Grow Your Online Radio Station with Video Marketing

Video marketing has become more popular in the past decade with platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and even on Facebook, but how can you use it to increase your radio listeners? We show you exactly how you can use video marketing to grow your online radio station with these key principles by using Radio.co as a case study.

A Complete Toolset for Today's Broadcaster

What is Radio.co? Well it's an online radio platform that makes it easy for anyone to start their own internet radio station.

You can schedule playlists, invite live DJs to broadcast, and create your own customisable web players. It's essentially a set of tools that makes it incredibly simple to manage and grow your radio station.

Radio.co launched just over a year ago and we have around 2,000+ active stations who broadcaster to more than 35 million listeners all around the world.

Since launch, we've worked with people like Unicef on the Radio Everyone project. We've created a radio station for Julian Casablanca's Cult Records. We've also worked with an increasing number of bars, restaurants, retail chains, and hotels.

Blogs, Videos, Podcasts...

On a day-to-day basis we produce a lot of different types of content such as

• Webinars
• Blog Posts
• Videos
• Tutorials
• Training Courses
• Podcasts

One of the most affective ways we find engaging with customers is through videos.

Creating Value for Broadcasters

The video below shows just how important it is to produce value from your content, as mentioned in the Be a Better Radio Presenter Course.

Now this organic content sits alongside the paid content channels that we also use. We would say that it roughly brings in around 50% of our new leads each month.

However we can't stress this enough that the most important thing when it comes to creating organic content is to really try and create as much value possible for your customers (or in your case for your listeners!).

If you're really into running your own radio station then you'll know that there's not an awful lot of useful information out there. Describing Radio.co's content strategy and the way we position ourselves is that we're a bit like video marketing platform Wistia, but for audio. We provide as much value to our content as possible like Wistia.

Is Your Radio Station an Authority?

It's not just about selling the product to people, it's about creating a brand that can act as authority.

As a broadcaster this is also something you should be doing. Look to position your radio station as the authority in your chosen area. Whether that's music genres like rock, punk, JPOP, etc, or talk like political, educational, and trends.

Without Radio.co Starting Your Station is Hard

Traditionally setting up a radio station is not an easy thing to do. If you've ever tried it before you'll now there's a lot of different hurdles.

Now with Radio.co the major benefits people is that it's an all-in-one platform, so you don't need to think about how you're going to hook up your live broadcasting software to your play out system to your streaming server, it's all done for you.

This really acts as a starting point for a lot of the content we produce. We might create a technical guide which shows you how to setup your studio or what microphone you should be using for your radio station.

On the flip side to that we might produce some marketing collateral which will show you how to grow your listeners or monetize your radio station like we show below.

Radio is About Your Passion & Knowledge

Typically someone that wants to start a radio station has a passion that they want to share with the world. It's our job at Radio.co to help you achieve that goal.

Why is This Video so Popular with Broadcasters?

Take a look at the following video:

If you compare this video to the "How to Find Content for You Radio Station" video above, you'll notice that there's no real production values.

However despite this lack of production value this one short video clip has brought Radio.co more customers than any of our other videos. Let's have a look at what's here because we think it's interesting on a few different levels.

Welcome to The Golden Age of Radio

Now if you're into radio then the video's audio is something that you'll instantly recognise.

It's something that we've all heard before, but we've not necessarily seen how these things are made. In that respect it gives customers a behind the scenes look into something that they're really passionate about.

We run this video on Facebook adverts, it's converted more customers than probably any other video that we've produced.

Tell Great Stories Your Listeners Care About

It's interesting, the video was shot very quickly on a mobile and it actually doesn't have the same production values that our videos normally have.

It goes to show that if you create things your listeners are into then the production value itself doesn't always necessarily matter.

Build Your Community

The most important thing is to try to listen to what your customers are saying.

Ask them questions and respond. Use this information to inform your content strategy. Ultimately what you're trying to do is build community, whether selling radio software like Radio.co or running a radio station yourself.

Plan Your Content Based on Listener Feedback

Each month at Radio.co, the sales, marketing, and support team sit down together and we go through all the questions that customers have submitted to us. We then use this to inform the content that we're going to produce.

The great thing about this approach is that it allows us to create incredibly focused content based on actual problems clients or potential clients are trying to overcome. For instance, we got asked repeatedly about how to broadcast music and talk radio at the same time, so we crafted some content on how to Broadcast All Audio from Your Computer.

Now obviously the likelihood is that if there's one 1 potential customer out there having this issue then there are going to be other people online that will also find this content useful. What we're doing is creating stories that help customers overcome the hurdles that they're facing.

Repurpose Your Content

Radio.co is used by an awful lot of different types of customers. It could be a record label, someone that's passionate about music or a certain talk topic, or it could be a bar, restaurant, or hotel chain.

More often then not we'll produce 1 piece of content that will be cross applicable to different types of customers. For example, if we were to produce a guide which tells you how to hook Radio.co into your speaker system then that would work if you're managing a bar, restaurant, hotel, gym, or even an educational establishment that's looking to create a campus radio station.

Likewise if we create a guide which shows you how to put your stream behind a paywall, then this is going to be useful to a whole different range of customers like publishers, podcasters, and record labels.

Ask Questions, Craft Content, & Grow Your Online Radio Station

Ultimately the more you talk to your listeners (or in our case our customers) then the easier it is to identify the problems that they're facing which in turn makes it easier to craft content that they're either going to find useful or interesting.

The more you do this, the higher chance you've got to grow your online radio station.

If you'd like to try Radio.co then head on over to try.radio.co and grab your 7 day free trial today.