With many forms of entertainment available nowadays, radio stations are still popular with a significant segment of the population. If your radio station has a big enough listener base, you can get more money from advertisements and sponsorships. To grow your listener base, you need to create a big audience first which needs the application of good marketing principles. The radio station marketing ideas given here can provide a vital action plan for growing the audience of your radio station.
1) Represent Your Online Presence with a Website
The nucleus of your entire online marketing strategy will be your website. So create your radio station website and put out your best features. With a website, you can effectively disseminate crucial updates and information. By having a website, you get more freedom to collect the email addresses and phone numbers of your site visitors through opt-in forms that you can use later to promote new shows and updates.
2) Be Found on Online Searches for Radio Stations
Whether you are operating a local-level radio station or a larger regional radio station, the name of your radio station should get found on Google (top 10 results) when people search for local or regional radio stations. Since SEO (search engine optimization) is the core determining factor behind the ranking of sites in Google, so get your SEO handled well, either by learning it yourself or by utilizing the services of any SEO agency.
3) Announce and Promote Through Press Releases
Digital marketing agencies utilize press release marketing for their clients in several ways. One of the ways is to compile a list of several low-competition keywords followed by putting optimized press releases for such keywords so that each of these press releases individually ranks on Google and can bring traffic to the concerned business. These press releases are also a great source for building the brand value of a business/service by getting the business/service name on sites of reputed stature (like news sites). These factors signify the importance of press release marketing and your radio station too should make use of it.
4) Promote Your Radio Station via Google Ads
Though free and inexpensive ways to promote your radio station online are a great start, paid ads on quality networks can seriously quicken the process of growing your radio station. Google ads is the most successful network in providing high-quality traffic and is therefore also the most competitive one. If you know how to optimize Google ads, you can quickly grow new listeners, or in case you don’t know the Google ads optimization and operation, a third-party agency can handle that for you.
5) Grow the Social Media Fanbase of Your Radio Station
With social media marketing, even though the results are not quick enough, the results are long-term and consistent once a business reaches a stage where they enjoy a fan following of at least a few thousand people on such platforms. Further, social media presence also aids in the SEO of your official business website and thereby helps to secure more visitors from organic ranking in search engines. The only thing to take note of while promoting on social media is that your radio station business must aim to make connections first by sharing quality content regularly as aggressive promotional content seldomly gives good results on social media.
6) Take Help from Your LinkedIn Profile
With your LinkedIn profile, you can find other local radio station owners and can pitch the proposal of cross-promotion to grow mutually. This process will work well for collaboration with new radio stations. You can also use your LinkedIn profile to connect with popular professionals from your city/town so that you can get their interviews on your radio station and can add more listeners.
7) Get Influencers to Announce Your Radio Station
Depending on the reach you want to get, you can accordingly use local or national-level social media influencers to get your radio station marketing done through them. You can also announce a contest for the followers of the respective influencers to get more participation from them. For good results from this method, the demography and niche of the influencers must be a close match with your radio station.
8) Actively Make Use of Trends
Follow the latest trending things on social media, especially at the local level, and get shows made for the same. As trending topics are quick in catching attention, shows made on such topics can generate new audience faster. For the best results, select those topics that are in tune with your target audience.
9) Grow Using Inputs from the Audience
Remain active in seeking ideas for new programs through your current audience. This process will enable you to get many ideas that you might not have thought of yourself. This can also grow the range of new programs on your radio station which will add more listeners to your radio station.
10) Good Interviews Can Bring More Audience
Start interviewing prominent personalities, businessmen, influencers, etc from your city/town along with asking them to announce the interview schedule beforehand on their social media profiles. This will make their followers tune in to your radio channel. Announce repeat telecasts of such prominent interviews to attract more people who might have missed out on the earlier show.
11) Cover Local Events, Get Extra Promotion
When you start covering local events, fairs, etc taking place in your area, you can get benefits in two ways. Firstly, the popularity of events itself will drive some listeners. Secondly, by asking the event organizers to announce (on their social media) coverage by your radio station, your radio station will get extra publicity.
12) Make Use of Local Upcoming Talents
Identify upcoming talents in different fields from your area and get them interviewed on your radio station. Upcoming talents are easy to approach and convince for interviews and social promotion. As these people will also share their interview details on their social media, your radio station will get promoted by default.
13) Grow Using Competitor Radio Station
Successful local radio stations have already put in the hard work to create a good schedule of shows. So be active in learning the best from your competing radio stations. Start noticing the kind of programs broadcasted by them and copy the basic idea of their top-performing shows. With careful observation, you can easily get many ideas.
14) Create a Local Utility to Grow Your Radio Station
Get an app created for delivering local news and get it uploaded to popular play stores. With more downloads of the app, your radio store will get promoted along with your app bringing more business to you through ads and other monetization methods.
15) Start Submitting to Radio Directories
Get your radio station details submitted to various radio directories so as to bring more visibility and growth to your radio station. By doing a search on Google for radio directories, you can come across many good ones like TuneIn, Streema, etc. Additionally, these submissions will also get you backlinks to your radio station website.
16) Increase the Frequency of Popular Shows
A very easy way to add extra audience to your radio station is by increasing the frequency of the popular shows on your radio station. For example, you can extend the show timing, or can get the show 2 times a day instead of the present one time.
17) Get New Audience with Social Media Contests
Run local social media contests and start collecting email and mobile numbers through such contests. Once you have these details, you can start promoting your radio station and its prime program to them through email marketing and sms marketing. By possessing these details, you can hold new social media contests very easily by promoting to them.
18) Host Targeted Events to Grow Business
Depending on your ideal audience demographic, you can host offline events to get local people to attend such events. As your radio station will be the host or a key sponsor, you can get many new listeners to your radio station through such events.
19) Reward Audience Daily, Get Publicity
Tie up with a few local businesses who will (in exchange for getting them promoted) sponsor daily rewards to your audience. At a certain time schedule daily, ask questions related to your shows, and select a few winners daily. This process will make more people tune in to your radio station, thereby increasing your listeners.
20) Give Voice to Audience for Participation
Announce on your radio station that you will be running the messages of some of your listeners daily and they can leave their messages on your website and social media. When people will get a voice through your radio station, your radio station will get more people attracted to it.
21) Do Free publicity of NGOs, Charity, etc
Many people are associated with NGOs, charities, etc and when you give them free publicity through your radio station, your radio station can get freely promoted to their group members and people associated with and served by them. With this strategy, you can also get your radio station name featured on their site and social media pages.
22) Witness Growth Through Podcast Directories
Turn popular interviews and shows from your radio station into podcasts and start sharing them on podcast directories. This method will start bringing more people to your radio station.
23) Traditional Marketing Still Holds Relevance
Businesses and services around the world have been getting new customers through offline marketing for centuries. Though costly compared to online marketing, ads seen offline are perceived more genuine than online ads. Another advantage of offline advertising is that your ads are not shown alongside with many others as it happens mostly in online advertising. If you want to get more listeners to your radio station through offline advertising, then some of the traditional methods you can consider are ads in local newspapers, billboard advertising, distributing flyers/brochures in malls/busy streets, etc.
After grasping these radio station marketing ideas, you are fully empowered to take the correct strategic steps to start growing your radio station audience. After going through these ideas, if you feel unclear on any point, ask us in the comment box below. Share this article on social media and we will consider it as a gesture of appreciation 😀
