One of the reasons I’m so adamant about on-air personalities creating digital content on a regular basis is because they start out with a huge advantage over everyone else. The terrestrial platform they’ve been given have helped them build up great name recognition, solid social followings, and a relationship with the audience that predisposes that audience to be comfortable with most new things that the on-air talent do. Therefore, the probability of it working is significantly higher than it is for your average person trying to create digital content. Especially if you throw in a little boost budget to get the ball rolling.
It’s ironic, because I tend to get the ‘not a good return on the time invested’ argument from a lot of radio personalities when I’m trying to convince them to do ‘digital stuff’. First off, it’s not nearly the time commitment they initially think it is once they’ve learned to incorporate digital into their prep process and it all works together to ultimately drive more traffic to their on-air shows. Secondly, once they find their groove and figure out what kinds of digital content they’re best at creating, and which platforms to focus on, they begin to develop what I call a digital superpower that allows them to regularly reach lots of people with minimal effort.
Its kind of similar to being a Kardashian on a much smaller scale of course. On-air personalities are local celebrities and, like any celebrity, anything they touch has a better chance of working because of their brand recognition. When I’m mentoring young on-air talent who are new to the business I always counsel them to be careful what they do in their market in their free time because they’re now officially a local celebrity. The downside of that is anytime they screw up they’re likely to make the local news, which generally means they’re out of a job. The upside is, there’s a built-in buzz around anything new they do, whether that’s a blog on the station website, a podcast, regular video content shared on web/social or any side-hustle content creation (Provided the group they work for passes on hosting/promoting/sharing the digital content they want to create.)
When we’re consulting for a group one of our goals is to jumpstart their digital content creation by taking a few things they already do and turning it into regular digital content, creating a few additional original features/benchmarks/programs that translate well to digital and supplying a list of idea starters to the staff. But while everything we do will look professional and well produced, the results from it will ultimately pale in comparison to the results the local content creators are able to get once they’ve been trained and fully buy in on why all of this stuff is so incredibly important. That process may take a few months or a few years depending on a whole multitude of factors, but positioning a group to better compete for today’s listener’s and advertiser’s attention is well worth the wait.
What are your thoughts? Comment below or email me at andy@radiostationconsultant.com.
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