Many radio stations produce big events as a source of non-spot revenue. In fact, according to the RAB, revenue growth for the “Off-Air” category (which includes events) in the first half of 2015 was one of the bright spots for radio — up 11% from the previous year.
Like you, we are also producing a big event this fall. We are gearing up for the third annual DASH Conference on November 4th and 5th is Detroit. This event focuses on radio’s role in the car dashboard. Over half of all radio listening happens in the car and automotive is the top advertising category for radio, yet leaders from these two worlds rarely meet. So we created an event to facilitate conversation between them.
Yet, as you know, sometimes it’s hard to fully convey how cool your station’s event is in a promotional spot or a banner ad. Your team has worked hard to build a concert series, a beer festival, or a job expo, and yet you can’t squeeze enough copy into a liner to fully convey the awesomeness of your event.
Fortunately, the internet allows you to create additional audio content and share it online, even if you don’t broadcast that content over your airwaves. Have some of your staff head into the production studio and record a short conversation about your event. There are a number of different ways to do this:
- Preview the event with an in-depth discussion about what happens there, who goes, where to stay, and other details.
- Interview the artists that will be part of the event.
- Have your on-air talent talk about their favorite moments from last year’s event.
- Have one of your jocks interview the promotions team about the behind-the-scenes preparation for the event.
Once you have the recording, add a short produced introduction and upload it to an audio host like Soundcloud. You can use this interview in a number of places:
- Share it over social media, especially on Facebook.
- Send it out to your email database.
- Embed it in a blogpost.
- Post it to your site and create a vanity url for that page; share this url on the air in produced sweepers and have your airstaff plug it.
- Have the morning show play a clip of the interview and encourage people to listen to the whole thing online.
We used this technique with the DASH Conference. While we can reduce the event to a tagline (“Radio and the Connected Car: A Survival Guide for Radio Broadcasters”), that doesn’t fully convey the depth of the conference. So I sat down Fred and Paul, who have been hard at work putting this event together, and we had a short conversation about why the dashboard is so important to the future of the broadcasting industry. As you can hear, they do a much better job of explaining it than a banner ad ever could:
This was a quick and easy way for us to create content to market the event. You can do the same for your station’s events.
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