The Media Connection, South Africa’s community radio advertising specialist, has launched 54 community radio Mobi-sites. “We wanted to launch our mobi-sites at a forum where members of the industry could investigate and explore the extraordinary opportunities that the digital market has to offer,” said Rachelle Jaques, The Media Connection’s sales manager.
The Media Connection started plotting its move into the digital space in 2009. “As mobile marketing is still new in South Africa and the continent at large, we wanted to take baby steps when it came to incorporating it into our portfolio,” explained Debbie Williams, manager of The Mobi Connection, a division within The Media Connection.
“We wanted to ensure that we had a very good understanding of its benefits to our business, our portfolio of community radio stations and our advertisers,” she added. While mobile marketing offers several tactical options including SMS, MMS, mobi-sites, applications and mobile advertising, The Mobi Connection has initially kept its offering to SMS and Mobi-sites, with some of its stations now having a well running in-studio SMS dashboard and short code and mobi-site.
“Mobi-sites offer our advertisers added leverage for their brand, which means that they no longer have to market to an entire demographic with one campaign using just radio,” Williams explained. “The mobi-sites will offer them an opportunity to fine-tune their campaigns to a targeted audience, to get measurable results and most importantly real time data.” “The benefits to the community radio station are that they are now empowered and part of the digital movement with the rest of the industry and the world. They are able to offer advertisers another platform to extend their campaigns to and generate extra revenue for themselves,” she added.
Judy Milne, director of The Media Connection, says that the company wanted to diversify its brand. “What worked 10 years ago may not work now. Our utmost aim is provide our advertisers with a greater return on their investment,” she said. “We want our portfolio of community radio stations to be more attractive and relevant to advertisers, in light of where the industry is moving. The station’s listeners will now also be able to communicate with their favourite stations in a unique and more effective manner.”
The mobi-sites will enable the community radio stations to communicate far more effectively with their loyal listeners. Show presenters can lead with relevant topics that affect their communities and get live feedback by means of posting comments on the mobi-sites and texting to the SMS line. “The stations will also now be offering the advertiser a second platform on which to advertise, meaning extra revenue and measurability,” Williams said.
