Making PR Waves! – Part 4
How to Impress Your Audience While On Air
In part three of my four part series on radio promotion, I shared my top preparation secrets with you and promised your radio interview would run smoothly and be more successful than you ever imagined if you followed them. Now we’re going to discuss how to impress your audience while you’re on air.
The most important thing to remember is that talking on radio is not the same as making a sales presentation to a prospect. This is true for various reasons – the main ones being that your time on radio is limited by the segment length allotted by the producer, the fact that listeners prefer crisp, concise answers, and quickly lose interest if you are too windy.
With this in mind, if you want to impress hosts and listeners as well as ace your radio appearances, here are even more of my best-kept publicity tips and tricks for you to follow:
√ When asked a question, restate the question before giving your answer.
√ Be brief. Your answers should be given in 20-30 seconds. Any more than that, you’re over-answering and must summarize or risk being tuned out.
√ Use humour, but don’t tell jokes. Short anecdotes are much more effective.
√ Demonstrate that you’re an authority by using facts, startling statistics and findings that support your points, as well as grab the audience’s attention.
√ Elaborate beyond yes or no responses. Make specific claims and raise issues or concerns, using examples that stir up controversy, as well as bring home your key messages.
√ Don’t come of like a stiff. Be relaxed and let your personality shine through.
√ To seem more personable, use names – particularly those of the person interviewing you and calling in to the show.
√ Be positive and show enthusiasm and conviction.
√ Don’t repeat or paraphrase a caller’s damaging question. It’s alright to interrupt a question based on a premise or false information.
√ End each segment with an upbeat, summarizing benefit of following your advice or using the product you are promoting.
√ The host and listeners expect you to be an expert on your topic. After all, that’s why you’re there! Part of being an expert is to know how far your experience extends and where it ends. Hosts and listeners are impressed with real people who are honest and sincere, and not afraid to acknowledge their limits and boundaries. So if you’re asked a question that throws you off balance and which you don’t have a good answer (assuming you can’t come up with one on the spot), I suggest you employ either one of my two dodging strategies…
1. Decline to answer based on the limits of your knowledge or experience. For example, on a recent radio interview in which an expert spoke about how to be more effective as a salesperson, a caller asked about managing a sales force (specifically whether the expert knew of compensation schemes that rewarded salespeople for getting repeat business from existing accounts). He immediately answered, “Sam, I’m sorry, but my expertise is in selling techniques, not management of salespeople. I know nothing about management and have no idea how to compensate a sales force. You might try asking colleagues who are sales managers at other companies in your industry.”
2. Alternatively say “I don’t know the answer to the question, Sam, but if you call me at my office tomorrow, we can discuss it further. I will then research it and get the answer for you or put you in touch with someone who knows. Host, may I give Sam my office number?” This technique demonstrates that you’re a helpful source of information and gets you off the hook of having to know it all.
Being a guest on a radio talk show is not always a winning situation. Getting yourself on the show, preparing for it and doing the interview takes a lot of effort and time. And for small business people, time is money. And let’s face it – you not doing publicity for the fun or glory of it. You’re doing it for the sole purpose of publicizing your product or service, generating quality leads, enhancing your visibility and reputation, and making more profit.
So when you go to all this trouble and your media appearance doesn’t work out, you tend to get frustrated. I understand, but advise you to never let it show. Rather, handle the situation gracefully. Don’t yell or complain, and always leave people thinking well of you. This positive behaviour increases your chances of getting added and better exposure. Negative behaviour on the other hand, will earn you a reputation of being difficult and make media people want to avoid you.
While most media appearances go well, horror stories do exist. Here are two actual cases that happened to me and my colleagues…
A fellow publicist (back in the days when I was strictly a publicist myself) I know tells of a client he had who drove two hours in a torrential rain storm to keep a confirmed interview on a radio show. When his client arrived, another guest was sitting in the interviewee’s chair. “Whoops the assistant program manager said. “I must have forgotten to book you after we talked. Can you come back next week?”
I once accompanied a book author client of mine, who was scheduled to appear on a top rated talk show in the Toronto area. When we arrived at the radio station, we discovered that my client was not the sole guest and that another author was set to be on the same show, at the same time. Worse the other author wanted to discuss something totally unrelated to my client’s topic. The show made no sense, but there was nothing either of us could do about it. So my client went ahead and performed like a pro – meaning that neither of us whined about it and she did her best under the circumstances – discussing her topic to the best of her ability and as much as the host would permit.
In addition to handling surprises such as those described above, you should never make product pitches or plugs on the air. Why? Because producers, hosts and audiences don’t want to hear about your book; video, website or accounting firm; they want to get solutions to their pressing problems. So rather than talking about yourself, products or services, focus on the wants, needs, problems and concerns of the listeners. This is true even if the host says “tell us about your book (product or service).” Instead answer, “I’d be happy to talk about my book (product, process or service), Mr. Host. But what I’d really like to do is help your listeners overcome the objections they’re getting from______, feel more confident about ________, and get better results. So those of you listening out there, when you call, we’ll go through your particular situation and solve your problem right over the phone!”
This approach tends to delight hosts and listeners because it creates a much more interesting, useful show, working with the listeners as though they were clients. What about promoting your book, product or service? Well, when you’re enthusiastic about your subject and want to help listeners get more of it, the host will do it for you! And this amounts to third-party endorsement (or the host saying to his or her audience that you or your book, product, service, company etc is great and should be ordered or used). Plus you’ll come across far more credible as a respectful and generous expert, not as a self-interested one trying to hock whatever it is you’re selling.
Radio is warm and intimate. In order to resonate with audiences, you must personalize what you know; reach out and talk directly to them as friends, entirely honest, as if you’re having a conversation over a cup of coffee. The fact that you can’t see them is irrelevant. Listeners must feel the force of your personality. This is how you make a lasting impression and become a highly desirable guest.
To your success,
Feel free to leave me a comment and let me know how my advice is working for you!
Want to reprint this article in your e-Zine, newsletter or on your website? You can as long as you do not change it, acknowledge me as the author, include its copyright date, my head shot and this paragraph:
Founding Publicist, Prime Time PR and former editor PRtalk (Canada’s only online PR magazine), Janette Burke is a marketing/PR coach, consultant, columnist, trainer, speaker, TV Personality and creator of “The Magnetic Marketing/PR Process TM” (TMMPP) – her customized, cost-effective, step-by-step, guaranteed to get-results-now marketing/PR coaching, consulting and training program. To discuss how she can help take your business to the next level, call: (905) 882-6893; E-mail: janette@yourmarketingmagnet.com or visit: www.yourmarketingmagnet.com.
