Congratulations On Your Promotion

Every week or so I read a post that makes me want to stand up and applaud. Here’s this week’s entry.

All-news radio station WTOP in Washington, D.C. helped Mark Brill propose to his bride-to-be, Phyllis Liebman. Ms. Liebman was conned into listening to the station at precisely the time it broadcast Brill’s marriage proposal (which Ms. Liebman accepted). It’s a great bit of promotion: plenty of human interest; eminently shareable through social media and the standard PR channels; total cost zero.

Promotion has been a part of radio since the days of Top 40. What began with DJs mentioning a station’s call letters and slogan every three minutes has morphed into contests, event sponsorships, ticket giveaways and nearly anything else a station can do to drill its call letters into the public consciousness.

And the Slogans Just Keep On Coming

Why do they do it?

Because it works. It raises a station’s visibility, help listeners distinguish it from competitors in the market, extends average listening times and creates a hook on which to hang word-of-mouth buzz. It also costs a heck of a lot of money, even though some prizes can be paid for in trade. At some point, in every promotion, real money has to change hands.

Are You Ready for Your Promotion?

As podcasters, we’re limited in the type of promotions we can run. Unless you’re very well off you’re not going to be giving away vacations to China or $10,000 in cash. It’s hard enough for most of us to budget in t-shirts and caps. Although we can’t duplicate radio station promotional tactics we can incorporate their strategy. We can use promotions to garner attention, create buzz and make us more memorable. Here’s a simple promotion almost any podcaster can pull off.

The Chase is On

If you’ve never heard of Chase’s Calendar of Events, it’s time you did. The book contains what its name suggests: list of events—promotional, political and historical—for every day, week and month of the year. You can buy a copy, but if you visit their website you’ll find this list of monthly events available for free. That’s more than enough for our purposes.

Pick a topic for a podcast. Film, pop culture, cars, technology, finance, business advice. Now, pick a month. October. Among other things, October is American Cheese Month (you can read about it here). Think of three ways you could put cheese-related content in a podcast…without sounding cheesy. (Full Disclosure: I’ve given up apologizing for my puns.) For example, if you do a film-related podcast, find a film about cheese or one shot in Wisconsin; talk about a start-up company in the cheese business or something closely related; interview the owner of a cheese store for an interesting story about marketing, managing or some other business-related topic; interview Green Bay Packers fans. If you’re in the podcast business you’re already more creative than most people. It’s not hard to come up with a plausible—and unexpected—connection if you flex your creative muscles.

Cheese Whiz

Now you can tag your social media content with the appropriate hashtag for whatever event you’re piggy-backing on. This opens up your content to a new group of listeners, ones that may not habitually usually see your tweets, posts or pictures. You can send information to the sponsoring organization (the American Cheese Society in the case of American Cheese Month). It might not do any good…but then, again, if you don’t try it definitely won’t do any good. Besides, that kind of messaging costs you nothing.

I’m sure, given a little brainstorming time, you can come up with promotional tie-ins that won’t cost you a dime and will provide visibility to potential listeners who will find your podcast content interesting (cheese eaters also watch movies, seek out financial advice, take vitamin supplements and buy technology products).

Go For It

One secret to successful promotion is remembering that enough is never enough. Contact the sponsoring organization and see if its executive officer will give you an interview about financial topics; see if one of the organization’s members has a good story about starting a business; ask if someone working at the organization has the reputation of being a film buff, and ask that person to review a film for you. You can be pretty sure that if you score something like that, the organization will put the information out via its social media channels.

It’s easy to do, and it costs you nothing out of pocket. You expand your potential listener pool and earn a reputation as a podcaster who does things differently.

That’s worth a promotion.