Why Your Company Should Start A Radio Station
Engaging with either customers or employees is a challenge for many companies. This guide explains how a company radio station can solve this problem to benefit your business.
What’s a Company Radio Station?
Put simply, a company radio station is where a company broadcasts audio to listeners. This can include speech, music or both. Unlike other types of streaming, what’s played isn’t controlled by the listener. But it is controlled by the radio station, so in this case the company itself.
Online radio stations can be broadcast to anyone with access to the internet or to a limited group of people, like employees at a company.
Who Should Consider Starting a Company Radio Station?
The various benefits company radio stations bring make them a suitable avenue for many businesses. These include:
Businesses Needing In-Store Entertainment
A radio station is ideal for businesses wanting control over in-store music and entertainment. Unlike streaming services, a company radio station can be interspersed with your own business announcements, information and advertisements. These could range from in-store offers to holiday opening times.
With Radio.co features like song tagging, specific playlists can be generated for a specific time of day and with minimal effort. Better yet, all content can be controlled by management. Meaning you won’t have to worry about employees hijacking the station to play their favourite songs.
Companies Needing To Drive Engagement
Sometimes, both customers and employees can be hard to reach. With customers, the challenge is often cutting through the noise. Especially when we’re competing for their attention.
For our employees, working in the same location is no longer the norm. Especially with the advent of remote and hybrid working. Even when employees work at the same site, there’s no guarantee they’ll engage with traditional internal communication.
A company radio station can help overcome these challenges. In both cases, a company radio station can be used to bring value to your customers, staff or both. Having provided value, this will make your audience more open to any messaging you need to convey.
Companies Wanting To Shape Brand Perception
How a brand is perceived can have real implications for a business’ success. So managing your brand perception is an essential part of any marketing strategy. Starting a company radio station can be an effective way to do this, as it provides ample opportunity to convey your brand’s values.
A company radio station can be used to speak directly to a customer’s emotional levers. A company can acknowledge the fears, frustrations, desires and dreams of customers - through the medium of radio. This helps align the brand with their customers and build consumer trust.
In an age where a customer's purchases form part of their identity, they no longer buy from brands but buy into them. Establishing this trust helps consumers buy into your brand and grows your customer base.
How a Company Radio Station Can Help Your Business
Starting an online radio station for your company can have far-reaching benefits for your staff, customers and brand, such as:
Establishing Brand Identity
Through broadcasting their own carefully crafted content, businesses create endless opportunities to convey their brands principles and standards. And these are the foundations of establishing and maintaining a strong brand identity.
On an explicit level, this might range from discussing how the business is adapting to changing times to how they deal with customer queries and problems.
On a more nuanced level, a company can align itself with their radio station hosts, the artists they promote, and the guests they invite on. By leveraging the reputations of these groups, companies can establish their brand through association.
Keeping Staff Informed
Any HR manager knows the pain of being asked basic questions when the information has already been circulated. With an online radio station, you can relay important information throughout the day and keep your employees informed. This could range from a change in company policy to day-to-day housekeeping. This method is an effective means of internal communications, as it’s less time-consuming and disruptive than holding meetings.
Humanising Your CEO
A company radio station can be your hardest working bit of PR. Your employees may know the company is the CEO’s baby, built on hours of graft, but do your customers? For some, corporate terms like CEO is automatically a dirty word. But with the platform of an online radio station, your company has the opportunity to humanise your CEO to your clients.
It can highlight your CEO’s personal beliefs and journey, making them more relatable and likeable. This expression of personal values reflects positively on your company, and fosters a strong brand perception.
Building Closer Connections With Senior Management
The feeling of alienation for employees from senior management can be detrimental to the success of a company. It makes employees more open to finding fault with the company. Be that its product, service, operations or treatment of staff. But this can be circumvented by fostering a healthy and mutually respectful relationship.
Starting a company online radio station gives senior management a platform to connect with their employees. It’s an opportunity to empathize with the various problems staff might face, explain the rationale behind company decisions and direction, celebrate successes and motivate the wider company.
By doing this, senior management can demonstrate they understand, care about and respect their employees. This is the foundation for a good employee-employer relationship, leading to greater productivity as employees feel more invested in their company.
Diversifying Communication Methods
Is there a section of your customer-base or workforce you’re failing to engage with using traditional communication tools? Your methods may be to blame. With communication, it’s never one-size-fits all. So, having diverse methods of communication is the best way to reach the most people. With online radio, your company can engage those that like to listen, rather than read, attend or watch.
Boosting Staff Morale
Staff morale and productivity are linked. But keeping up staff morale when there’s repetitive tasks to be done can be challenging. This is where an online company radio station can help. Online radio stations offer more flexibility to keep things fresh than just streaming music. Inherent to radio stations are different programmes, which switch up styles and formats, as well as track requests and shout outs to keep listeners (staff) engaged.
Interested? Get in touch and speak to one of our radio experts by using the button below.
3 Examples of Successful Company Radio Stations
1. NEXT
NEXT is a UK clothing & lifestyle brand and household name which sells to customers all over the world. Central to their operation is their UK-based distribution warehouse, where 10,000 employees are responsible for picking, packing and driving NEXTs products.
The NEXT Communications and Engagement Manager, Catherine (Flo) McAleese explained the majority of those employees work on the warehouse floor and not at desks, so there was a challenge in communicating with them.
Their internal communications strategy already consisted on internal social media, with 80% employee uptake and weekly newsletters, which 70% of employees read.
So they launched NEXT Radio partly to reach those other employees, as Catherine told us:
Not every [type of] communication is right for everybody. Some people like to read, some people like to listen so radio is just one of those tools.
By diversifying their internal comms and including an internal radio station, they aim to engage the majority of their staff. In fact, NEXT radio is being used to target one group of employees particularly:
“Drivers spend most of their time on their own and when they come into the business it’s for a very short period of time, they’re a very hard group to communicate to. Radio is absolutely perfect.”
To hear from Catherine and the NEXT Radio team themselves, watch the video below.
But for NEXT, the benefits of starting a company radio station hasn’t stopped with diversifying their internal communication. NEXT know their employees, including the challenges they face and the problems they encounter.
As such, they’ve used this knowledge to create a tailor-made mix of entertainment and information, which is broadcast on NEXT Radio through their warehouse. As NEXT Radio presenter Joey explained, this is a more fitting alternative to playing a standard radio station.
“I think when you’re playing commercial stations, it’s just a product that’s [directed] at you. But because we can bring it internally we can make it specifically for our people."
So, NEXT Radio is designed entirely with the NEXT employees in mind.
Songs can be requested and played instantly, if there’s news about the business you want to know you can hear it, whether that be overtime or what’s on for lunch at the canteen.
2. Eurotunnel
Eurotunnel is the company that operates the high-speed trains for vehicles under the English channel. And it launched its company and B2C radio stations, Le Shuttle & Le Shuttle France, last year. Le Shuttle serves those making the trip from England to France and Le Shuttle France serves those making the trip the other way.
The purpose of these twin stations is twofold: Firstly, to provide an effective means of communication with customers and secondly to strengthen the associations of the Eurotunnel brand. Both stations play a blend of popular and positive English or French-centric music, relative to their respective areas. By curating their own playlists, Eurotunnel helps shape their customers' experiences and set the tone of excitement, anticipation and joy of going on holiday.
Given the Eurotunnel trains only offer transportation and toilet facilities, Le Shuttle radio is a low-cost yet effective means of entertainment for customers. By increasing the value customers get from their service, Eurotunnel is helping to secure repeat bookings.
In addition and alongside the music, the stations both play announcements and updates relating to passengers travel. This has proved particularly useful when Eurotunnel have needed to update customers regularly about any delays or problems. For example, when the service was affected by industrial action, passengers turned to Le Shuttle to stay informed. Consequently, Le Shuttle saw a huge jump in listeners from the daily average of a few hundred to over 6,000.
3. DORK
DORK is a music brand covering the best new and established artists. It encompasses a magazine, website, podcast network and crucially, an online radio station. Having been a part of DORK since its inception, the radio station element is an integral part of the DORK brand.
When reviewing and talking about music is at the heart of its brand, logic follows that DORK should have a way of playing that music too. Of course, they could direct users to their playlists on external apps like Spotify or YouTube. But that defies the goal of trying to keep users on your webpage.
Instead, the company uses DORK RADIO to play the songs that the brand endorses. Not only does this keep users on their page for longer, but it helps consolidate them further as a music brand. And their selections represent the music DORK associates with, giving listeners a quick and simple method to see what the brand is about, in just a few short seconds.
How To Create A Company Radio Station
Unfortunately, most countries have restrictions as to who can broadcast over the airwaves which they regulate through licensing. So starting a company radio station that legally broadcasts terrestrially brings with it unnecessary expense and inconvenience. Not to mention, the inevitable geographical restrictions that come from broadcasting terrestrially.
The good news is broadcasting online does away with a need for expensive licencing and can reach your customers or employees, wherever they are.
Working With an Internet Radio Broadcasting Platform
While creating your own online company radio station can bring many benefits to your business, getting started can seem overwhelming. That’s why working with the internet radio broadcasting platform, Radio.co, can help. Radio.co is an all-in-one solution that provides all the tools, software and support needed to create and manage an online radio station.
We offer two services. For companies wanting to take control themselves, we offer a self-managed solution. As well as our powerful but easy-to-use platform and your own custom-built radio apps, we provide initial training, regular catch-ups and prioritized support with our team. You’ll have your own dedicated account manager, who’ll ensure every element of launching and managing your station is easy and streamlined.
Looking for a hands-off approach? We also offer a completely managed solution. Here, we use your business goals to design and build your company radio station from scratch. We’ll create show structures, regularly update music and take care of all editing and scheduling. We’ll also produce fresh content that reflects your brand, with little demands on your time.
And we’ll make sure your company radio station can be heard in the places that count. By providing custom-built radio apps, an Alexa skill and even private podcasting.
To get your free company radio station proposal, get in touch using the button below.
To Wrap Up
From shaping your brand's perception to engaging your employees, starting a company radio station brings advantages to a business that leaders dream of. Many savvy companies are already reaping the benefits of having this powerful platform to connect with their staff and customers alike. If you want yours to be the next one, then reach out to us and discover how Radio.co can help.
