Getting Noticed

What business are you in?

Nah.

Okay, partially nah. You're still in the business of generating content, and monetizing it. But defining what you do as "radio" or "podcasting" is missing the point.

You're in the marketing business.

That's because we're in the age of plenty. It's not just radio, or podcasting, it's pretty much everything. There's so much content, so many options, that perhaps your most important job function in 2019 will be to find ways to cut through the clutter and get people to pick you.

It's not so much, as we once thought, about curation. If you're waiting for a magic cure that involves an app or charts or playlists to bring you an audience, that's not how it works, and it's not how things are going to work. Even if the initial numbers aren't impressive, people WILL be getting their audio content via voice commands and voice-controlled devices (which will include your car's dashboard and your phone). They will have to know to ASK for you. How do you get them to do that? Marketing. You have to make people aware of your product, give them reasons to want to consume it, and tell them how to do so. It's not going to matter if you're high up on the Apple Podcasts charts; it's going to involve getting the word out in whatever manner works.

And your competition isn't just other radio streams or podcasts. It's everything, and by that I mean television, online video, ebooks. I mean online shopping, food delivery, work. Everything you can ask for and have delivered to you, digitally or physically. In a world where everything is available for the asking, you have to get people to ask for YOU. Are you prepared for that?

The radio industry, of course, has long prided itself on its marketing prowess. You're going to have to ask yourself, though, whether that to which radio marketing has been reduced -- occasional digital billboards, live events, and the dreaded car dealership interns-under-a-canopy -- will work to break a station out from the pack. It'll be interesting to see if the increased reliance on national branding is a good idea considering that localism has been for generations touted as broadcast radio's strategic advantage; it's one answer to the "there are a dozen 102.7 Kiss FMs out there" problem, but if the answer is just "ask for iHeartRadio" or "ask for Radio.com," getting people to take the second step to ask for the local station, or making people download an individual station skill so they can just directly ask for the station, well, that's a marketing issue.

Podcasting will have an interesting path forward. Marketing is one thing podcast networks can offer that some smaller shows can't do for themselves, but so far, I haven't seen terribly effective marketing coming from those networks. There have been few tried-and-true marketing techniques that HAVE worked for podcasts, one being debuting new shows in the feed of already-successful shows (hello, "Serial"), and the other being finding a particularly lurid true crime story that catches people's attention. Or both. Assuming that not every new podcast is going to be a true crime story, podcasts, individually and via networks, will have to figure out the marketing aspect before the medium starts to achieve the financial success everyone assumes it eventually will.

It's the same for television, maybe more so these days with Netflix flooding the market with "must-binge" shows, and retail, for which everyone other than Amazon has to get the word out about why people should shop with them instead of defaulting to Amazon, and even dinner -- if Postmates and GrubHub and DoorDash are essentially the same and often deliver from the same restaurants, they're going to have to differentiate themselves somehow. Marketing is the key. The bad news is that we're still trying to figure out what works in the new media age (we'll talk about social media and "pivot to video" and other nightmares in another column). The good news is that since nobody, especially most of the people who are now showing up claiming to be experts, really knows what's going to work, we all have a shot at getting it right.

As long as we get away from the parking-lot remote. Interns handing out beer koozies and bumper stickers are so 1980s.

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Now, as for WHAT you're marketing, you have to create content, and, for most of you, that means radio shows and podcasts. And for THAT, you need material. So go to Talk Topics, the show prep column at All Access News-Talk-Sports. That's where you'll find plenty of stuff to talk about that you WON'T find elsewhere. Just click here and/or by following the Talk Topics Twitter feed at @talktopics with every story individually linked to the appropriate item.

Make sure you're subscribed to Today's Talk, the daily email newsletter with the top news stories in News, Talk, and Sports radio and podcasting. You can check off the appropriate boxes in your All Access account profile's Format Preferences and Email Preferences sections if you're not already getting it.

My podcast is "The Evening Bulletin with Perry Michael Simon," a quick (two minutes or less) daily thing, and you can get it at Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Google Play Music, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Stitcher, and RadioPublic. Spotify, too. Google Podcasts? Click here. You can also use the RSS feed and the website where you can listen in your browser, or my own website where they're all embedded, too. And if you have an Amazon Alexa-enabled device, just say "Alexa, play the Evening Bulletin podcast."

You can follow my personal Twitter account at @pmsimon, and my Instagram account (same handle, @pmsimon) as well. And you can find me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pmsimon, and at pmsimon.com.

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Next week, I'm either going to write about social media and measurement and the effect on traditional media, or the best and worst Halloween candy. Or both. Or neither.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
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Twitter @pmsimon
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