to understand why. While chasing the competition, all eyes are forward and the goal of beating “the other guy” is an obvious and tangible target. Being top dog obviously leaves no one in front, so the natural reaction is to look behind, thus adopting the defensive mindset. I believe it makes more sense to simply keep looking forward and continue to do what got you there. The only one to beat is yourself. It may be less concrete but it’s an exciting challenge to bring to the staff. Stay proactive by looking through the windshield. Don’t be reactive by looking through the rear view mirror.
Conclusion Some of the suggestions above should be applied to your radio station no matter what market you’re in or what position you occupy. We all need to work harder to improve our products.
At Byrnes Media, we make it a priority to help you establish your targets and to use our proven ways to achieve them. If you want to be the best in your market and stay there, let us help you get it done. |