Counter Programming - Being First in the Market

I was reading Rick’s post titled, “Be Number One,” and he touched on something in that post upon which I want to elaborate.

“If you can’t be number one in your market, redefine your market.”

I spent a few years involved in Public Radio. I was a volunteer disc jockey and producer for a jazz radio station. I produced a weekly four-hour program that was one of two specialty shows on the station. Most of the week the station played jazz recordings, but on Sunday evenings my show featured music that was categorized as “New-Age.” It was not, by most listeners’ opinions, jazz. Many people hated the show and thought it had no place on a jazz station.

At the time, I was earning a living as a jazz drummer. I played music and/or taught private music lessons several nights a week and was going to college during the day. Sunday evening was just about the only time slot in my schedule I had available to volunteer at the radio station.

Even though the station needed a producer for the Sunday night program, the station managers hadn’t asked me if I would like to take over the time slot because they didn’t think I would be interested in programming a New-Age music show. I was a jazz drummer after all, and this was a New-Age program; surely a working jazz drummer wouldn’t be caught dead playing New-Age recordings in public. I surprised quite a few folks when I agreed to take over the show.

The first thing I did was study the market to see what else was on the air on Sunday evenings. Turned out this was the only show of its kind on the air in our town of about 40 radio stations. It was one of the few locally produced specialty shows where most of the music was on CD instead of vinyl (tells you how long ago this was), so the quality of the recordings was pretty high. It was also broadcast from 7:00 pm to 11:00 pm, which is a good chunk of the evening for most folks.

The first few months on the air, I took notes of all the calls I was getting from listeners. Some of them yelled at me and even threatened me; others loved the music I was selecting. After a while, I noticed some patterns in the callers and their comments, and I started to experiment with the flow of the music to see if I could get more positive calls and fewer highly enraged “jazz-experts” calling to ridicule me.

After about six months on the air, I saw my first ratings book, which was a poll of what kinds of listeners were tuning in to the show, taken by an independent ratings business. I learned that nearly the entire audience was composed of men in their 40s and 50s. There were a couple of thousand listeners, according to the ratings. I really wanted a bigger and more diverse audience, so I took a close look at my notes from the calls I received, my only other listener feedback and made more changes in the programming.

I played tracks with drums in them, mostly up-beat, soft-rockish tunes for the first hour, then slowed things down with tracks that featured just two or three instruments at a time—solo guitar, piano, and harp. About 10:00 pm I would play a half hour of electronic instruments, and finally, in the last half-hour, started slipping in some jazz ballads to ease folks back into the standard jazz programming.

When the next ratings book came out a few months later, the station manager called me into his office. I thought I was getting canned. He held out the ratings book so I could see my time slot in relation to the whole market on Sunday nights. In six months, the show went from less than a 1 percent audience share to 19 percent of the whole market between 7:30 pm and 11:00 pm.

This was a show that played music most folks had never heard before, during a less than desirable time slot and on a college station with an unreliable broadcast signal. The show was pulling a big share of the women in the market at that time slot and a much broader range of men than any other single offering. Little college radio stations don’t get this kind of market share around here. It just doesn’t happen.

Within a month of that ratings book coming out, three commercial stations in the market launched new locally produced programs to compete directly with my show. They played some of the same artists I featured and tried to copy my format. Over time, the new shows grabbed half my audience away, leaving me with just 9 percent of the Sunday evening market.

In that first year my show went from 1 percent of the audience share to a solid 9 percent and inspired new listening opportunities for another 10 percent of the Sunday evening market. My show held on to its new audience for at least the next four years that I continued to produce the show. It was the first regularly scheduled, locally produced radio program of New-Age music in the market, and the music we played was not only different from any other music on our station at the time, but it was also different than anything you could find on your radio dial in our market.

It was being first in the market, and very much counter programming, that fueled much of the program’s success. I would like to think that having a musician programming the music had something to do with the show’s success too.

Fast foreword a decade to when I was laying the groundwork for my web services business, and that experience in counter programming and being first to do something in the local radio market played a big role in my decision to choose nonprofits as a target audience for my web business.

When I started looking into who was serving the nonprofits in my area, there were only six web firms locally and four nationally that had an established presence. I live in a state in the U.S. with over 11,000 registered nonprofit organizations, so I figured there’s no way this small number of firms could keep up with demand for CMS-based websites. There were so few web providers focused on nonprofits that I took the principals of each firm out for coffee to meet them and to find out if any of them had a compelling reason I shouldn’t go after the nonprofit/education market in our area. None of them did.

Within five years, my web firm became one of the largest providers of web services for nonprofits in the local market. We weren’t the first ones on the scene, but we were the first firm building all our sites in a CMS called ExpressionEngine. We also were the first to offer a two-year comprehensive website subscription-based service plan instead of either an hourly project-based service or the ever popular Application Service Provider model.

Not only were we among the first to serve a segmented client base that almost no one was going after, but we were also the first to offer EE-based CMS style websites and a comprehensive service plan as a package deal.

If your web business is in its infancy, or you feel like your competition is grabbing all the “good” clients, then I recommend you sit down with your favorite search engine to start looking for underserved market segments in your area.

Is there a firm specializing in CMS intranets for small business? Is there a web firm in our town serving all the private schools, the local artists, the farmers, the used-car dealers, the home remodeling companies? How about the CPAs, the lawyers and other professionals? Who’s underserved in your market and who is going to need your services six months from now or a year from now when they are ready to make the leap from static websites to dynamic? Are you placing yourself out in front of them so they can find you?

Need some inspiration? Head on over to our Professionals Network and read through the profiles. Note how many EE Pro Net users are focused on creating websites for a specific market or a small group of markets. Note how many of them were early adopters of EE and among the first to introduce a whole new market segment to EE. These folks know the benefits of being first and carefully choosing one’s market, and stand to benefit from that careful positioning.

Sure, you’ll still want to pick your clients, but being first in your market can play a huge role in your success.