Finding new listeners is laudable, important work — and buzzworthy in public radio during recent years — but it’s a terribly inefficient way to build audience.
Making new listeners into regulars is a long haul. It takes significant investments and patience. New listeners are difficult to catch and far more difficult to keep. If you doubt that, think about your last experience with the scan button on your radio. How many stations captured and lost you in a matter of seconds?
While new-listener initiatives pay off over the course of several years, there are audience-building initiatives that can show results in weeks or months, strengthening service to current listeners.
In a review of audience data for a presentation at the Public Radio Program Directors Conference last year, I found three stations that do this superbly. Vermont Public Radio, KUOW in Seattle and WVTF in Roanoke, Va., outperformed their peers in adding to their weekly cume audiences. We’ll look at how they did it in a moment.
From fringe to core
A station’s most efficient means of expanding its audience is to convert fringe listeners into core listeners. A core listener is someone who uses your radio station more than they use any other radio station across a seven-day period. That’s it.
Fringe listeners? They are everyone else. Everyone who isn’t a core listener is a fringe listener.
Core listeners are the backbone of a station. When we talk about providing public service through our programming, core listeners are the “public” we serve best. Yours is their favorite radio station, and they listen to your station more than any other. You entertain and inform them in a way that resonates with their values and beliefs. They consider your station to be an important component in their lives. Just because fringe listeners don’t consider your station their favorite and aren’t as loyal as the core audience doesn’t mean they should be written off. In fact, they are the future of your station.
If core listeners are the health of your station, fringe listeners are your station’s wealth. They’re important because you’ve already gotten them to do something that 90 percent or more of the population in your listening area hasn’t done: listen regularly enough to show up in at least one Arbitron ratings book. Our goal: We want them to tune in more often and listen longer.
Since they already listen to your station, fringe listeners are your easiest target to bring into the core. Many fringe listeners like some of the programming on your station and probably would enjoy more of it. That’s where the programmer comes in.
The programmer can control the conversion of fringe listeners to core listeners, though it’s a lot of work. It requires an honest and dispassionate assessment of just about everything your station puts in front of listeners. While you can’t control when and whether they turn on the radio, you can remove the things about your station that make listening difficult or unappealing.
The task involves the two basic components of a programmer’s job: on the macro level, selecting the station’s format and program schedule, and, on the micro level, working with the station’s staff to make the on-air sound as professional, appealing and listener-focused as possible.
The easiest way to increase listening is on the macro level: getting rid of the programming that listeners aren’t using. It’s really no more complicated than that. There is no shortage of powerful and appealing alternatives, local and national. But don’t always assume that a schedule change is the only answer.
The changes with the biggest potential to grow audience at almost any radio station are microformatic enhancements, and there are several that every station should execute:
Music stations have their own set of microformatic options involving format, music focus, playlist, rotation, host and host presence. News and talk stations have a different list, though with striking similarities: program format, clock, topic selection, guest selection and host and host presence.
What top-growers did
To see the potential of change in these areas, we need look no further than the stations most successful at converting new listeners to core.
During a period of impressive growth in our industry, it isn’t hard to find stations that have grown audiences. It’s the norm. What we really want is not only a larger audience but a more loyal one.
With the help of Audience Research Analysis, I crunched some national numbers last year to see which stations had the greatest percentage growth in their cume audience and in the core portion of their cume audiences. They were Vermont Public Radio, KUOW and WVTF.
Here’s the headline: None of these top audience-growers made wholesale format changes during the four years we examined.
All three had grown within the formats they had at the beginning of the period by devoting themselves to enhancing their listeners’ experiences with their stations. Otherwise, these stations are very different from one another.
One is news/information; the others are news/classical. Each is in a different competitive situation. Two are in markets with nearly ideal demographics for public radio; the other’s primary market is in southern Virginia. Only one is in a major market. All have different governance structures. None is a perfect service, and each has its own problems and opportunities.
All three stations saw large increases in Morning Edition and equally large increases in midday listening. These two dayparts drove all of their growth. Other public radio pillars such as Car Talk, Prairie Home Companion, Fresh Air and even All Things Considered showed no or moderate growth.
| Four years of exceptional audience growth | |||
| Morning Edition | Midday | ATC | |
| KUOW | 98% | 88% | 3% |
| Vermont Public Radio | 72% | 42% | 14% |
| WVTF, Roanoke | 36% | 52% | 9% |
| These public radio stations had the greatest percentage growth in cume and core cume from 1999 to 2003. Above: their audience growth in three dayparts during that period. (Source: Arbitron data crunched by Audience Research Analysis.) | |||
Vermont Public Radio: This network airs a dual format of news and classical music. From 1999 to 2003, VPR not only expanded its cume by 40,000 listeners but increased its listener hours by 51 percent, its Average Quarter Hour listening by 51 percent, total loyalty by 19 percent and total time spent listening by 14 percent.
They did so by thinking broadly about the listeners’ whole experience with VPR and by exploiting the shared traits between music and news audiences. They honed their on-air messages to tell listeners why they should care about—and support—VPR and made all on-air copy meet the same editorial standards. They streamlined their on-air promotion and applied Optimum Effective Scheduling techniques to their promotion campaigns. They also implemented PRPD’s Core Values throughout station programming and educated staff about the reasoning behind changes.
WVTF, Roanoke: This station programs a dual format of NPR news and classical music. Station management saw working on middays as its best chance to grow audience. Over the four years we studied, the station expanded its cume by 27 percent and AQH by 55 percent. WVTF’s total loyalty rose 21 percent.
Management accomplished this by hiring a new Morning Edition host and adding a midday announcer, maintaining consistency in music playlists and explaining to its staff why changes were being made. WVTF sent several staffers to PRPD and Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio workshops and conferences.
When I called General Manager Glenn Gleixner about WVTF’s inclusion in this list, he was surprised that his station ranked so high. “I’m not quite sure what we did to achieve this,” he said. “We just come in every day and focus on the basics of doing great radio. We pay attention to everything that goes out over the air and how it works for the listener.” I don’t think Glenn realized that he answered his own question.
KUOW, Seattle: KUOW is a news/talk station. With intensive work, KUOW expanded its cume by almost 80,000 listeners, increased listener hours by an impressive 67 percent and grew its average quarter-hour listening by 66 percent, its total loyalty by 23 percent and total time spent listening by 25 percent.
The station concentrated on what Program Director Jeff Hansen calls “the standard things.” It established basic promotion strategies, a “reset list” prompting hosts to repeat key information on a regular basis, and distinct identities for local programs, including one-sentence focus statements for individual shows.
You can clearly see some commonalities here. In a blind ranking of our stations with the healthiest growth, it ends up that all were doing primarily the same thing: practicing better radio. These tactics may not account for all of the stations’ success, but it is obvious that these small tweaks and attention to detail, when aggregated, drove a great deal of their growth.
Because we care so deeply about our stations and the public service we provide, we sometimes over-think things and make them more complicated than they actually are. But the simplest solution often leads to success.
Eric Nuzum is program and acquisitions manager at NPR and
a former station p.d. and PRPD Board member. He thanks Leslie Peters of Audience
Research
Analysis for contributing audience data as well as her thoughts to help shape
this article. Stations were evaluated with audience data from 1999 to 2003,
gathered for the 2004 PRPD conference. Watch for details of these stations’ tactics
in a future issue of PRPD NewsWrap.
Web page reposted Oct. 31, 2005
Copyright 2005 by Current Publishing Committee
