After six months of hosting a live talk radio show, Rachel and I were surprised to learn that we actually had to talk as if people were listening. We needed to stop talking to ourselves, and instead talk to THEM. I’m ashamed to admit that we didn’t come to this realization on our own. No, we had to hear this from our producers, who said to us on a coaching call one day: “You know, the two of you are so wrapped up in talking to each other, that you don’t even acknowledge that the audience is there! Why don’t you ever turn to them and ask them what they think about what you’re saying?” Rachel and I stared at each other. Really? Talk to our listeners DIRECTLY? It honestly had never occurred to us. While we frequently engaged in one-on-one conversations with callers whom our producers arranged to put in our line-up, during the rest of our show we thought that our job was to talk (and sometimes argue) with each other. We assumed that through the magical force of our personalities, the audience would come.
Or not. Because in that moment we realized that, in fact, we had no idea if we had a following at all. One sure sign of a radio audience is the presence of the “organic caller” – the caller who hears the number over the radio and phones in from their car or from the street in real time. Statistics suggest that every organic caller represents approximately 10,000 listeners. How many organic callers had we gotten? As of the time of the awakening described above: zero.
And here’s the irony: the “if we build it they will come” philosophy is the single assumption we make our clients drop the minute they walk into the door of ROI Ventures. The “Field of Dreams” approach – “If we build a bigger theater, we’ll get a bigger audience. If we replicate our program in another city, funding will follow…” – has crippled efforts to achieve social impact for years. From barren cultural plazas to empty training programs to traffic-free Web sites, the world of wonderful social intentions is littered with casualties of just this kind of flawed thinking.
We get it. Really we do. The power of a Big Idea can make even the smartest people (ahem) engage in magical thinking. And the last thing we want to do is dash your Big Idea. So instead, we put the supports in place to ensure that your Big Idea actually works. Answering three questions puts you on the right path:
1) WHO (exactly) will come? (What’s your target market?) Too often, the answer is: “Everybody! Everybody’s our market, if only they knew about us!” Not true. You need to know the actual details, circumstances, cultural conditions, and demographic profile of your target market. If you don’t know who they are, they won’t know who you are. Simple as that.
2) WHO (else) can influence them to come? (What’s the ecosystem of your target?) Once you know your target market, you can start mapping the relationships surrounding your target, because nobody acts alone. If you want to induce people to behave in certain ways, know their context cold.
3) WHY will they come? (What are the core incentives of your target and all the actors surrounding your target?) And no, the fact that you want them to act is NOT an incentive. Once you understand every player’s primary incentive for change (or what they’re scared of losing if they don’t), you’ve got your playbook and you can now craft a set of new messages and a distribution strategy that will pull you into the market.
Now, about that radio show. Once Rachel and I stopped laughing at our own self-absorbed, magical thinking, we decided to take our producers’ (and our own) advice to heart. In preparation for the next show, we thought about what kinds of topics would interest our (largely male, business oriented) listeners. We went a step further and framed some pointed questions to throw at them, and then once we were on the air, we repeatedly turned directly TO them during our conversation. In between our own banter, Rachel or I would say, “So, we wonder what you think about [whatever the topic was]. Give us a call at 888-454-3378.” And I tell you this without exaggeration: within the first five minutes of the show, our producer was telling us that we had organic callers waiting on the line. Many of them. One after the other. We were so stunned that we just stared at each other like two deer caught in the headlights. OMG. Now what??!!
So it really was true. If you keep your audience in mind, understand what motivates them, and then ask them to take action (and in our case, reward them with 15 seconds of public exposure), they will do what you want them to do!
To this day, Rachel and I shake our heads when we learn we have callers. It reminds us that we are not exempt from our own Dirty Truth: there is no magic to engaging a market.
-posted by Suzanne
