Promotion – hey, it works
I’ll call this my Mark Fuerst post. This graph shows pageviews for our Election 2008 page over the last 30 days, ending yesterday. As with most stations, unfortunately, our Election 2008 page has not had much traction, despite lots of on-air promotion (at least once per hour). Mark pointed this out at IMA’s Public Media Conference in February.
What happened last Friday (the first spike) and this Wednesday (the point farthest right) to cause the spikes? Well, certainly the debates, but our big change was shifting from heavy generic promotion of the election site to heavy specific promotion of what we had to offer.
Generic Promotion: the latest election news, issues in-depth, an interactive map to explore races around the country.
Specific Promotion: watch the video of last night’s debate, fact-check the candidate’s statements, read NPR’s political blogs.
Notice, also, the halo effect on Monday and Tuesday – we had increasing pageviews both days after our typical weekend dropoff. These numbers still aren’t great when you consider that our election coverage is so front-and-center on-air, and it’s something listeners reference quite often.
This isn’t rocket science, of course. We avoid generic promos because they’re never as effective as the specific promos. But this is a nice visual illustration of the just how effective they can be, and a reminder that we have to be as diligent about web promotion as we are about every other kind of promotion we do. It means more time crafting and updating promo copy, but ultimately, it means more people find what we’ve worked so hard to create for them.
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Based on a limited comparison of on-air to online promotions as part of our social media initiatives, I've seen email and online promotions generate significantly more traffic and participation than on-air promotions – even specific ones.
I used to think this was due to an audience demographics problem – on-air listeners were just too old for the web or something. But because of our promotional experiments, I now believe there there is a more interesting difference at work. Different Individuals, regardless of demographic, use station and show websites for two radically different purposes, and it is useless to try and get 'crossover'. The typical radio listener is driven to websites for ways to relate to the radio that they can only do online – the pledge form, online exclusives (e.g. photo bait), schedules, streams, and podcasts. On-air promotions should stick to these value propositions.
In contrast, online users are driven to sites around unique and compelling searchable and linkable content, interactive features, special events and initiatives, and vibrant online community activity. As an industry, we need to get better at the value propositions around the latter if we're to grow online audiences.
Thanks, Keith. All very true.. and the public engagement piece is the important next tier for us. At the moment, we're (in Louisville) on level one, increasing public awareness of our sites, which have had major enhancements in the past 8 months, and in the past have had extremely low numbers. For us, this is where we begin. Others who have already achieved this need to move to the next piece of the puzzle, which you've outlined quite well. We're preparing our public engagement piece, too.
I look forward to checking out your public engagement initiative. I have high expectations!
Thanks, but, like Sarah Palin's handlers, now I need to lower your expectations.