Most radio stations have a database, but few know what to do with it. In our media world of shrinking budgets and increased pressure, actively managing one-to-one listener relationships often takes a back seat. But stations can and should make the audience database a high leverage weapon to dominate the ratings battle.
Stations often tell me they have a database, then proudly announce how many listeners are in it. But they don’t know where, when or how most of them joined.
Most of the time, they’ve never even scrubbed the list to remove dead emails. And they can’t tell you how many are actively engaged with the station. But they know that top-line number.
That’s like bragging about how many likes you have on Facebook but never communicating with the audience! As marketing wizard Seth Godin says:
If your Facebook page has 600,000 people following it, you don’t have 600,000 fans. Those are 600,000 people entertaining themselves by watching you type. Not fans. True fans actually use your product.
It’s the same with the database. If you’re not actively communicating, it’s not a database. It’s just names on a list.
