Looking Beyond Ratings

Marketing professionals, like gourmet chefs, are on the lookout for key ingredients when they are planning their strategy.

Specifically, when buying radio, those in the know are looking at things like reach, frequency and ratings.

Michigan Radio has the numbers that the professionals are looking for. As the most listened-to public radio station in the state, we reach more than a half a million listeners per week with our on-air broadcast – and that’s not counting our streaming or web audience.

Beyond the ratings, marketers today know they should also be looking at audience engagement. Put simply, audience engagement = how much the audience takes action as a result of the content produced by the station.

Taking action or audience engagement could look like:

• social media interaction: liking, sharing, commenting on content;

• web interaction: commenting on stories on the web or going to the web to follow up on a story they heard on-air;

• calling the station with feedback;

• contacting sponsors or advertisers;

For Michigan Radio, audience engagement also includes listeners who become donors/members of the station.  This is the ultimate in audience engagement: our listeners value our content enough to contribute financially.

This means that sponsorship messages aired and associated with our high-quality content, are HEARD by our audience.  Since we don’t have commercials and limit our sponsorship messages to only a few an hour, our listeners don’t change the station during sponsorship messages.

As a marketing professional, we know that you recognize the value in what Michigan Radio sponsorship has to offer – contact us to find out how to put your marketing dollars to work in our high-quality, content-rich environment!