Speaker Series: RadioMilwaukee’s Jordan Lee Visits Rocket Clicks

As part of Rocket Click’s Speaker Series, Jordan Lee, assistant program director for 88Nine RadioMilwaukee, visited our office to talk about his work in the radio industry and how he interacts with his listeners and the community.

Jordan Lee feels music has been and still is a major building block in his life. He believes “music is the one language that every culture on this planet speaks. It is man’s great equalizer.” He began his music career as DJ Madhatter, spinning records for more than ten years in Milwaukee. His transition to radio was unexpected but worthwhile, and we are thrilled he was able to chat with us.

We’ve highlighted some of his points and recontextualized them for our work in search engine optimization and paid search.

Psychographic vs. Demographic

One of the points Jordan kept referring back to was the idea of psychographics versus demographics. Rather than targeting specific cultural or economic groups, 88Nine tries to appeal to people of similar personalities, values, and opinions.

Psychographics, Jordan said, let you target specific people based on interests rather than surface level data like income or ethnicity. You’re targeting people that care about the same things or think in similar ways. To Jordan, this means finding similarities where they might not be as obvious. That little old lady at the end of the block might own the same heavy metal tee shirt as you…you just never know.

Our Take

For both our own clients and our clients’ clients, how might we benefit from looking for psychographic data? Are we missing out on potential audiences because we fail to see connections that demographical information doesn’t give us?

Jordan spoke a lot about finding connections between the radio station and real people. As marketers, we try to do the same for our clients and their audiences. How can we connect our clients with their customers beyond just trying to sell them something?

Relying on Unreliable Metrics

According to Jordan, one of the challenges RadioMilwaukee faces is putting a concrete value on their success. Most radio stations would rely on ratings, but niche radio takes up such a small percentage for those measures that it’s too unreliable for 88Nine.

Instead, the station measures three levels of engagement— content, digital listeners, and memberships— to determine at least some level of success. Jordan’s job is to act as a bridge between the interaction of those three metrics and the station’s audience, trying to figure out how to guide his listeners towards more engagement.

Our Take

As digital marketers, we rely heavily on a large number of metrics to give us an idea of how well we’re doing. Unfortunately, there is no single metric that says something is or isn’t working. Instead, they are a guide to tell us which individual parts may or may not be going well.

The jobs of SEO analysts and PPC managers mirror that of Jordan’s. We have to figure out how the different metrics influence each other and figure out which parts of them are or aren’t working. Then we figure out how we can help our clients improve those areas. It’s a process that never ends, especially when the best practices of digital marketing change almost as often as new music.

What Can We Do Better Than Anyone Else?

One thing Jordan loves about RadioMilwaukee is trying to figure out how it can stand out from the other radio stations in the area. For instance, 88Nine puts a heavy emphasis on injecting personality into its content, mixing in feel good stories from the community between tracks. It’s a process Jordan calls “giving you applesauce with medicine in it.”

It’s RadioMilwaukee’s unique characteristics, like treating Milwaukee bands the same as national bands, that give the station its own personality. They want to build a brand that can stand apart from national brands and top 40 stations, and by focusing on community 88Nine is doing just that.

Our Take

Discovering what you can do better than anyone else is crucial for the success of any business. For Rocket Clicks, we’re constantly evaluating what we offer our clients and how we can do it better than anyone else. You can see it in our leadership-driven business model or our spotlight on client testimonials.

In our work, we put an emphasis on uncovering what makes our clients unique. If we understand what they do that their competitors can’t, we know what their advantage is, making our job easier.

Whether you’re an individual marketer, you’re in-house or you’re part of an internet marketing firm, you can always look to other areas of business and media for inspiration.

Thanks for chatting with us, Jordan!