Know-How Exchange : Other

Ngassa,

I hope you're having a great day and a wonderful experience currently reaching your audience of listeners.

WHO IS YOUR TARGET MARKET?
I would say it is probably wise to find out what who your target market is. One way to identify this target would be to identify your current customer by asking why (they) your current customers are listening to your radio station already? What do they like most about what you are currently providing for them? Now take this information and identify if other listeners where you would desire to expand your target audience range would be interested in these types of things in their communities.

ATTRACT YOUR CUSTOMER WITH ONLY WHAT THEY WANT...
One other easy way to do this would be to identify the worldview or beliefs and biases of your existing customers. Take this knowledge and frame all of your marketing around these beliefs and biases. You will be able to isolate your target audience by attracting them to the things that interest them most about what you provide. What you will eventually provide your customer with will be only the types of things that they are interested in or attracted to. Let me know what you think and let's see if we can narrow this down for you. Is there anything else I can do for you?

Your Servant, Deremiah, *CPE (Customer Passion Evangelist)

Why do you want to expand the reach? Is it for your ego, or is it because you think you'll be able to charge your advertisers more?

Very often when you enlarge your audience, you do a less good job of delivering a specific target, and your advertisers find that their messages are delivered to a lot of people who really are not in THEIR targets.

You need to figure out what the big objective is first, and then decide whether geographic expansion is the best strategy for accomplishing that objective. Maybe you'd be better off staying with your current geography/audience and just doing a better job of reaching them.

Are you familiar with the broadcasting ministry in Tanzania?


Ministry of Works Communications and Transport
PO Box 9423
Dar es Salaam
Tanzania
Tel: +255 51 37641
Fax: +255 51 36462

They don’t appear to have a dedicated website, but there is some sparse information on:

https://www.mwanzacommunity.org/communication.html

If you intend to service the Tanzanian market from across the border, then you would be well served to obtain clearance or risk interference on the airways. If your station is “International” and totally commercial in nature, the government is not known to jam broadcasts, but if you intend to take an interest in more controversial issues, you will need to tread more carefully.

If you wish to do it from within Tanzania’s borders then obtaining the appropriate license is essential.

As to surveying your potential market and looking at the background, have a peek at the work carried out by DFID (Department for International Development) in the UK. They carried out a similar survey for Uganda which could be used as a model for establishing a similar exercise for Tanzania:

https://www.bdsknowledge.org/dyn/bds/docs/240/MSMW4P_Report.pdf

Good luck with the project – there is a great need for independent public service information broadcasting in Africa and one of the best ways this can be achieved is via commercially successful independents. It’s not easy to keep on the right side of fickle local authorities but there is a perceived and real demand for broadcasting services which tell the listeners a bit more than how great this week’s “Great and revered leader” is!

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions