WEBINAR: Increase the Functionality of Your Website - 16 February 2021
A great website lets you share your content anywhere, anytime.
Whether it’s highlighting past programs or promoting what you’ve got coming up, a great website can help you grow your audience online and attract subscribers and donations.
Learn how Radio Website Services can help broadcasters manage your station website and promote online content through web, social media, and mobile devices.
Presented by:
Andrew Morris is the Manager, Online Products and Services for the CBAA, with 24 years’ experience in the Australian radio industry. Andrew is committed through the CBAA to ensure community media in Australia is positioned well to take advantage of the disruptive forces impacting our media listening habits.
Anthony Eden is a Software Developer for Media Realm providing media focused software & web development, broadcast technology and IT system administration for not for profits.
This webinar was held at 11:00 AM (AEDT) Tuesday 16 February 2021
Increase the Functionality of Your Website - Summary Notes
1. START by Defining your goals & Objective
What are your radio stations highest priorities? Your main navigation will reflect a combination of business goals and identified listener tasks. Your goals need to be SMART; we’ll use Google Analytics to track these. Read more about SMART goals.
2. Human-Centred Design
Websites need to useful and usable. We’ve taken our experience in user testing a variety of radio station websites to build a radio station template that is easy to navigate, built to be responsive across multiple devices, from desktop, tablet and mobile. Learn more about Human-Centered Design.
3. Champion your Content
It’s all about the content. Not quantity but quality of your content. Are you creating content your listeners want to listen to or read? It’s also about your capacity. Let’s build a website you can maintain and turn on more features as you grow your staff or volunteer base.
The two most popular pages of radio stations websites are the homepage and streaming page. So ensure your live stream is easy to find and consider offering on-demand and podcasting.
The national current affairs program The Wire will soon be pushing out daily audio stories to RWS websites. That’s great content which you can promote on-air and push listeners to your website.
Invite your presenters to create news articles promoting an upcoming special guest or event. And if a presenter had a great interview, create a web article about it. With the demise of local newspapers, perhaps there are journos or community contributors who can create content for you?
4. Building Station Revenue
Your website is an important business tool. Online transactions are commonplace in 2021 and community radio stations should offer listeners an easy and convenient way to support their station with low barriers. A listener pledge is great, but a listener making a 90 second safe and secure online transaction is money in your bank account. Your accounts and finance team will love you.
Our CBAA website template has an optimised donation page with once off and monthly recurring gift amounts. This can be reframed for subscribers or membership.
A secure gateway service is used to send the transaction safely from your website to your bank.
We use Stripe, SecurePay or eWAY. The transaction fees are low and all easy to set up.
5. Creating Sponsorship & Marketing Opportunities
Add value to your on-air sponsors by bundling on-air and online together. Maybe as a value add to start with and then sell online as a separate service.
The CBAA website offers a sponsor’s directory which features a sponsor’s logo, description of their service or product and address/contact details. The sponsor directory is a helpful tool for listeners who hear a sponsorship spot on-air and want more details.
Our template also features banner advertising across the website. Again, another great value add for on-air sponsors. The banner ads all conform with current IAB specifications which is convenient if an ad agency offers your station online advertising.
With our Gravity Forms WordPress plug-in, you can create online forms for competitions with local businesses. And you can capture your listener email details and start building an online relationship with them.
Finally, you can create sponsor logos bands across the website to thank local business for supporting your station.
6. Ability to Easily Integrate
The CBAA website template uses a number of third-party plugins and services. From payment gateways, Amrap Pages integration, Radio Station Automation systems through METARADIO, Omny Studio and Nucleus on-demand services to e-Newsletter companies and analytics with Google and Facebook. We’ve made integration easy.
7. Hosting & Maintenance
As part of the subscription, CBAA looks after your website hosting with an Australian based hosting and support. We’ll look after your core monthly WordPress and plugin updates and testing before pushing these changes live. We’ll also provide nightly backups of your website.
More Information
- Watch the Webinar again
- CBAA streaming and on-demand solutions
- Live CBAA websites
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