Category SpotlightPublic Radios’s tried and true success

categories (plus a few surprises)

Nancy Mitchell, PRP and Kimberly Sparrow, KQED

Top-Performing Categories: what the research shows

The top three underwriting categories

• Education• Performance• Healthcare/Medical …representing 32% of all funding

Stations that did not do well in these categories showed growth potential of 10-20% by capturing

these ‘lost’ categories

Top-Performing Categories: what the research shows

• Most stations earned half of their revenue from six or fewer categories (so what?)

• Targeted growth categories:

- Banks - Food Service

- Retail - Financial Services

- Law Firms - Community Orgs

- Government - Public Utilities

What’s Notable or Surprising

• Automobiles under perform …

• B to B accounts under perform …

• High % of agency business not necessarily an indicator of growth nor of high performance

KQED Radio Top Categories

• Financial Services

• Consumer Goods

• Education

• Health

• Next tier 5% each, including tech, .orgs, professional services, leisure/entertainment

•15%•15%•10%•10% = 50%

How to increase revenue in emerging categories

• Monitor

• Organize

• Deploy

• Renew

• Repeat

Category Spotlight Session

3 Market Examples

Austin-Retail

• Historically stable category for KUT because of the University environment in Austin

• Local-Centric Attitude “Keep Austin Weird” • Sales Manager reviewed how clients were buying

the stations and created new packages with more productive schedules. Increased the client results and helped the stations enjoy a larger share of budgets from more retail clients.

• “Independent Retailers Package”

Static Sticker for Program

Nashville-Financial

• Considerable population growth with simultaneous growth in disposable income

• Growth due in part of explosion of businesses relocating to Nashville area creating new opportunities for corporate banking, personal wealth management and retirement planning

• Used Demographic statistics and indexes from Media Audit during sales pitch and proposal stages that helped to support the need for the Financial Institutions to market their products to their affluent listeners of Nashville Public Radio.

Seattle-Legal

• Noticed a surge in new law firms opening up shop in Seattle along with several large firms merging

• Focused the attention of a new rep on the majority of the firms that were not being called on with some regularity

• Increased revenues by increasing proposal amounts, focusing schedules on drive times to increase visibility to B-2-B audiences

• Created competitive surge, Law Firms are followers, once one is in the others will follow because of sheer competitiveness.

• 22% growth in category revenues

Summary

• Watch market trends for new category ideas

• Create packages that will appeal to the category group to help drive sales and traffic to their websites or storefronts

• Focus sales efforts on growth categories identified

• Use Research to help sell demographics in sales pitches and proposals