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Narrow Your Focus and Win Over Your Listener

Here at Finney Media, our goal is Audience Growth—spiritually and hearts reached.

To that end, we survey Christian radio listeners from across the country for the Why Listen? Survey. This past year, almost 15,000 listeners were invited by CCM stations, Teaching/Music stations and all-Teaching stations and programs.

And the headlines from the survey are clear. Our listeners want Jesus.

They are more about spiritual encouragement, spiritual growth, the Bible, prayer and worship than many people expect.

They don’t want  nor do they expect to hear from us about:

  • Pop Culture
  • Sports
  • Politics
  • News

We see more Christian audio channels who are narrowing their focus on messages about Christ, spiritual growth, spiritual encouragement and we see record numbers of listeners gravitate to their station or podcast.

In a crowded, confusing audio choice environment, we achieve more listeners, more ministry impact by narrowing our focus.

  • Ask us about the station that ended hard news and started doing only stories consistent with Biblical encouragement and how they are at record audience levels.
  • About the skyrocketing ministry impact at the station that requires its on-air team to use Scripture – not a verse of the day but something the announcer has researched – at least hourly.
  • About how donor response went way up when the program became more focused on the most effective Biblical content, which meant reducing other messages.
  • About the morning show with stronger reach than ever after they started praying more often on air.

Here’s why this matters to us all: In most towns, there used to be no more than 50 choices for audio content, the radio stations in that town. Even in the largest markets, there were no more than 75 choices.

Today? With smartphones and smart speakers, there’s thousands of options. Your podcast, your radio stations, your program are now jostling with thousands of other choices.

This is an environment for your podcast or your radio station where the only way to achieve audience growth is to narrow your focus to your mission and your listeners’ preferences and expectations. This is how to achieve more listeners and more ministry impact.

This month, I’m with the other team members of Finney Media at the 2024 NRB Convention in Nashville, TN and the team will be at the CMB Gold Event in Dallas, TX. We’d love to discuss this in more depth with you.

Happy New Year! 

Some thoughts from PASTOR CHUCK SWINDOLL for inspiration as we head into 2024: 

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company…a church…a home. 

The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past…we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable.  

The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. 

I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it.  

Scripture provides the amen, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4:8 ESV) 

 

Is your radio station focused and on a Biblical mission of reaching more people for Jesus with spiritual truth and encouragement? 

Then it’s important that you focus your breaks relentlessly on topics that are already on your listener’s mind and heart. Meet her where she is. 

In our 2023 Finney Media Why Listen® nationwide Christian radio survey, almost 50 percent of respondents indicated they are very likely or somewhat likely to tune away or turn the radio off when we talk about a topic they are not interested in. If you’re trying to grow listenership, that’s a big incentive to focus on topics of higher interest. 

For Christian radio listeners, it’s hard to find topics of lower interest than sports. Even when your team is winning in the playoffs.  

As I write this morning, the Texas Rangers, my hometown DFW baseball team have surprised the experts by making it to the American League Championship Series. I’m a baseball fan. I’m thrilled! How exciting that they’ll have a chance, for the first time since 2011, to get a shot at going to the World Series! 

It matters to me. But that doesn’t mean it matters to our Christian Radio listener.  

If we want to grow our listenership, we must be disciplined about putting our own interests aside and focusing on our listener’s interests. 

Should a Dallas-Fort Worth Christian Radio Morning Show mention the Rangers going to the playoffs today? Absolutely!  

Should they focus the rest of their show on spiritual encouragement, Scripture, relationships, and other topics of highest interest to the Christian radio listener? Yes! 

To reach more listeners, nothing works quite like getting focused and staying focused on where her head and heart are today.  

Written by Guest Blogger Beth Bacall, Sr. Talent Coach

Finish 2023 strong. Speak to the heart of our listeners with relatable and encouraging content. How?

What is heard coming out of the speakers begins with how you prepare for your show and the vision/programming direction of your station.

Friday night lights are on, Christmas decorations greet you as you enter Costco, and 2024 calendars are being considered. This fall season will soon be closely followed by winter happenings and a New Year. It will come faster than you think! Boost your on-air content to go beyond “something to talk about” or “what we usually talk about.”

Join me as we’ll take a glimpse at content generators geared toward the last quarter of this year. We’ll dig into how we can create moments that matter. Maybe it’s a local story, a station event, or a scripture verse that speaks to the day and time you are on the air.

Want to learn more? Reserve your seat at our next Finney Media webinar happening on September 26th at 11 a.m. CT/Noon ET. REGISTER TODAY!

 

How Your Listener is the Key to Longevity

Dave Sullivan at Radio Research Consortium is a very smart man. Check out the ARTICLE and video below. It’s important to watch the whole thing because he gets into analysis of Nielsen ratings for CCM stations toward the end:

The bottom line is this: in a Nielsen PPM world of declining Weekly Cume (how many listeners listen to radio for at least five minutes in a week) and declining Weekly Time Spent Listening (how long on average those radio listeners hear a station), CCM is the non-comm format that is growing.

It’s sobering news.

It echoes what we’re seeing in our research.

Are listeners more busy, more distracted? Yes.

Are uses of other media choices up the past few years? Yes. In audio, that’s especially true with streamed music and podcasts.

Are listeners looking for hopeful, uplifting channels like yours? Definitely!

Is there opportunity for us? Most definitely!!

Arguably, this is a golden age for CCM audio channels.

If we get our heads wrapped around how, where and how often listeners consume audio.

If we get past our personal biases and “that’s-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it’s” long enough to listen to our listener. And then act on what they tell us.

These are tough actions that are hard to do. I know. Even though I’ve been in the business all of my adult life, I struggle with this crucial step, too.

This is not compromise on the ministry mission. Instead, it’s a major focus on the sound that mission takes coming out of the speakers.

In a world of declining Cume and TSL, there is a way to address this. We can help you figure out a plan to grow your ministry impact, and not be left behind. We evaluate, we list specific items to consider doing, and we work on each aspect of your sound. Let’s talk about how you can reach your potential. Email us at Info@finneymedia.com.

 

Increase your ministry impact for the cost of only a little of your time 

It’s mid-year. A great time to be thinking about the second half of the year and ways to increase your ministry impact for little or no cost and just a few hours of your time. 

Let me give you an example to illustrate:

Here at Finney Media, we’re often involved with A-to-Z CCM Music Library Reviews. The kind where we’re discussing Titles and Artists and what rotations to put them in. Typically, we’ll ask our client friends to alphabetize their Titles. They’ll be looking at their A-to-Z library while we’re reviewing a separate A-to-Z list with nationwide spins. And we won’t be far into the songs beginning with A before we bring up a title that our client should consider playing.  

Not because the title is old or slow or some other programming objection. But because it just got overlooked. Somewhere along the way, they stopped playing it and never put it back in. 

By the time we get to Z, it’s likely we’ll have come across two dozen or more titles they should be playing. 

I ran a nine-day monitor of eleven randomly selected major, large and medium market stations and then picked three stations randomly. Looking at the past three years, here are three high testing songs that each of those three markets are not playing: 

Station A 

Into The Sea/Tasha Layton 2020 

The Blessing/Kari Jobe 2020 

There Was Jesus/Zach Williams 2019 

Station B 

Child Of Love/We The Kingdom 2020 

The Father’s House/Cory Asbury 2020 

Keep Me In The Moment/Jeremy Camp 2020 

Station C 

Miracles/Colton Dixon 2020 

Scars/I Am They 2018 

Rescue/Lauren Daigle 2018 

It’s possible they have low testing data on these songs. Or, it’s possible they’ve made a programming decision to not play them. But it more often seems songs like this just slipped through the cracks. High testing, often positive mood, often high energy songs that somehow ended up in Hold.  

How can you increase your ministry impact for the cost of only a little of your time? Do an audit of your music library and review your library against a monitor of other CCM stations. It’ll take no more than a couple hours. Do it this summer before the chaos of fall and/or fundraising season is upon you.  

And bring back those songs your listener loves! 

We’re ready to assist if you would like help with an audit like this. Reach us at info@finneymedia.com.  

A harried dad is at the airline counter with a busy two-year-old by his side and got unexpected, less-than-upbeat news. He thought his daughter could sit on his lap, but since she is now over two, she has to have her own seat. And it’s going to cost almost a thousand dollars! He tells the agent he needs to make a few calls and will be back. A woman nearby overhears the conversation and, after the dad leaves, tells the gate agent she’d like to pay for the little girl’s ticket . . . and she doesn’t want dad to know who paid. Matthew said it this way: But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. (Matthew 6 3 ESV) 

We played that story recently for a group of Christian Music Radio listeners, and they LOVED it! And we hear comments like, “That’s the kind of story I need to face my day.”  

Why? 

Surrounded by negative, painful stories elsewhere, our listeners love uplifting, heartwarming stories. 

My friend Erica Parkerson at KCMS Seattle sent me this recently:

Seeing stories of kindness may counteract the negative effects of consuming bad news | Nieman Journalism Lab (niemanlab.org) 

From that article:

“…research has shown that witnessing others’ acts of moral beauty, such as kindness or heroism, triggers “elevation” — a positive and uplifting feeling which experts theorize acts as an emotional reset button, replacing feelings of cynicism with hope, love and optimism.” 

Finding and telling good, uplifting, loving, kind stories in a negative, chaotic, angry, judgmental world grows ministry impact. 

Put another way, finding and telling GOD stories—stories that show the heart of God—works! 

Chuck here.

A friend of mine a few years ago at a convention said this “I don’t think listeners want prayer on (Christian) radio.”

Me: “Have you ever asked them?”

Friend: “No . . . but I’m guessing from your question that you think we should.”

Me: “Thinking you might be surprised by their answer.”

We all might be surprised by a lot of answers from our listeners . . . if we just ask.

Like the listener who was annoyed by a music bed because it made the announcer “hard to hear.”

Or the woman who, with tears in her eyes, explained how “life-giving” her Christian station is. All of us listening to her in a focus group choked up and were motivated by her story.

We’re consistently surprised by the answers we hear from actual listeners. Their comments often defy conventional wisdom and have the power to help our media friends who desire to reach more hearts, more deeply.

Think about it this way: You can guess what songs your listeners know and want or how long your breaks should be, or which voices are the most appealing to your listeners. You can guess on dozens of other questions/decisions about your content.

Or you can ask. And serve your listener better than you ever have by knowing and acting on their answers.

This month, Finney Media releases the results of our fourth nationwide Finney Media Why Listen® Survey. Almost 15,000 Christian radio listeners with sometimes surprising answers.

I’ll be presenting findings at both the NRB Convention and CMB Momentum. Why they listen. Why they give. Why they leave. How habits have altered. And much more.

We’ll also be hosting two free webinars on the results on July 11th and September 12th. For more information about all the places and times to learn more about your listener, visit our EVENTS PAGE.

And if you’d like to have a conversation about how your organization might ask your listener, I’d love to meet and talk in Orlando at NRB Convention or at CMB Momentum. To arrange a meeting, email us at info@finneymedia.com.

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