Making Money from Your Loyal Listeners: Part 3 – Proving Your Audience Cannot Be Reached Elsewhere

My two previous posts talked about two common ways to use your audience’s loyalty to capture more advertising dollars. This technique can grow your revenue two ways:

• It can bring new advertisers to your station
• It can cause existing advertisers to perceive a higher value of your precious inventory

The first two techniques (TSL and first preference) are effective in both diary and PPM markets. However, the other two techniques, while available in PPM markets, are more beneficial in diary markets. Because of the amount of incidental listening that PPM captures, it diminishes the effectiveness of these two positioning methods.

Both of these techniques can be used when an advertiser or potential advertiser believes that they can reach your audience using other outlets.

Reverse Duplication

Most users look at duplication as how many of your station’s listeners are also reached by your competitor. In a diary world, many consider 30% duplication to be high. However, that means that the competitor station is missing 70% of your audience.

By using reverse duplication, a smart sales rep can demonstrate that even a direct format competitor misses a large portion of your desirable listeners.

If duplication is a factor with a single station, compare the station’s TSL. If your station has higher TSL, then you are the better choice.

Exclusive Cume

Exclusive cume is the ultimate sign of loyalty. These are listeners who do not tune to any other radio station. In other words, you could buy every other radio station in the market and would still miss these consumers.

Exclusive cume can be expressed as either raw persons or a composition of your total audience. For example, you can say that there are 20,000 consumers (raw persons) who tune only to my radio station, or 20% of my audience (composition) cannot be reached on any other station. Both estimates can be effective to prove that an advertiser needs to use your station to reach their potential consumers.

I cannot stress the importance of documenting the emotional relationship your listeners have with your station. Only then can you get the premium you deserve.