The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year...?

It's the most wonderful time of the year for many radio stations as Christmas and holiday music starts to fill the airwaves. However, those who may dominate the dairy or PPM ratings with feel good songs for the season are leaving themselves exposed in the social and search arena.

Here's how:

Just pull up a Google browser and look at a combination of keywords and phrases around Christmas songs, holiday music, or simply the holiday in general for your market.

For example, "Christmas Songs" receives over 1,000,000 local monthly searches. But in my test of some major markets with big-time Christmas/holiday stations, not one single one even showed up on the first page of results with organic or paid search.

So you may dominate the airwaves, but when someone has a moment of deciding to search for a solution to put them in the holiday mood, you are invisible.

You know who is there in many markets?

Christmas Music Radio
www.pandora.com
Christmas Music You'll Love -
Listen to Personalized Radio -Free

Christmas Songs
www.slacker.com
Slacker Plays Your Favorite
Holiday Music. Listen Now For Free.

The classic strategy of beating a leader is to find a weakness to expose and exploit. Social and search is an area that others can do this to you around holiday music right now.

I know you will see a possibility for you, whether its as the leader of Christmas songs, or someone looking to use the strategy to break-in to the category for themselves.

Everything matters.

To truly be the Christmas or holiday leader, you need an integrated experience, not just around the music, but also the moments it activates during the holiday season. It happens beyond just the airwaves and can drive ratings, revenue, likes, and much more for a wonderful holiday season.