BRX Pro Tip: Community vs Audience
Stone Payton : [00:00:00] Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Lee and Kantor Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. Lee, so many of us involved in the media ecosystem, we strive for larger audiences. The client wants that. We want to be able to provide that. But there’s also this aspect of community. Can you speak to community versus audience?
Lee Kantor: [00:00:31] Yeah. There was a time when audience building and audience size was the most important metric, and that was how people kept scoring. The bigger the audience, the better it was. But these times have changed. The media is so fragmented nowadays and there are so many media properties for just really narrow niches and verticals that it’s way more important to have an engaged community rather than a large kind of anonymous audience. And the way that we help our clients create these engaged communities is by helping them kind of create real relationships with real people and nurture that over time rather than build an impersonal audience that’s filled with unengaged, transactional, anonymous listeners.
Lee Kantor: [00:01:29] So, today I think that you want to be a grassroots community builder. That’s really what most professional services, organizations, and small firms need to be doing. They have to kind of immerse themselves in the community. They have to be seen as a leader, a supporter, a person who is celebrating the success of the community. The size of the audience is so much less important if you’re in that space because you don’t need that many more clients. You’re not – this isn’t a mass – we’re not a good fit for mass products that need a mass audience. We are fantastic fits for those kind of niche-oriented businesses, the boutique firms that are really trying to serve a small group and really they care about the group, they care about the community.
Lee Kantor: [00:02:27] Our tool, the Business RadioX platform, is a great way to demonstrate the care and service to these kind of groups. We help make our sponsor or our studio partner an authentic influencer in that space by supporting and celebrating the work that is happening in that niche that they’re serving, whether it’s a geography or whether it’s a vertical in an industry.
Lee Kantor: [00:02:55] At Business RadioX, our sponsors are linchpin members of their community, and they would be missed if they stopped sharing the stories of the niche that they serve. That’s what makes our platform so powerful, and it’s because at the heart of this that we are focusing way more on community building than we are in audience building.
Stone Payton : [00:03:18] It’s such a timely conversation. I’m telling you, as recently as yesterday I was having a very similar conversation over a cup of coffee, and I don’t know if this ever happens to you, but often the people I’m talking to end up being more articulate or eloquent about the topic than I am. And so, I was sharing some of the same things you were talking about. And he says, “Hearts and minds over eyes and ears.” And I said, “Yeah, that.”
