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The Thing Many Radio Station Websites Forget
August 29, 2017
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I tend to look at a lot of radio station websites and newsletters every day as part of my job. This is interesting and head-scratching at the same time.
There's a strange thing about radio newsletters. People sign up to them because, by and large, they're fans of the radio station: at least, they've interacted with the radio station in the past.
A good newsletter offers the chance to grow your time-spent-listening by giving your most loyal listeners the opportunity to try something new. Perhaps there's a good interview next week, a new show starting this weekend, or a best-of clip from something that isn't the breakfast show to help your listeners discover new things about your station to keep them listening? (Better still: can you segment your newsletter based on when they interact with you?)
A good newsletter also offers the chance to make your listeners closer to your station by giving them news and information about the on-air talent. It might be as simple as one of your breakfast hosts has a new haircut; or your mid-morning show host took a nice photo at the local park last week. Your talent is what separates you from Pandora or Spotify, after all; so making the most of their relationship with listeners is important.
Instead, the majority of newsletters I see from a radio station have nothing to do with the radio station. A few paid-for competitions, some showbiz stories that everyone else has. The goal, it seems, is to drum-up some short-term page traffic rather than long-term listening habits. That appears, to me, to be a missed opportunity.
However, here's a bigger missed opportunity.
I discovered a radio station with one of those random names that doesn't communicate that it's a radio station - "The Prime," or "SportsChat," or something like that. I went to visit to find out how to tune in.
Now, sure, this website had a "listen now" button on every page, which opened up a web player. I didn't want that. Specifically, I wanted to find out whether it was on DAB or whether it was on an AM/FM frequency somewhere - you know, the way that delivers over 80% of your TSL. I prodded the website hopefully: but I couldn't find anything.
I then discovered one frequency on a different website. And I idly wondered whether it existed on the radio station's website. You can search through a particular website by typing "site:example.com cheese" into Google, and that'll search for any mention of cheese on that website. Anyway - no, it didn't. The radio station website didn't actually have any frequency on it. Nor - astonishingly - the phrase "radio station."
Chances are, your station is available in many different ways: from an app to a set of AM/FM frequencies, on digital radio in some form, or on other platforms. List them. For this station, I knew none of the ways I could tune in. This seems a tad disappointing.
As a suggestion: your website, and its newsletter, have a primary function of getting people to listen longer to your radio station. By all means, do other things on it. But get the basics right. Frequencies, platforms, apps - if they're not easily visible on your website, you've missed a trick; and make sure your station newsletter actually mentions, you know, the station.
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