For years now, we’ve been talking about how radio stations can use a Content Marketing strategy to drive listeners back to their websites. The overall strategy is fairly simple: Create compelling content (blogposts, videos, podcasts, etc.) for your website, then share that content on social networks so people click through and come back to your station’s site.
If the strategy sounds familiar to radio programmers, it should: it’s the same basic principle that’s involved in running a radio station. First, put compelling content (music, DJs, a morning show) on your airwaves, then promote that content on billboards by the highway so people tune in to your radio station.
The challenge, however, is that in the digital version of this strategy, radio stations are at the mercy of the social networks they are sharing their content on. When Facebook tweaks its algorithm, it can have a big impact on the amount of traffic that a station can drive back to its website. Moreover, the social networks are working at cross-purposes to the radio stations: Facebook wants to keep people on Facebook, while stations want to steer people somewhere else.
One way to combat these issues is to use “micro-content.” Micro-Content is smaller bits of content used to engage people and encourage them to check out larger content. A familiar example of micro-content is the tried-and-true radio morning show promo. The morning show promo might sound like this:
Station Voiceover: If you missed Johnny Fever this morning, here’s what you missed…
Johnny Fever: …and then the priest says, “That’s not a duck!”
Les Nessman, Venus Flytrap: AHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Station Voiceover: Johnny Fever. Mornings on WKRP!
The promo takes a short, entertaining clip of the morning show and repurposes it as a short piece of content that the station airs throughout the day. This same tactic can be deployed as part of your radio station’s digital strategy. The only difference is that you’re sharing the micro-content on social media, not just on your airwaves.
For example, here’s an audiogram — a soundbite turned into a video with a static image and a soundwave — from a recent episode of my podcast:
This is, of course, just a morning show promo in video form, which makes it ideal for sharing on social media. (Note that the video is a square to make it ideal for mobile devices.) If you’re looking, it’s easy to find lots of opportunities to carve radio shows up into micro-content: benchmark features, interview clips, concert calendars, contest winners, etc. As you prep your next radio show, look for ways that you can repurpose small pieces of the show as micro-content that can be shared on social media.
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