You may have heard that “daily deals” are dead. Don’t you believe it. In reality, now is the perfect time for radio stations to get in and take back the dollars that are rightfully theirs.
Like Mark Twain’s famous quote in the June 2nd, 1897 New York Journal “The report of my death was an exaggeration”, the death of “deals” as a radio station program is also a gross overstatement. In reality, “Deals” can work extremely well for radio stations when the program is set up correctly. They work well for radio stations simply because they work well for both the station’s clients and listeners. Listeners love a great deal (who doesn’t) and one of the lesser known reasons why radio revenue sharing programs work so well for radio station’s clients is that they are much more than just a proven powerful magnet for new customers. The types of customers they attract are also both unique and exceedingly attractive for merchants. How?
First they are unique by virtue of the content your radio station presents: every radio station features a distinctive and striking music or information mix. As a result, by the very nature of having distinct music or information cohorts as listeners, stations enjoy audiences that are tremendously difficult to reach in any other way for merchants – either over the air or on the internet. Put quite simply, there are a great number of hard to reach people in your audience who would love to hear about a client’s amazing deal!
Further, these are people who have lots of money to spend. They are not the just-out-of-their-teens “cheap bargain hunters” that you might find subscribing to the national daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial. Many radio station’s receptive audiences are adults between the ages of 25 and 54 – the ages most prone to spend lavishly on food, fun and entertainment. For example, when these people go out for dinner they aren’t the type to order just water with their meal like some deal-site users in order to spend the bare minimum the voucher allows – rather they are the types of people that order appetizers, desserts, drinks and wine with their meals.
Even more powerful is the people who subscribe to your radio station’s deals are extremely attractive to merchants because they are by nature, leaders of thought in their “communities” and they are well connected. They are, by their very nature, first in each of their groups to adapt the internet; they are the first to purchase new products and services over the internet and they will be the first to grab fabulous deals like the ones offered by your radio station’s revenue sharing program. These people have tremendous influence over their peers. Malcolm Gladwell described this at length in his best-selling book, “The Tipping Point”
Gladwell said the reason why these types of cutting-edge people are so influential with their peers is based on the 1967 Six Degrees of Separation study by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram distributed letters to 160 students in Nebraska, with instructions that they be sent to a stockbroker in Boston (not personally known to them) by passing the letters to anyone else that they believed to be socially closer to the target. The study found that it took an average of six links to deliver each letter. Of particular interest to Gladwell was the finding that in reality, just three friends of the stockbroker provided the final link for half of the letters that arrived successfully. This demonstrated that certain types of people are crucial to the dissemination of information. They are the very same people that subscribe to a radio station’s revenue sharing program and they can best be categorized as follows:
• Connectors are the people who “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together.” They are “a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack for making friends and acquaintances”. These listeners have large social networks and will connect them all to a great deal like the ones provided on your radio station.
• Mavens are people we rely upon to connect us with new information. They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others. Mavens are those who want to help solve other people’s problems by means of their knowledge, social skills, and ability to communicate. These listeners are the ones to first hear about your radio station’s offering…and then they share the information with their peers.
• Salesmen are people whose uncommon charisma allows them to be extremely persuasive in inducing others’ buying decisions and behaviors. Once these listeners hear about a deal, they “sell” their friends on joining them in the experience.
Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen in today’s wired society accomplish this through social sharing in Twitter, Facebook, email, text messages, good old fashioned telephone calls and now Google Plus. These Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen are the ones that stimulate the deals to go “viral”. And getting a deal to go “viral” means that hordes of your listeners’ friends and peers will be exposed to those merchants featured in your station’s deals.
Lots of hard to reach customers, predisposed to be Connectors, Mavens and Salespeople among their individual personal networks make radio station revenue sharing promotions profoundly potent marketing tools for merchants. The reports of death of these “deals” programs are not only an exaggeration, but for radio stations the opportunity for the extra profits a revenue sharing program provides is very much alive, well and has a superb future.
–Neil Gallagher specializes in developing and operating “Groupon Style” Revenue Sharing Programs for Radio. [email protected].
