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See no station; hear no station
How to best use visual publicity to increase your audience awareness and figures!
The most effective form of marketing is word-of-mouth. If you can get your existing listeners to tell their mates about the station it will have a much bigger impact than simply sticking up posters and handing out some stickers.
However, that can often be difficult to organise and can take time - and especially if you've only got a 28 day RSL then getting people to listen will involve some more pro-active marketing. Most commercial stations reckon it takes 18 months to establish themselves in a market; you've got less than a week (there is simply no point in reaching your potential number of listeners on the last day of broadcasting).
What amazes me is the paltry sums stations will often dedicate to marketing. Many times I've seen a station with a pro-spec broadcast studio moan that it has no money for marketing. That is a station with the wrong priorities; marketing is a key ingredient to every station and should be prioritised over everything other than the most basic of studio equipment.
Unfortunately unless you are incredibly wealthy you are not going to be able to buy ad-spots in your local newspaper or run billboard or bus-back campaigns. But posters are pretty much a necessity for any radio station; they establish a physical presence within your TSA and reinforce other marketing you do. Take them round local shops and pubs, schools and colleges, gyms and cinemas, and dependent on your target libraries or nightclubs. Ask people to put them up in homes and offices, and even do some guerrilla tactics by fixing them to lamp-posts and at traffic signs.
Like all marketing the most important element has to be the station frequency - that needs to be easy to spot and big enough to read from far away. But equally your poster can't just simply say the station name and frequency, there has to be a reason given as to why people should tune in to your radio station. Positioning statements can help - but you'll often need more specific reasons.
I'd always avoid negative marketing; that is belittling your competitors. If your radio station is to be thought of as a friend, then people don't want to hang around with friends who go "you should play with me because Fred smells". Yep you can get away with "more great music" or "more local". People react a lot better to positive publicity about how good you are rather that a campaign that suggests you should be listened to only because you are less bad than the competitors.
I'd avoid things like car-stickers, bugs and pens ... how many times do you actually see people driving around with station car stickers in their windows? Bugs and pens are good but they often end up being left at home and so only the person who got hold of them will see them. With a marketing budget you are much better to spend it on getting more of the cheaper stuff; for every one pen you get produced you can probably get close on 50 leaflets.
Leaflets are great to hand out, but bear in mind they've only got two seconds to sell the station and most people will throw them away by the time they hit the nearest bin (and often before). So make sure your frequency is the first thing they see - and the branding which will interest them. Don't put complicated schedules, simply list things as mornings, afternoons, evenings and weekends. Don't use them as an ego-trip for your presenters; I'd always avoid pictures - both mugshots and groupshots and only a sentence about each presenter.
Then go and work places where your target market are likely to be - coming out of the cinema or a concert, shopping on a Saturday morning (go around the car-parks and streets near the town centre and stick a leaflet under all the windscreens), the bus or train station. You can't usually give out stuff on private property without prior permission, but if you haven't got it it's much better simply to turn up and then leave when requested than not bother at all.
Don't put up posters or hand out leaflets until a couple of days before you go on air - and then limit it until you are actually broadcasting. There is nothing worse than seeing a poster, trying the frequency and getting white noise.
And finally - have a decent website. A website allows you to put all the things that none of your other marketing literature can hold; detailed presenter profiles and station pictures; audio and possibly some video. But whilst your website will normally only attract people who have already discovered the station, it still needs to have the core station values and if it looks badly designed and half of it doesn't work it will make people think twice about how good the station really is.