Here's a great example of letting your creative people succeed, by getting out of their way. Give them a task and a goal and watch them work a little magic. Cody Welling is the General Sales Manager for Great Plains Media in Bloomington, Illinois. Cody got together with his on-air staff, the program director's and even the engineers and they brainstormed on how the station could do something fun around the holidays and make money for the radio station. What they came up with was an online version of a radio station playing nothing but Holiday music. And they call it jinglebellradio.com. Brilliant!
Welling says it was a total team effort. "We brainstormed around the idea of different domain names until we all agreed upon jinglebellradio.com. The domain had to be ?catchy? to the listener, easy to spell, and most of all--- an available domain. Our competition is known for changing their format to All-Christmas around the holidays. We simply couldn?t compete with an already established format, and we couldn?t change ours."
Welling says they are getting the word out by utilizing facebook and social media, along with their station data base for e-blasts. "We even created a ?jingle? for jinglebellradio.com. On all 3 of our radio stations, we downloaded a simple: 15 second promo that airs throughout the day. The on-air talent also talk about it every day. We've purchased some rotating digital billboards in our community that simply has the domain name. Listeners that visit our web-sites can also link to jinglebellradio.com."
The advertisers really like the concept, according to Welling. "It?s a new idea in our market, and we made it affordable because it's new. Our community is approximately 179,000 people with 3 colleges, and the national headquarters of some major corporations. Internet usage and digital products are very popular in our community. Since the average commute in our market is only 10-15 minutes, the advertisers thought the domain idea, the smart phone app, along with the popularity of Christmas music could help their businesses gain market share around the holidays if they invested in our product. Plus they liked the concept around a radio station that can be played in the office or at home, utilizing our growing digital formats."
The site officially launched LIVE Monday, November 1st. The total cost of the site and equipment was around $900. The creation of the web-site layout, colors, logos, and content was done in-house by Program Director Steve Uselton. The Christmas music was purchased. Spots and ads are being sold specifically on the site. Weller says they wanted to keep the site as simple as possible. "The home page has some simple sponsor logos, and a Christmas version of each of regular radio station logos. We limited the site to 24 local advertisers and we will have 3 stop-sets per hour. (4 minutes, 4 minutes, and 2 minutes.)- Less clutter and more Christmas music. The site, when sold out, will generate approximately $13,000 in NTR revenue over 2 months. As of October 31st, the site has already generated approximately $8800. We have simple tabs on the web-site such as holiday recipes, local events, and a Santa Tracker that all has sponsorship opportunities. The whole concept was to generate revenue, but keep everything simple and clean on the web-site."
Check out the site www.jinglebellradio.com
Reach out to Cody cody@gpmbloomington.com
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