As I spoke to station after station last year, it became obvious that just about every staff member, from the on air talent to the promotions coordinators to the program directors, had thoughts about how they could improve their online efforts. Unfortunately, they often have no arena in which to voice these thoughts. At best, these ideas are mentioned in passing in the hallways. At worst, they are never voiced at all.
Your online content deserves as much attention as your on-air programming. So carve out some time on a weekly basis to gather everybody together and review, discuss, and plan your digital strategy.
Who Should Attend
Bring together every staff member who has a stake in the website: your webmaster, anybody who blogs, the promotions department, the appropriate salespeople, etc. If it’s inconvenient for the necessary air staff to physically be in the room, allow them to phone into the meeting or make other arrangements to get the information they need.
Old Business
Start the meeting by reviewing the performance of your website over the last week. Think of this like a music meeting at a radio station that plays records in current rotation. Just as you would spend some time reviewing callout research, sales figures, airplay charts, etc., do the same with your online analytics. Compile Google Analytics, email reports, social media metrics, etc. and put them together in a packet so everybody can review them together.
As you look over the data, ask yourself some questions:
- How many people came to our website?
- Where did they come from (social media, search engines, etc.)?
- Which social networks drove the most traffic?
- Which keywords drove the most traffic from search engines
- What content brought them to the site?
- Which device types (desktop, tablet, mobile) did they use to come to the site?
- What percentage of visitors “bounced” from the site (left without looking at a second page)?
- How many people completed a goal on the site (signed up for the email list, entered a contest, etc.)?
After a few weeks, you will start discover patterns. Perhaps certain topics, such as food, sports, or video games, will perform better than others. Over time, you can use this information to guide your online strategy.
New Business
A Content Marketing strategy will enable you to attract listeners to your website. (This short video explains.) At the heart of this strategy, of course, is content. Use the second half of the weekly meeting to plan what content you will post to the site in the coming week. Again, this is similar to a music meeting, except instead of adding songs, you’ll be adding blogposts, podcasts, or videos.
Decide who’s responsible for adding which content to the site. Is there a promotion that needs to be added to the homepage? Are there concert photos that need to be uploaded? Is there a sporting event that somebody should blog about?
There are two tools that will help you here:
1. A Content Calendar
A Content Calendar is a spreadsheet that helps you dole out web assignments to the staff. Don’t try to keep track of all the blog assignments by email; you’ll waste a lot of time digging through your inbox. Instead, create a Content Calendar as a Google spreadsheet and share it with all of your online content creators. This way, they can log in anytime and quickly see what’s going on with the website.
I have created a Content Calendar template that you can use for your station.
2. A List of Blog Topic Formulas
There’s nothing worse than being told you have to write a blogpost and not knowing what to write about. You can help your staff avoid writer’s block by having a list of sure-fire topics to fall back on, from album reviews to interviews with local celebrities to a list of things to do this weekend.
Here is a list of blog topic formulas. Adapt this list to suit your station’s audience and use it as you fill out the content calendar. This will make it easier for your station to produce content on a regular basis.
You can’t pull together a successful online strategy overnight. It takes a lot of work over an extended period of time. But every journey starts with a single first step. Your first step is to set up weekly website meeting.
Watch Our Webinar
I hosted a webinar on how to run a weekly web meeting.
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