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Google My Radio Station

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Tuesdays With Coleman

When it comes to building, managing, and protecting their brand identities, radio stations rightfully tend to focus on the most important thing—the on-air product. The reputation management services help one manage and get a peek into how many stations are represented in the digital space indicates some areas of opportunity, both in brand management and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

One easy step stations can take is to simply search for variations of the station name in Google. Use the street name, call letters, and city.  Is the station represented the way it should be?

The title tag is the headline that grabs the attention of the user. Does the title tag show the correct name and the message you want to send? For example, does the title tag indicate your station plays rock music…when you’re a talk station?

A meta description is the text underneath the title tag that follows each search listing. Are you populating this with key features you want the user to remember (music, personalities, contesting), or are you allowing Google to populate this for you?

There are character limits for both the title tag and meta descriptions. Google generally displays the first 50-60 characters of the title tag, and they increased the meta description limit to 300 characters in December, 2017. Exceed the character limit, and you could fall victim to the dreaded “…” before the end of the sentence.

There are free tools available like the Title Tag Preview Tool on Moz.com.  The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is one of a number of tools that can help you easily navigate character limits, see previews on search engines, and assist with keyword optimization.

Is your station utilizing Google My Business (GMB)?

If not, you may be at the mercy of what Google shows in that expanded box to the right of the search results. Here, Google often pulls information from Wikipedia (which, as you know, is always correct) and Google Images – which can (and often does) show old station logos. These can include old positioning statements or even pre-format flip station names. Setting up a Google My Business account allows you to control that content, and can help you organically improve your SEO (read: free!). Radio stations have some distinct advantages that can be used to their advantage in GMB.

  • Images. Google likes when businesses upload lots of photos to their GMB page to “personalize” the company. Many businesses struggle with this. “How many photos can we upload of our boring office?”  Radio stations can give listeners a virtual behind-the-scenes tour.  How many pictures do you have of the lobby, studios, concerts, and remotes? How about highlighting pictures of important artists at the station or backstage standing in front of the logo?

These photos can be a great digital “teaser” to get more visitors to your landing page and can help your SEO efforts. 360 degree tours has even become a business in and of itself.

  • Reviews. When a listener utilizes Google Maps for directions to your station, they’ll see reviews from other listeners. How about encouraging listeners to write a review when you see them picking up a prize or when they stop by a remote?

Here’s an example of a florist in Raleigh, NC that is utilizing GMB. Notice how they’ve got reviews and photos to grab your attention, as well as business information. The box on the right is the length of about nine search listings. Many radio stations, without a proper GMB listing, get a brief description of about three or four listings.

Google My Business

Microsoft also has a free product available, called “Bing Places for Business”.   Here you can also set up a free account to better optimize your search results on Bing.

Radio stations are local businesses with large numbers of customers who utilize their product. If other local businesses are successfully using Google My Business, radio stations should as well.

We encourage our client stations to follow the tenets of the Image Pyramid – and to take great care that their brand is represented properly.

There’s no reason why that this shouldn’t be extended to all branding in the digital space.

Blog

Is Inside Thinking Blurring Your Strategic Vision?

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Tuesdays With Coleman

If you work at a radio station (or in any business, for that matter), it’s easy to get caught up in Inside Thinking. We sometimes get too close to the product for our own good, and are unable to see it through the lens of our customers. When you’re the manager of a radio station, this can lead to blurred strategic vision, exemplified by statements such as, “We just need to know what’s most popular with 25- to 39-year old men because that is our target.”

Is that really enough?

This is the final installment of a four-part series that revisits a Radio & Records column I wrote in 1999. It describes scenarios I ran into when speaking with radio station managers about research projects. All of these scenarios, including Scenario 4 – No Strategic Vision, still come up with regularity 18 years later.

The inability of some managers to look at their stations from any other perspective than from inside the stations’ walls manifests itself in Inside Thinking. These managers believe that listeners:

  • Care deeply about radio
  • Are paying close attention to our stations
  • Can be manipulated

Conversely, Outside Thinkers believe the opposite. They understand that listeners’ station choices are:

  • Driven substantially by habit
  • A result of instantaneous need fulfillment
  • Based on a simplistic set of perceptions they have of different stations
  • Impacted by the role of language
  • Determined by their lifestyle

This very different mindset leads Outside Thinkers to approach research with a much more strategic point of view rather than simply trying to find out what listeners do and do not like. They use research to ask questions like:

  • What is my station’s awareness level in the market?
  • How different is my actual product and what people perceive my product to be?
  • Where do the musical tastes of my market really lie and are they moving in the direction that I believe they are?
  • Does the fact that my target demo share dropped by 25% over the last two Nielsen books really mean that my position in the market has weakened?
  • Am I focusing my energy and my resources on the right things?

Our suggestion that radio managers take the Outside Thinking approach to their stations—and their research—provides a good final thought for this four-part blog series. Our previous installments warned against obsessing over methodology, not investing in research when your station is successful and confusing tactical and strategic research. Outside Thinkers rarely make these mistakes, and as a result, their stations are far more likely to enjoy long-term success.