Podcasting and Radio: Finding a Mutually Beneficial Partnership

Brett Johnson [: 00:00:13

Welcome to the Circle Sessions featuring The Circle Of Experts. The Circle Of Experts are Yasmine Robles from Robles Designs, Tonnisha English Amamoo of TJE Communications. And Don The Idea Guy, I'm Brett Johnson from Circle270 MediaPodcast Consultants. Each week, one of our Circle Of Experts joins me to talk about critical aspects of growing your podcast. We focus on marketing, social media monetization, and website design, implementing all of these to make your podcast the best it can be. This week, Don is here with The Circle Of Experts. He possesses creative powers beyond those of mere mortals. Don The Idea Guy rescues those in need of innovative ideas through his brainstorming sessions at Five Buck Brainstorms. Don, thanks for joining me today.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:00:57

Hey, Brett. How's it going?

Brett Johnson [: 00:00:58

Good. We talked in a couple of previous episodes, actually, and I'll put a link to our collection of Don the Idea Guy Circle Sessions, specifically about radio. And I thought it would be a good idea to kind of go a little bit deeper into the radio idea. Now, we brought the radio idea up of a marketing opportunity, maybe even buying airtime to promote your podcast, but the radio station itself, or radio stations that you would deal with itself, I think we need to dig a little bit deeper just because you've had decades of experience with radio. I've had decades of experience with radio, and I think knowing what a podcaster may walk into by contacting a radio station is something to be forewarned. Take the advice. Take the advice.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:01:49

Abandon all hope, ye who enter the FM station.

Brett Johnson [: 00:01:52

Exactly. And that's not to say we're not saying not to do this, but I think it's one of those to know how to approach a radio station, to understand the makeup, to understand the levels of what's inside. Now, this is not the same at every radio station, but be prepared, be forewarned. Caveat mTOR kind of thing.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:02:12

Yeah. The traditional your mileage may vary.

Brett Johnson [: 00:02:15

Yes.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:02:16

I think the easiest doorway to get through at a radio station is the sales door. So I'd reach out to a salesperson. We've both worked on the sales and programming sides, but the sales side is filled with people who are tasked with serving customers. So you can put a salesperson onto a task, and they'll go do it. Hey, why don't you get me information on this? Okay? Let me go back. Let me go get that information. That's what their job is. So the program director, I think, is the thickest wall to try and get through because they're trying to protect the integrity of their programming and the artistic insights and the science behind how they choose the content that will be on the air. I don't want to affect the content they have in their air. I want to buy spots. I want to rent space on their station to turn part of their audience into my audience and then go away I just want to go in, carve out a few new leads, win over a few new listeners and be out before they realize I'm doing something really cool that they should be charging me more for.

Brett Johnson [: 00:03:23

Right. And looking at it, talking to that salesperson. Obviously that salesperson is in that place to make money. So they're either going to make money from you as the podcaster buying time, or you're giving them ideas or help them create ideas to make money off of your concept. Whether it's money off your podcast or the concept of, I want to spotlight this podcast, how can this station make money from it? Whether you make money from it or not, whatever your goal is, whether it's more exposure, then it's more exposure, if you want to make money from this, elvis sales rep is going to take a piece as well too. So the more layers you add, the more difficult it could be. Yeah.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:04:04

The simplest transaction you can have with the radio station is to trade them dollars for time on the air. It's very straightforward. There's little to no oversight to what you're going to talk about in that spot. As long as you're political stuff, that's a different animal. They've got departments and special people to handle that stuff. You can't say things that aren't true, but if you want to promote listeners listening to your podcast, they're not going to blink twice at that. If you're promoting an event that you're doing and you want to have people come out to that event, they're not going to have a problem with that. That's why they rent the airwaves, that's why they sell station spots. So let's kind of dive in and maybe do some examples because if you know what you want out of talking to a radio station audience, it's going to be better. It's going to be easier for you to walk in with a request. Your requests need to be clear. It can be a bit of a circus inside of a radio station. You do have different departments. You have the sales department, you have a programming department. Those are the two primary groups. It's almost like the separation of church and state. The sellers cannot dictate what's going to be on the air as part of programming. And the program side have very little insight into what the advertisers can do and what the sellers can sell on the air to monetize and wrap ads around the content, the programming content that they're producing. So if you go in and go, I got a great idea to do this Moment in Music History spot, I want you guys, I want a DJ to do A Moment in Music History every week and I want to sell a sponsor on it. They may like that idea, but if they hate that idea, it's not going to get it on the air. Now, you could buy a 62nd spot on a radio station and promote this moment in music history. And you can talk about that moment in music history and tell people to listen to your history of music podcast, and there's nothing that the programming guys could do about it, right? So you're accomplishing the same thing. You're talking about music history, and you're promoting your podcast about music history on the air. One involves programming, creating new content, and approving this content to put on the air. And it's something new, so they're going to be afraid of it. They're going to have to cut something else to fit that into it. You're going to have to have one of their DJs agree to do the homework required to report on this moment. There's a bunch of hoops to jump through, and some of them are on fire. Right? But on the sales side, if you just want to promote your music history podcast, you buy a spot and you talk about this moment in music history. You want to hear more about this minute in music history, tune into my podcast for new episodes every week. It sounds like content, it sounds like programming content, but it's promoting your podcast.

Brett Johnson [: 00:06:56

All right?

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:06:57

Makes sense.

Brett Johnson [: 00:06:57

Yes, exactly. Two examples come to mind, and let's go to the two things we were talking about when I was working with you when you were at the local radio station. We were talking about, number one, going back to that idea of that music history content idea you would propose. And here's an idea to think about. And I want the listener to come up with some ideas as they listen to us as well. But if you have a group of podcasts that you work with, or maybe you're co hosting two or three of them, you could actually buy time and promote what's coming up on a podcast or go back to your catalog. Let's talk a little bit about that idea that you put to me.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:07:37

square. To buy this album and: 1000

Brett Johnson [: 00:11:28

Right. And to measure that as you do with social media, do some kind of call to action correct. That even though that listener is probably driving in a car, may not have access, but at least tell them to go somewhere that's easy to remember, to at least know that if your ad campaign is doing some kind of good.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:11:45

Work, yeah, I always think you should introduce some sort of tracking into it. It might be a special discount. Tell us you heard this radio ad and save 10%. A really great example here locally, we used to have a record not a record store, a carpet store, a rug store, where on the radio spot, they would say, ask for Mr. Edwards, and there was no Mr. Edwards. The legend has it there was no Mr. Edwards. But if you came into the store and you asked to speak to Mr. Edwards, they knew you heard their radio spot or their TV spot. So you could do that exact same kind of thing, but offer something exclusive, something very trackable. If you're going to offer that 10% discount on your radio spot, don't offer it on your Facebook page. What we did for the record store is we told people to ask for Jack. Well, Jack's the owner. So if they come in and ask for Jack, that's a really good way to track how they learned about him because they heard his name on the radio. You could ask for people to submit their fun music history fact or the next crime that they want to have featured in your True Crime podcast, or for breath's thing, where you're going to feature upcoming podcasts. You could absolutely say, well, what's your favorite podcast? And maybe we'll feature it on the air. And if people come to a website and they fill that out, that's really good tracking, really good insight into the fact that somebody heard the spot and they came to your website to submit their podcast, that's the only place you were promoting it. So make it something unique that you're tracking. The other thing that worked really well with this music history thing and this idea about the featured podcast is you're going to do it repeatedly, same place, same time every week. Reliably they would come to expect it there on radio. When you're talking to a radio salesperson, they're going to talk to you about reach and frequency. And frequency is the number of times your ad runs, reaches the number of people you reach while it's running. So they want you to spread your ads out all over the radio. That's your best results. You run them in all day parts, and you run them as many times as you can afford, because you're going to reach the broadest audience. That way, if you're going to do this trick that we're talking about where it's one spot in the same place every week, you're going to reach that same audience every week, virtually the same audience. The listeners might be in a drive time, a morning or an afternoon where they know it's a large audience of listeners, but you're going to be in there and you're going to keep hitting the same people over and over and over again. The repetition is there. The frequency won't be there, the reach won't be there, but the repetition will be.

Brett Johnson [: 00:14:19

Right.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:14:19

So there's pluses and minuses.

Brett Johnson [: 00:14:21

Exactly.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:14:22

But one's really affordable and one's really expensive, right?

Brett Johnson [: 00:14:25

Exactly. You have to look at and work with the sales rep. Can you be in that certain hour? Probably an hour, not even a quarter hour piece, as well as maybe even looking at a sponsorship of a fixed position, as in a newscast, weather forecast or something that's going to have a little bit more price tag to it, but it is a guarantee that you're going to be in that time slot you want rather than a whole day part.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:14:45

And still pretty economical. I mean, those sponsored tags of the short stuff that you're talking about with traffic, news, weather, those things are nice, they're simple, they're typically low dough, shorter commitment times. You don't have to sign on for a whole year. Now your message time is more limited. You're talking about 10 seconds, 15 seconds at the most, but it's good, inexpensive spots if you want to be on the air.

Brett Johnson [: 00:15:14

pull that off in the fall of: 2022

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:16:44

Yeah, I think that's a good example of, again, of what you really want out of a partnership with a radio station. There's a lot of work. You put a lot of time and effort into building this event and you brought it to the radio station to say, hey, look, here's how I'm laying it out. I'm bringing in speakers in these different fields. You've got a space here. Is there a way for us to partner on letting me use the space and you promoting it on the air exchange for you having access to the people who are showing up, demonstrating yourself as a resource for these businesses, offering up special advertising packages to the people who attended. If you can give a radio station an opportunity to make $5 off of $1 that you're spending, they could end up giving you $10 in value so they can make money off of it themselves. You're putting a lot more work on yourself because you're going to have to produce something that is worth the radio station investing time and energy in promoting and making it interesting enough that it will attract their audience and it's something that their group can monetize, something that comes to mind. Again, I'll go with true crime podcast. If you're doing some sort of true crime tour, you've got your regular podcast and then at Halloween you're doing a tour of the different famous, infamous crime scenes of historical interest in your city. That could be a cool thing a radio station might have an interest in. Maybe they'll send their DJ to go on the tour to take the tour with you. Or maybe they want to give away space in your tour to listeners who call in during the morning show to win. Maybe they'll have you on and do an interview about what to expect on your tour. But you have to have that tour ready to go and it's got to be really cool and engaging for that to happen. An easier way to associate with an event might be to look at the station's actual promotions and events calendar. One of the local stations here does a series of artisan markets where they bring in artists and vintage vendors and food trucks, and they're promoting that on the air as a station event all summer and fall. And every one of those events they bring 500 or more people out to well, you don't even have to advertise as part of that event. For $50, you can get a booth out at one of their events. That's a great way to ride the coattails of something the station is already doing and getting out in front of them. Now, what would a podcaster do with that booth? Well, you could record a live event depending on what let's say your podcast is about local artists. What a great place to interview local artists at an artist fair, at a marketplace. Maybe you're into collectibles market and you're going to go from booth to booth, talk to the guy who set up the comic book booth, talk to the person who brought in their vinyl collection, talk to the people brought in the vintage clothing. Maybe you do food reviews. Great place to do the food truck reviews that are there. And all the time talking to people local who are milling about and shopping at the market about your podcast. It's also a great place to sell your apparel. In a past episode, we talked about promoting yourself with imprinted promotional products. You've got a really cool T shirt, great place to sell it. Get people to be your billboard for you and they'll pay you $20 for the privilege. So look for events that the station is already doing that you can become a bigger part of as well.

Brett Johnson [: 00:20:16

Yeah. There are still a lot of awe in somebody seeing you as a podcaster at an exhibit booth or a table. It's still pretty amazing. This is not an overdone situation at all. You go out, people are going to stop by going, oh, your podcast, that's cool. I think people are underutilizing these type of events. I agree.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:20:38

And one of the great things that can happen to you as a podcaster is go out there and have somebody go, oh, man, I listen to you. I love your podcast. I know you're here in town. The best thing that can happen to you is somebody comes up and goes, oh, I love podcast, but I've never heard of yours. What a great opportunity for you to talk about your podcast with somebody who said they're interested in podcasting, they love podcasts, and then start talking about your favorite ones. I keep using True Crime, but it's one of the more popular formats. So if somebody's listening to podcasting or listening to True Crime podcast, they're going to come out and go, oh, why listen to this one and this one and this one? I never heard of yours before. What's yours about? And you can go, oh, why listen to those ones too? Matter of fact, that podcast is the one that gave me the idea to launch my own podcast. People who are interested in podcasts talk about podcasts, so it's a great place to make connections.

Brett Johnson [: 00:21:24

It is, definitely. Yeah. So if you have any other thoughts.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:21:31

I will give you my favorite, what I think is the most undervalued time on a radio station.

Brett Johnson [: 00:21:38

Got you.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:21:39

So when people talk about radio, if you know anything about radio at all, you know drive time, right? Morning drive, afternoon drive. It's the biggest audiences, it's the most expensive spots. People are trapped in their cars. They've got nothing else to do. I think a great opportunity because those are all priced accordingly. They've got the biggest audience, so it's got the biggest price tag. But radio stations broadcast 24/7. So there are what's called overnights late night spots and overnight spots. So this is when they have the smallest audience. These are the night owls who are up late and can't sleep or they're working third shift at some place or they're delivering pizzas all night. These are folks who consist of a smaller, but I'd wager even more loyal audience. But the spots are also priced accordingly. These are the cheapest spots that you can buy on the air. So there are some incredible values to be had. And I think if you've got a podcast and I'm going to throw out True Crime again because that's a good one, if you've got a podcast about horror, one of the most popular podcasts out there right now is Lore. Lore is all about creepy horror stories, those short stories, legends, urban myths. If you've got a podcast like that, what better time to run that than at midnight, right? It's like the witching hour. If you've got a podcast about freelancing, if somebody's got a full time job, they're staying up late to work on their projects and they're probably listening to audio while they're doing it. So side hustles, maybe you've got a podcast about Insomnia. I know there's a podcast where the guy does really dull kind of speaking to try and get you to go to sleep. And maybe it's the AMSR stop, I don't know. But those would be great spots to run in overnight. So think about it. Would that work? If you've got a horror movie review podcast, late night spots, you could get a spot for like $5 on overnights. You could buy out overnights for $50. You could own all the spots overnights. So there are some great deals to be had there and task your radio salesperson, call them up and go, I got little money. What's the cheapest spots I can buy? And see what they come back with. And if it makes sense, experiment. But as Brett said earlier, put some pieces in place to track. Make sure you've got some things in there that you'll be able to determine your ROI tell your radio salesperson that you're going to be tracking. So do they have any ideas of what they could be doing to help you track your results too? A lot of them are using new technology now that something I thought was really cool was they can give you a report that can show you when your spots ran and what the traffic to your website was when your spots ran so that you can look at your historical information. Go, why? I never got traffic to my website after midnight before, but I've been running these late night spots on the radio station. All of a sudden I got traffic coming to my website. It's definitely worth that. So track everything. You never know what story you're going to be able to tell from it, but if you don't track it, you'll always be wondering. Try and determine an ROI. You want to make sure it makes sense.

Brett Johnson [: 00:24:54

as most purchases are made at: 02:00

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:25:35

See, there's a reason infomercials buy late night television.

Brett Johnson [: 00:25:40

, $: 7500

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:26:01

u could advertise at three or: 04:00

Brett Johnson [: 00:26:51

ing to do news programming at: 04:00

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:27:04

They'Re getting up, they're getting on the treadmill, they're turning on the TV and on the treadmill for the first 30 minutes of their day. So people could be listening to your podcast, people could be listening to the radio. I listen to audio when I get up, so I'm listening to radio exactly. Playlist.

Brett Johnson [: 00:27:17

Yeah. Good. Well, if you have any questions, any comments, any thoughts you want to ask more of, don. Don, how can they get a hold of you.

Don The Idea Guy [: 00:27:25

The best place to find me is on virtually any social media the username is at Don The Idea Guy. Or you could find me at www.fiveBUCKBrainstorms.com.

Brett Johnson [: 00:27:33

Good. You'd catch me at www.mypodcastguy.com. And thanks for following and subscribing to The Circle Sessions from Circle270Media Podcast Consultants.