In the 2023 media landscape, it’s not enough for broadcasters to be just broadcasters anymore. The most successful companies in the industry are reaching beyond their airwaves to find other ways to convert their highly valuable audiences into other businesses. If your company is doing this, congratulations! If you’re not, time to start brainstorming how you can grow your business beyond your broadcast.
The best opportunities are frequently in the digital realm (especially mobile, but also web) as that is the best way to find your audience where they’re already spending a huge amount of time (almost 4 hours a day on mobile!). But there could also be opportunities IRL (in real life) worthy of exploring.
The key thing is to leverage your strengths and build off your basic brand promise. That is, if you’re a sports brand, start there. If you’ve got a strong news presence, work with that. You should also look within your station for smaller sub-brands, popular features, or personalities who have something special to offer that can be extended into other areas. If you have a great foodie on staff, build a restaurant guide around them. If you have a strong sports presence, maybe go beyond the local pro teams and go deep on high school sports.
Look for what author Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From) calls the adjacent possible. It’s hard enough to extend your brand into other areas and build good businesses, but it makes no sense to start from square one. Look for your advantages and find the “hill” that you can own.
One area that most broadcasters have a strong advantage in is local. There’s no point in competing with deep-pocketed major national brands, but if you lean into your local presence, local knowledge and local awareness, you have a great place to start. As other local information providers – especially newspapers – decline, this opens the door for smart, aggressive broadcasters to “fill the hole.”
One area that we’ve seen clients have success in is local directories. These information sources provide massive opportunities to leverage your brand in creative ways. One of our Wisconsin clients, Mid-West Family, has done an outstanding job with local event directories, a guide to black-owned businesses, and other on-brand aggregations of data and content that provide their audiences with something that is a real utility. Other clients have done bar and restaurant guides, guides to local religious schools and churches (perfect for religious broadcasters) and other creative implementations. These directory concepts don’t have to be year-round projects, they can just as easily be seasonal or holiday themed.
Another opportunity lies around news and sports. If you’re a major news outlet in your market, you can easily create a web or mobile application that gives your audience a regular, reliable, and on-demand news source with a focus on the stories and issues in your local region. A site/app like this can present the news in whatever format makes sense – text, audio, video. Similarly, on the sports side, it’s easy to create powerful fan apps, especially if you have local high school and college sports scenes that aren’t adequately covered elsewhere. You might also try business news or agricultural news, whatever best leverages your local market and your station’s brands and personalities.
These kinds of elements are great sources of new revenue. Such narrowly focused content initiatives are very appealing to endemic sponsors who will pay a premium to “own” them, thus avoiding the usual digital CPM traps. We recommend really looking for opportunities to partner with potential sponsors. Let them help you create the concept, give them “naming” rights, and make it truly a long-lasting partnership. In fact, in looking for these types of opportunities, start with your best clients and see what you might partner with them on. Bringing your creativity to them will really cement the relationship and make them feel special (because, let’s face it, they are).
They also provide an excellent way to digitize your audience and begin collecting the kind of first party data that can be incredibly valuable both for your advertisers and your own marketing efforts.
With some creativity and collaboration across your company – from content to sales to marketing – you can create all new digital properties that can be sources of new, high-value revenue.
Feel free to call us to talk about your ideas.
Bob Kernen is COO of jacapps
The WBA Digital Hotline is a free service of the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association.
