Choose Your Audience Carefully

I’ve been working on several projects the last couple of months. One of these projects is an internet radio, United Dj’s Radio (website).
At the beginning we didn’t know anything about the running of a radio, so we’ve made a lot of mistakes during this period of time. One of the big mistakes we did was that we chose the wrong market. Our selected target audience was based on wrong perceptions.

We thought that the biggest amount of listeners was found around the world, so we made the radio international. Our range of broadcast programmes were based on Danish and English shows, and we almost had a full week schedule. We thought, and said to ourselves: “This is going to be awesome, we’re Rollin’!”. The listening figures and Google Analytics went crazy the first couple of weeks, due to heavy advertising at global social networks (Myspace, hi5 etc.), and hundreds of dance and trance communities.
What we then experienced the following weeks and months was that our listening figures fell, not only because of our mix between Danish and English shows, but also because we, at the moment, had kind of realised the issue but didn’t know what to do (didn’t dare to do it). At the end, only our friends listened. Hurray…?

All this happened rather quickly.

It’s obvious now that the mix, between English and Danish shows, was a wrong decision, because when the English (international) listeners were listening, they experienced (now and then) one or more Danish shows. They became tired of this strange language, and we lost them.

Another thing which we’ve realised is the fact that there is a much bigger chance of getting listeners if you run your radio speaking your native tongue. Who wants to listen to an international radio when there is one likewise (and their probably is) in their own language?

You got to know what you want, and how to get it, before you start doing it.

We wanted a huge radio with many listeners, but we didn’t get that, though we thought we knew what to do, when we launched it.

If we had chosen the right market (in this case the Danish one) from the beginning, I think we had been much more successful in what we did with that radio. The radio is still running though, we are (very) slowly building a network of faithful listeners, Danish listeners actually…