MStique Marketing... Reaching Women One At A Time

Mood and Marketing

A Vacuum Sweeper For My Birthday?

 Right now, as a country, we’re all in a bad mood. And why not? Gas prices through the roof. Food prices through the roof. Stock market in the toilet. Someone you know, or maybe even you, on the brink of losing your home.

 Now, after reading that, don’t you feel like jumping off the roof? And that is my point. What we say and do on-air affects our listener’s moods. And just like the character of Debbie Downer on SNL, who wants to hang out with someone who makes you feel bad?

 Social scientists have been studying mood for years. It is something we all know instinctually, but sometimes we don’t use that knowledge in our work. Think about it, don’t you naturally gravitate to people who make you laugh at a party? And don’t you always avoid that person who has a black cloud over them all the time?

 A recent study of college students demonstrates this principal. A very dry passage about sociology was recorded two ways, one by someone who sounded happy and one by someone who was dry and boring. Those who listened to the passage from the happy recording felt their mood lift; those with the boring recording were more depressed after hearing their version. Same boring material but the presentation made a huge difference in how the participants felt afterwards.

 How does this translate to marketing? Let’s look at our industry wide fascination with gas cards. Everywhere I go, a radio station is giving away gas cards, jocks complaining all the time how much it cost to fill up their tank. Yes, we all are getting hit at the pump, but how does giving away gas cards really translate to bonding with your listeners? I contend that it doesn’t. It is the equivalent of giving your wife a vacuum sweeper for her birthday. Or if you are a wife, RECEIVING a vacuum sweeper for your birthday. You might need it, but you don’t want it and it does nothing to make you feel better.

 Contrast that to the stations I hear that are doing things that make you feel better. One of my long-term clients is giving away a family vacation everyday. The jocks visit the places they go and broadcast live from the resort. It is presented as a great relaxing getaway and even if you can’t go on the trip, it is really fun on the air.

 What would make you feel better? Thinking about $4.00 gas or lounging on the beach with a margarita in hand in Cancun? Call me crazy, but I prefer the beach.

 So before you jump into a big gas card promotion, think about it. How does that really change your listeners’ mood? Does that make you the guy at the party everyone wants to stand by or are you just Debbie Downer with a gas card to giveaway?

 Next time, we’ll talk about things that can change mood, for the good!

 

 

Three Ideas To Connect With Your Audience

Becoming connected to your listener. What does that really mean? That was a question that I was asked by a young programmer the other day. This is a young man who is probably a wiz with Selector and is good with the technical parts of his job, but really had no understanding that radio is more about emotion that great rotations.

His comments reminded me of a great chef who doesn’t understand that customer service from the wait staff, the ambience of the restaurant and the “feeling” his diners had during dinner were just as important as the food. When your main target is women, you must connect to win.

 So how do you do that, connect that is? That was his next question. And here are some ideas I shared with him on connection:

 Women are natural connectors themselves. They are verbal communicators. They talk among their friends and co-workers about their lives, purchasing decisions and life changing decisions they are making. They build different “communities” and use those communities for support and entertainment. Women are the caretakers of the family and therefore are very concerned about health, the environment and pocketbook issues. Women own almost half of all businesses in this country. 50% of women are single. Throw out the “woman driving her two kids to school” model of your listener and really understand what women are doing.

 Build your brand around becoming part of their real lives.

 This is the example I used to illustrate my point to him. 

1 in 9 women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime. Almost every family is made up of a survivor. And almost everyone knows someone who didn’t survive. This is a topic that is important to women, especially those over 35. October is Breast Cancer Month. Start thinking now how your station can become involved on an active level and make this a real cause in your marketing. Use emotion to create the picture.

 

• Invite listeners to submit their stories about survival on your website. Then use some of their stories, in the listener’s own words as promos to promote mammograms.

 

• Create a page on your website that listeners may visit to “donate” for a program of free mammograms for those without insurance. You can sell this program to various advertisers who then get hot links on the page. The “donation” is actually a dollar per visit or click provided by you and the clients you sell the program to. This creates incentive to visit your site and is great exposure and PR for clients who are targeting women also. Cause marketing works with women.

 

• Breast cancer is tied to health issues. Create a series of lunches with a Women’s Health Specialist and sell tickets to the events. I attended one last week that was a huge success. There were participating sponsors who all had purchased booths and had time before and after the lunch to market their services from plastic surgery to financial services. And the keynote speaker, a leading women’s wellness doctor provided great information. She took questions after the lunch for over a half an hour and finally had to cut off questions to catch her plane. The women in this audience could not get enough from her. It was a fabulous connecting event for the sponsoring station.

So to simply answer the young programmer’s question, connecting is not about giving away gas cards or playing Beat the Bomb. It’s about understanding what the women in your audience are feeling, doing and talking about, and then getting involved.

 

What are my “communities” talking about now? Things like WII Fit, the Sex in the City movie, cheap vacations, green issues and losing weight.  And the opportunities to connect by joining those conversation are endless. 

Corn In a Bag?

I recently had the pleasure of having lunch with Kim Lavine, owner and President of Green Daisy. Kim is a remarkable woman. She took a simple idea and became a self made millionaire in just over 4 years. Her idea? To sew corn kernels into a cloth bag that you can put in the microwave. That doesn’t sound very exciting or appealing does it? 

But what if I told you Kim created a beautiful product that when heated, became a warm and moist spa treatment to help relax your tired back? The packaging was made from beautiful material and the scent was wonderful, like lavender and vanilla? It sells for $25 dollars at upscale department stores like Saks and Parisian. And her product has a name that says nothing about the ingredients, it’s called a Wuvit. I hope you would say “how brilliant!” 

What can we learn from Kim? Kim’s marketing mantra is “Don’t say something when you can make them feel something. The surest way to a consumers’ wallet is through their heart, not their head.” It’s a reminder we all can use when marketing our product to women. What are you saying to your audience? Are you talking about ingredients such as artists, number of songs in a row or lite rock and less talk? Or are you selling your station through emotion? If you’re selling corn in a bag, you’re missing the boat. 

Ingredients are not a brand. Creating a brand for your radio station is developing an entire marketing strategy that focuses on how you want your listener to feel when they turn on your station. What is the overall mood? When your listeners see you out and about, how do you look? Does your printed material convey the same feeling? And how are you taking that mood and making your website reflect the strategy? Is your email communication consistent? 

This type of marketing does not require lots of money. It only requires a commitment to understand your audience, then appeal to them as a product, not a list of ingredients. Are you a warm and moist spa treatment or corn in the bag? Think about it.

What If We Thought More Like Martha?

I’d like you to ask yourself a question and please answer it before you read on. If someone who never heard your radio station would ask you to describe your station, what would you say? Think about your answer, don’t cheat and skip forward until you have that conversation in your head.

How many of you described your station using a list of the type of artists you play or by a certain female demo? In asking this question to many programmers and marketing directors recently, most used those types of examples to create the picture of their station.

Now, think about this. Do you think the two top female media brands use those types of descriptors when talking about their brands? Does Oprah say I have a TV show that appeals to women and we do shows about health, celebrities and self improvement? Or does Martha Stewart say I have a magazine that does articles on cooking, gardening and crafts? I don’t think so.

What would happen if we changed our thought process and quit thinking like radio people and really adapted to the changing media landscape? That is, what if we began thinking of ourselves as a women’s entertainment brand? Just like Oprah used her TV show and Martha used her magazine, we used our radio station as the anchor.
But then we developed all of our media channels to become a true women’s entertainment brand?

Oprah has the TV show, but she also has the off channel shows, O the magazine, the website and all kinds of other community and charity involvement. Martha has the magazine, TV, radio, books and retail tie-ins with countless marketing opportunities. Neither woman ever limited their thinking to one channel, but instead, they are constantly thinking of ways to use all media to drive the brand. The brand is what connects with women, not the channel it’s delivered on.

In order for radio to survive and thrive, perhaps an adjustment in our thinking is required. Instead of relying on playing the same 700 songs over and over again, maybe we should begin thinking more about what goes in between the songs. Maybe we should begin to think about the total entertainment and connection experience. And just maybe we should realize that if we don’t begin to expand the experience we give our listeners, the amount of time they spend with us will continue to decline.

Radio is still too much of a one way communication channel. We put out the message and hope someone cares. But, if we begin to expand the content and create ways for our audience to connect and communicate with us, we can begin to be a brand that women look to as a total experience. Not just a place to find their favorite songs.
And we can begin to reclaim the revenue that leaving traditional media and going to new media. We have to embrace change and let us work for us, reinvent ourselves to make sure that as a business we continue to be relevant.

If you want to talk about the future and how to make your radio station into a brand, not just a tune machine, give us a call.

Is That A Cow On My Plate?

Why is it that we all think we possess this magic power to understand what others want? That we can use our own experiences to project our wants and needs on to others and then expect them to be correct assumptions? As humans, it is a mistake I see over and over again.

Let me relate a story from a luncheon I recently attended. This might seem like an “Oh Duh” moment to some of you, but it happens in radio more than we would all like to admit.

I belong to a business women’s networking group in the town I live in. It is a group of women from bank presidents to small business owners. We get together once a month to share successes and help each other network and solve problems. It is a great group. And this month’s luncheon was held at a very nice restaurant in a very nice hotel.

So imagine this. There are about 100 women sitting at their tables when they begin serving lunch. And on the plate are 3 stalks of asparagus, a mound of mashed potatoes and a piece of roast beef the size of a softball. What a great lunch for the construction guys working out front. But this was so far off target for this group… it was all they talked about for the rest of the luncheon.

Comments ranged from “there’s a whole cow on my plate” to “now I‘ll need to nap at my desk.” Plate after plate went back to the kitchen with most of the roast beef still sitting there. If the chef had a dog, they are having a huge doggie day.

And in the kitchen, I could see the young chef looking at the plates in wonder. Wondering if it was not good, did he mis-season the beef and what is wrong with his fabulous mashed potatoes. When actually, everything tasted great. But the choice was so off target and he just didn’t see it coming. He was so used to doing lunch for the Rotary and golf groups that he projected their likes onto our group too. And believe me, this group will probably not choose his restaurant again for our luncheons.

You may be thinking, what an obvious mistake. But I see it happen in radio all the time. We project our likes onto those we want to listen without any basis other than it’s worked in the past. Or worse yet, I like that so I assume everyone else does too.

I recently heard just a mistake. A smaller market female based CHR who’s devoting a huge amount of airtime giving away baseball tickets to a major league team’s games. Not a home team but a team that is over 200 miles away.

They are doing remotes from bars during day games, giving out baseball scores on the air and acting like they are all excited about the team. But because the tickets were free (their AM runs the games) and the owner thinks it’s a good idea, that is what they are doing. If they would have asked 20 18-30 year old women if they wanted to win baseball tickets, tickets that required them to spend another $150 on gas and parking just to use them, what do you think the answer would be? But someone projected their desires on a group that they do not come close to identifying with and then will wonder why it doesn’t work.

Once again, it might seem obvious. But think about how you make marketing decisions. Do you project, guess and ask the Magic 8 Ball, or do you really know? You wouldn’t think about playing a song in power rotation without the data to back it up. But we do it with marketing everyday. Need some help that doesn’t include the Magic 8 Ball? Give us a call.

3.7 trillion dollars! Wait until I see my VISA bill.

It is not just your imagination. Women control 80% of all consumer spending. 80%! That’s 3.7 TRILLION dollars. Women are the primary household decision makers, making 95% of household decisions. To further break it down, they make 70% of all travel decisions, 57% of all consumer electronic decisions and buy 50% of all new cars. They are by all definitions, the purchasing agents for the world.

If your radio station is targeting the female audience… join a huge crowd that is vying for their attention. Virtually every television network has an interactive channel aimed just at women. Martha Stewart has just kicked off a shopping portal to offer her huge female consumer base to other “like minded” retailers. Last week, Yahoo launched a women focused site called Shine. Yahoo said that advertisers were asking them for more ways to reach women. The women audience is the power audience… but are you really embracing that power?

Many times I will discuss a marketing strategy with a program director or general manager and they will balk at making their strategy focused strictly to women. They always ask “But what about the men in our audience?” To which I reply, “Who cares?” How many rock stations worry about the women in their audience? And if women control the purse strings, that is who your advertisers want to reach. So who cares if 25% of your audience is men? They really don’t matter if you are a female-targeted radio station.

ESPN knows that. They created a whole network aimed at men. They super serve them with everything you might ever need to know about sports. They offer many ways for you to interact with them from fantasy leagues, online NCAA pools, branded products, cross channel marketing like ESPN The Magazine and superior programming. And their sales materials? They only talk about their men ratings. No mention of women.

Using the ESPN model, take a moment and look at your radio station. How is your positioning? What about your visual image? Your logo? Your website design? What are you doing to be interactive with your audience? What are you doing to connect? And most importantly, how are you positioning your valuable female-based audience to your advertisers? How are you offering those listeners to them? Best Buy has changed their whole advertising focus to appeal to women. Instead of talking about 55” TVs or how many speakers you can hook up to your home theater, they are showing families being together watching that big TV.
Next time, we’ll look at some real world examples of how to use your radio station to deliver that 3.7 TRILLION dollar audience. And if you have a great story to tell, let us know. We love to share ideas.

Who's The Best Trend Spotter?

Emerging trends. Some people are just born with the sixth sense of spotting them before they are trends. It’s an ability to take the pulse of your audience and know what they are thinking before they really think it. One of the best is Oprah. She has hit a nerve with her new show The Big Give. I am seeing it in other research, but Oprah saw it months ago. When people are feeling anxious or unsure about the future, they feel better when they can help other people. And what a great way for you to connect with your audience! It’s an idea that can create great buzz and word of mouth for your station.

The idea? Just focus on making someone happy. Sometimes as radio marketers, we get so focused on getting people to listen for x number of quarter hours or playing games with recall that we forget a basic marketing principal. Make people love your product and they will tell their friends, family and co-workers. And the number one way that women connect with new products? Word of mouth, they trust their peer’s recommendations.

So, how can you create that buzz by making someone happy? It’s really not that hard. Instead of giving away $100 every hour, create a concept of making people’s day. For example, send your morning show out on the town with a credit card and a business card that say’s We Just Wanted To Make Your Day. Have them pay for people’s gas, their lunch or their groceries. Do it randomly and get a buzz going about when and where they might be that day. Believe me, if your morning show steps up and pays for my $65.00 tank of gas, I am going to tell everyone I know.

Get involved with your community. Don’t just talk about a charity event, get involved and get your hands dirty. Over half of all women volunteer for some charitable cause every year and 70% donate money. Most women have a favorite charity and it is their favorite because of an emotional tie such as breast cancer or an animal cause. Connect with those women by helping them support their cause. Instead of giving away $1000 a day, give away $500 and another $500 to their favorite charity.

To create word of mouth buzz about your station, you must do things that emotionally connect with your listener. What does your station stand for? What are you doing everyday to be relevant in your listeners’ world? If you are not part of your listeners’ conversations, you are not part of their sphere of influence. You cannot buy buzz, you must create it.

Need help creating some buzz? Give us a call!

MStique Marketing For Women
888-707-4441

Direct Mail... The Top Ten Reasons It Still Works

It’s a question we hear over and over again… “Does direct mail still work?” Never mind that your mailbox is still full of direct mail from leading marketers like Best Buy, American Express and the airlines. Radio in general seems to be attracted to what is shiny and new. If we did it once, we have to do something new… an attitude that has caused many a marketer to fail.

Yes… direct mail still works and in fact, is still one of the best ways to reach radio listeners. So here is my Top Ten of Direct Mail.

10) The cost per impression is still very inexpensive. The average direct mail campaign MStique Marketing produced last fall cost around $.40 each.

9) With virtually everyone you know on the Do Not Call list, telemarketing has become the equivalent of sticking bamboo shoots under your listeners’ fingernails… that is the ones you can actually reach. With direct mail, you can reach almost anyone and they won’t scream at you for interrupting their dinner or busy day at work.

8) Unlike TV, direct mail can be used for multiple strategies from brand building to creating direct interaction such as visiting your website and listening to the station at certain times… also known as appointment setting.

7) Direct mail is tangible. One quick view of a well designed direct mail piece can give potential listeners a snapshot of your station. And instead of being distracted during your TV spot, or even more likely, surfing to see what is on Food Network, direct mail hangs around. It is not 30 seconds and gone.

6) Direct mail has an open rate of 80%, according to the latest information from the Direct Marketing Association. It provides great response recall in virtually all media studies.

5) Direct mail offers direct response. Through sending listeners to join your listener club online or an old-fashioned snail mail reply card, you then have a tangible body to add to your direct marketing response strategy. And we all know, it is much easier to get more listening from someone who has already found your station.

4) E-marketing is cheap, but it has limitations. The average e-mail campaign has around a 40% open rate. That is half of what direct mail can produce for you. And with email… if you do not have a relationship with that person, it is spam. Purchased email lists are almost worthless for radio.

3) Targetability. Using your database, MStique Marketing can create a targeted mailing list that resembles your current listeners by demo and lifestyle. There is no other form of marketing that has more ways to accurately target your potential listener. TV and billboard are full of waste, more people miss your message than see it. More people could care less than think it appeals to them. With direct mail, you can limit that waste.

2) Measurability. You cannot accurately measure return on investment with TV or outdoor. TV has ratings, but with over 40% of people channel surfing during your spot, how do you really know who is seeing it? Traffic counts on billboards only tell you who drove by, they have no way of telling you who saw your board and turned on your station. But with direct mail, you have a call to action that shows immediate response. For client after client, we see web registration go through the roof as soon as the mailer lands in listeners’ mailboxes.

1) Tight budgets require efficiency. With direct mail you can reach everyone you need to reach much more economically than any other medium. (Except your own air of course.) And with direct mail, you know who you reached and if they responded. That is efficient ROI all the way around.

Help... My bottle of Tums is empty!

I was talking to a marketing director the other day who was so overwhelmed that she didn’t know which way to turn. And it was a situation I have seen more frequently lately, corporate pressure to do more, no increase in budget and no increase in staff. We spent a good half hour on the phone talking about all the things she wanted to do, changes in the way she should be marketing her radio station and how the basic principals of marketing to our consumers needs to change. As the conversation progressed I could hear her giving up. Her words to me were, “I can’t get everything I need to do now done, so how can I even begin to do more?”

The more we talked, the answer started to become clear. It wasn’t that she needed to so much more, it was that she needed to stop doing many things that she had “always done.” When looking over her typical week, it was full of events and appearances that really weren’t that productive. She didn’t have a true marketing plan, it was really just a budget. And most importantly, the station’s marketing team was still using the “let’s do everything and see what works” planning method. Be everywhere, give away everything, spend a big chunk of our marketing budget on television and let’s hope that something works. No wonder she had a huge bottle of Tums on her desk.

That type of marketing worked for many radio stations in the past, but it is not going to work in the future. And it is really not working today. Why? Because there are too many choices and too many media channels. If radio doesn’t start making better connections and stickier relationships, we are going to suffer from the same problem TV is trying to hide from right now. Our individual piece of the pie is going to continue shrinking to the point that advertisers will not need us. Just as our listeners have many choices, so do our advertisers.

So what is that overwhelmed, Tums popping marketing director to do? She is going to learn to become a real marketing director, not just a radio marketing director, but a brand managing marketing guru. And the first step is going to be evaluating how she is really spending her time and assign an ROI figure to that time. Secondly, she is going to do the same with all of their current marketing plans and also assign an ROI number to those. Anything that isn’t positively bringing something to the bottom line is going to be gone.

And thirdly, we are going to help her develop an honest to goodness real marketing strategy based on today’s marketing principals that focus on the tools available along with understanding what really makes her radio station connect with her listeners. We will help her create channels of communication that are not just one way communication coming out of the speakers, but two way communications that make her listeners feel connected to the station.

And that television budget? We will have recommendations for that too. The latest study by BIGresearch shows that 41.2% of people channel surf during TV commercials. The ROI on TV spots for radio stations is usually not worth the money. As we discussed with her, just imagine if you took that money from the budget and used it to actually connect with your listener?

Put on your dream cap for a moment and imagine a radio station/online media channel that provided a way for your listeners to become connected to the station through listener conversations via blogs or message boards, listener provided content, real listener feedback to understand their wants and needs, highly focused events that appealed to specific niche groups in your audience and revenue generating opportunities that put listeners who want to buy together with advertisers who have just what they need.

The other thing the BIGreseach study confirmed is that media multitasking is continuing to grow. No one does just one thing anymore. One of the most popular combinations continues to be listening to the radio and going online. So instead of making your website just a rehash of what is on the radio… make it entertaining, create content that your listeners will find entertaining and fun and create enough value in your site that they keep coming back. Don’t look at other radio sites for guidance, look at social networking sites that are interactive and provide great content. IVillage.com, GirlfriendsCafe.com and Facebook all provide great ideas. Martha Stewart is just getting ready to kick off a social site on MarketingVox. Connect, connect, connect. That is the future of marketing. So put away the Tums and reinvent your station’s marketing. Tomorrow’s success depends on what you start today.

No Marketing Boners in 08!

Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

In December, we featured 8 tips to help you in your quest to connect with the women in your audience. I want to thank everyone who responded and shared your stories of success and some really good bloopers. If you missed 8 Tips to Marketing To Women, don’t worry... just scroll down and you'll find them.

So we thought we’d start the New Year off with the flip side, some common mistakes marketers make that can actually scream “turn off” to the females in your audience. So read carefully and we’d love to hear if you’ve made any of these mistakes and how you’ve turned it around!

1) Going Overboard With Unauthentic Drama
Do you remember the Yoplait ads where a couple of women were sitting around talking about Yoplait yogurt like it was the greatest thing on earth? They didn’t work because they were so unauthentic. No one does that. The product was too center stage, and no matter how much you like Yoplait, you don’t sit around and talk about it like you’re talking about the date you had last Saturday night. But I’ve seen radio do this many times too. Promos and TV spots where fake listeners talk about just how much they love their station. It is unauthentic and it does nothing to connect with the listener.

2) Being Insincere and Offensive
Focus on what is important to the women in your audience but make sure the message is authentic. I cannot tell you how many times I hear a male on air personalities making fun of a woman’s size or weight in a mean spirited way. Over 60% of all women struggle with their weight. So believe me… some guy doing middays on your station making fun of Brittney or J-Lo’s rear end is not funny to most women. How can Carson Kressley get overweight women to work with him on his show How To Look Good Naked? He does it with compassion and gentle humor. Know women’s hot buttons, but pay attention to their soft spots too. As a generalization, mean does not work.

3) Avoid Sappiness
It is really easy to go too far. Before doing an emotional TV spot or get too warm and fuzzy, do some testing. You do not want to create an “eye roller.”

4) Don’t Be So Noisy
Women’s senses are sharp and they use them all when absorbing a situation. Listen to your station’s promos. Are they really loud and in your face? Just because you are the loudest or the boldest doesn’t mean you’re being heard. Don’t be loud, be different. Don’t be loud, be real.

5) Understand Women’s Life Stages
There are many differences in the way women filter information based on where they are in their life stage cycle. Understand life stages and know where your audience falls in those stages. Your radio station must stay in sync with the way women think and live. If you are an 18-34 targeted CHR, the women in your audience are at a much different stage in their life than a soft AC audience. If most of your audience is younger, if they have children, they are younger children. So your promotions and marketing must appeal to those life stages. For example, a woman with younger children would probably find it very difficult to go on a week’s vacation without their children. Chances are they don’t have a baby sitter or the extra money it takes to eat and enjoy the trip. You will have better results doing promotions that make that audience’s life easier. Promotions like shopping sprees, purse giveaways and spa treatments all have appeal to younger females. However, older women will jump at the chance to get away for a week. They don’t have the child problem and they have a lot more disposable income.

So know your audience’s life stages and promote accordingly. (If you need more information on life stages, visit www.mstiquemarketing.com)

Create emotion by offering things that they can’t get themselves. Women who are mothers and worried about providing for their children cannot justify buying a $500 purse. Find what they covet but can’t afford, then give it to them. Women love to be pampered, but by the time they care for everyone else, they usually end up sacrificing for themselves. You can create great emotion by connecting with your audience in that way. Take away the guilt and give them what they want, but won’t give to themselves.

Understanding your audience’s life stages is not hard. By using your database, you can gain a great deal of information quickly and inexpensively. If you need help understanding how life stages work and how you can better connect with your audience, let MStique Marketing show you how!