We want radio listeners to download our station app. Then what?
One of the ongoing themes so far of What Workers Want, a survey by Strategic Solutions Research in conjunction with Point-to-Point Marketing has been the “critical” need for radio to boost app activation.
One of the key findings of the second in the series of What Workers Want webinars, first presented April 24, is that 38% of listening at an office/worksite is through a phone. And those are the users with whom “local radio” is already strongest.
Only 27% of respondents have a local radio station app on their phone. 25% report having the iHeart Radio app. By comparison, 64% have You Tube, 59% Spotify, 36% Apple Music, and 34% Pandora.
When asked what might compel them to download an app, the motivators for all respondents were:
- Free/No Subscription Fees (32%)
- Win Concert Tickets (24%)
- Win Cash and Prizes (21%)
- Interact with the Personalities at Your Favorite Station (21%)
To hear radio station messaging now is to hear how many stations have already made a priority of spreading the “free” message and encouraging downloads. In November, I asked “How to Make Free Worth Something,” since subscription fatigue has hardly taken down most of our competitors so far.
Promoting the station app has been a challenge for a while, particularly when it alternates with promoting smart speaker usage and other station priorities. Country KRTY San Jose, Calif., did a particularly good job making its device promos stand out. That was three years ago. When KRTY left the FM dial, it had directed enough listening to the app for the station to remain viable, judging from listening figures that leaked out in its first month.
If it is simultaneously true that “we need to promote our app,” “we need to remind people that radio is free,” and “we have been saying both things for years, to the point where it threatens to become white noise,” we need to look at how we share those messages with listeners.
KRTY’s strategy, letting real-sounding listeners (identified by name) share stories, sounded great and proved effective. Beyond that, being able to find hundreds of different ways to sell the app a little differently each time should become as much a part of an on-air host’s skill set as finding different ways to sell “As It Was” or “Calm Down” each time. (By the way, I don’t hear that happening enough either.)
With the “promoting station apps” discussion also comes the question of whether to promote individual station apps or station aggregators, especially when individual station apps had only 2% more reach than iHeart Radio in the at-work listening study.
Station apps are easily understood and, as Strategic’s Hal Rood and Point-to-Point’s Tim Bronsil have noted, they make at-work listening a game of eight potential hours a day (as opposed to the eight-minutes-at-a-time that many broadcasters have resigned themselves to). But they also solve the problem only for one station at a time.
It’s no station’s responsibility to remind listeners that they have other options during a spot break (or “As It Was” or “Calm Down” for the thousandth time). At the same time, a combination of just-enough-choice and ease-of-use has been one of radio’s rapidly diluted strengths. It’s hard to imagine one brand being able to repatriate (or even hold on to) enough listening to keep broadcasting robust enough as a whole.
Asked how a single station app could compete with Spotify’s endless playlist choices, Bronsil and Rood point to the European stations that offer numerous side channels. (I’m looking forward to trying out Fun Radio’s Running channel later today.) But most of that listening wouldn’t count for a North American radio station until they have the capacity to offer an HD-23 channel and encode it for ratings measurement.
It is nice to imagine a new station that creates enough of its own currency through an app that the FM frequency is merely a placeholder. (Or the thing available for free that gets the crossplugs.) Our most recent successful radio launch, Spanish-language Classic Hits WMIA (Magic 93.9) Miami proves that a new station can still become phenomenal. But that station had years of cume waiting to be activated by the right formula.
At the least, it seems like single-station apps should offer access to at least a series of over-the-air sister station. Personally, I’m spending more time than ever with both iHeart Radio and TuneIn in a new car where Android Auto, free for the length of the lease, makes both apps better looking and easier to use than ever.
This is iHeart in my car.
This is TuneIn.
Infinite choice isn’t a likely need for the average listener who doesn’t write about radio for a living. In my car, it hasn’t turned out to be that either. I still find myself gravitating to 2-3 stations—often the top row of choices—unless I make a concerted effort to do otherwise. But the availability of choice is still an attraction for listeners of, say, SiriusXM, who still gravitate to a few different channels. Ultimately, radio’s challenge is reinvigorating both brands and the band.
The final installment of What Workers Want is May 2, 2 p.m. ET. Register here. See full results from the first two webinars here.
