XCS Local offers boutique consulting services to spoken word radio stations. Our specialty is radio news, but we can assist with talk radio and sports radio stations.
Innovative radio consultation
What we can do for you
Our goal is to help you win.
XCS Local focuses on helping you build your brand and creating a unique product for your audience and your market. That means custom solutions and a one-on-one experience — not a “our way is the right way” mentality.
It can just be a one-off call just to bounce ideas; ongoing consulting on programming, branding, digital, and news; or even step in on an interim basis during a transition period. We can be your confidant or your “bad cop”. We can help you or help your team.
At the end of the day, we are not a one-size-fits-all partner — we work directly with you to help you solve problems you identify need fixing.
What we have done
We help brands draw younger and broader audiences.
In our experience, stations we have been involved with generally see their average on-air audience ages decrease by about 10 years. We also typically see web traffic increase by multiples.
This is achieved by focusing on a specific brand direction, have stations take ownership of who they are individually by increasing the internal control of the content that is disseminated through its platforms, and use all of its means of communicating with audiences be consistent in tone and quality throughout.
We then use data to assess where a station is presently, where the station intends to go, and what opportunities exist for the content to gain traction and snowball growth. The ultimate goal for us with our clients is having the content be what leads to sales, not an FCC license.
Improved consistency leads to improved results on all platforms — opening the door to more revenue opportunities and higher quality sales packages to boost net revenue.
News
Operations
- News department structure
- News operations within overall station brand
- Sound and presentation of news product
- Digital news production
- Staff alignment
Coaching
- News writing
- News reporting
- News anchoring
Talk
Operations
- Brand focus and growth paths
- Performance metrics (digital and PPM)
- Digital and social media goals and execution plan
- Develop revenue strategies utilizing content
Focus areas
XCS Local can focus on these areas and more.
From being your confidant to being a hands-on operator, let us help you win.
Case Study
(As an employee)
This station was a strong revenue performer, however it lagged in content performance — in terms of public perception, digital metrics, and PPM performance.
What we did:
- Refocused the “voice” of the station on all platforms. Liners had been loose and sarcastic, hosts had been hard conservative, and the news was heavy politics. We realigned the brand to all follow the lead of the liners. This meant getting the hosts to loosen up, the news to be broader with a focus on “interesting”, and carrying the on-air sarcastic tone of the station voice into the station’s social media presence. Throughout, we aimed to give our brand a higher quality, personal touch to make it an explicitly local product.
- Take control of the entire digital product. Corporate had controlled the syndicated editorial content that was appearing on the website. We had all content available to us be fed into our website’s back-end and we explicitly chose which content to publish on the website, then share to social media. We then worked to improve the quality of our in-house digital content, pair it with additional high quality partners.
- Created an essence of quality. Was there an element of perfectionism? Sure. However, we wanted to create the essence that we were a big market product in a big market. This meant dumping low quality images and presentations, instead investing the time to make graphics, on-air elements, and even videos that aimed to, at a minimum, raise the baseline expectations of the audience.
The results:
- Improved PPM market share from a mid-1 range into the mid-3; went from third-best news/talk station in the market to #1 news/talk station in market, defeating direct market rival for the first time in decades.
- As most news/talk stations saw a roughly 25 to 40 percent drop in cume after the COVID-19 pandemic, including the other news/talk stations in the market losing roughly 50 percent of their cume, we saw our cume grow by about 50 percent.
- Throughout this process, our audience composition became younger than the other news/talkers in the market:
- Website traffic increased by roughly four-five multiples, becoming one of the top two web performers in the company (by pageviews and users). This, plus high social media engagement compared to competitors, created additional sponsorship opportunities with station talent to boost revenue.
- The news department (with a staff of three people and no digital staff) became a perennial awards contender in the following categories: Newscast, News Anchor, News Reporter, Digital/Website.