Radio Advertising Facts

Tag: advertising

  • Advertising Is Nothing More Than Inviting People To Do Business With You

    Advertising Is Nothing More Than Inviting People To Do Business With You

    There is a chain of hamburger places in Las Vegas called “Fatburger.” It’s a California-based company. I’ve lived in Las Vegas for 18 years and had never eaten at one until today (September 17, 2021).  Primarily because I was never invited.  I see their stores all the time, but I hear nothing about them.  And let’s face it, the name “Fatburger” is not necessarily appealing.  However, for lack of a better idea, I was headed to Wendy’s today for lunch.  I noticed a Fatburger right across the street, and feeling adventurous, I decided to give it a try.  It was actually quite good.  As good or better than Five Guys, especially since the burger I got was topped with chili, like The Varsity in Atlanta.

    Will I go back?  Yes, I will.

    Would it have taken me 18 years to go there if I had been invited?  No, had I been invited, I would have gone 18 years ago.  But, because they do no radio advertising (or any other advertising I’ve noticed), they’ve missed 18 years of business from me and my family.  All those trips I made to Carl’s Jr., In-N-Out, Burger King, Wendy’s, McDonalds, and Jack In The Box, for somewhat inferior burgers, could have been trips to Fatburger instead.  However, I was never invited.  That’s the part about advertising that most business owners don’t understand – ADVERTISING IS NOTHING MORE THAN INVITING PEOPLE TO DO BUSINESS WITH YOU!  If you want more business, invite people in!

     

  • Where Should You Advertise?

    Where Should You Advertise?

    What’s the best medium for local advertising? According to Michael Corbett, author of “The 33 Ruthless Rules of Local Advertising”, it’s NOT the newspaper. According to Corbett, “the readers of most newspapers are middle aged and older. If you are looking for buyers under the age of forty, you’ll find fewer of them in the newspaper than in any other media.” Corbett says that newspapers are “a place for shoppers to compare prices and information after they’ve already been motivated to buy.”

    Why then do many local business continue to spend the bulk of their advertising budget in the newspaper? According to Corbett, “he newspaper has been the traditional medium for many local businesses. For centuries, it was the only medium. But most consumers don’t rely on the newspaper as much as they once did. They get their motivation and information from many sources. The readership ages have changed; buying habits and priorities have changed; media choices have changed. The only thing that hasn’t seem to change is the tradition of thinking that the newspaper is still the motivation source for most consumers. It clearly is not. That role has been taken over by TV and radio, either of which consumers spend more time with than they do newspapers.”

    Corbett concluded by saying, “newspapers, in my experience, are neither appropriate nor affordable as your primary vehicle for domination or impact.”

    So, where do you advertise to get the most impact? Corbett suggests one of the two “motivational mediums”, radio or broadcast TV (not cable). Corbett also suggests you “dominate” a medium in order to achieve maximum effectiveness. Since most local advertisers cannot afford to dominate TV, the logical choice is radio.

    Quoted from “The 33 Ruthless Rules of Local Advertising”
    by Michael Corbett
    Pinnacle Books, Inc

  • Radio Advertising Facts & Figures

    Radio Advertising Facts & Figures

    Even though competitors like to portray radio as an aging technology, the reality is radio advertising remains an effective tool for reaching consumers in today’s fragmented media landscape. Extensive research by the Radio Advertising Bureau reveals a robust weekly audience of radio listeners.

    Who’s Listening?
    Over 92 percent of Americans age 12 and up listen to radio each week, creating an audience of over 235 million listeners. Among 12- to 17-year-olds, who are perceived as not listening to the radio, nearly 90 percent listen weekly.

    Where Do They Listen?
    The majority of radio listening occurs in cars, with 73 percent of adults age 18 and up listening while driving on a typical weekday. The second most popular location for listening is at home. The number of people listening to commercial radio online now includes nearly 20 percent of the people who listen each week.

    What Are They Listening To?
    There are over 10,000 commercial radio stations in the United States. There are more country music stations in America than any other type with over 2,000 outlets. News/talk is second with 1,375 stations.

    Who’s Advertising?
    Major brands such as Verizon, Home Depot, Walt Disney and Burger King are among the top 20 largest radio advertisers. The largest advertising categories for radio include retail, automotive, insurance, restaurants and financial institutions.

    How Much Do They Spend?
    Radio advertising revenue exceeded $19 billion in 2008, and over $13 billion came from local businesses.

    Article written by Mike Stern.

  • Radio Advertising Tips

    Radio Advertising Tips

    Here are some concepts to keep in mind as you plan your Radio advertising:

    • Feature one item, or a limited number, per commercial to insure listener remembrance. You can’t sell ten items in thirty seconds.
    • If you must use price, use one or a few only. This way you won’t confuse the listener.
    • Is a phone number necessary? If it can’t get an order or sell a customer, and if you can’t make it the centerpiece of the ad, don’t use it.
    • Spend a reasonable amount of money. Don’t expect good results unless you invest appropriately.
    • Use saturation for hard-hitting impact. You can’t get the job done with one spot. Repetition – frequency – is one of radio’s biggest persuaders.
    • Distinction is an effective tool for attracting people. That sound effect, theme music or “sound signature” will help your ads make an impression.
    • Don’t select radio programs or formats for your own personal likes or dislikes, but rather for the audience you want to reach.
    • The best use of radio advertising is day in, day out, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. The results from radio advertising build over time, and they are lasting results.
    • Don’t try to reach too many people all at once. It is better to reach 10% of your prospects 100% of the way than to reach 100% of your prospects only 10% of the way.
  • How to Budget Advertising Costs

    How to Budget Advertising Costs

    Build it and they will come… a motto which is the downfall of many new, small businesses.

    The problem is, “they” often don’t know you exist! Ideally, you have figured out that you will need to advertise your business in order to attract customers.

    That leads to the question, how much money should be spent on advertising?

    The U.S. Small Business Administration has a lot of wonderful resources for the small business. There is a very helpful section on their website that addresses this:  Click here.

    In creating an advertising and marketing budget, the SBA says: “Because marketing needs and costs vary widely, there are no simple rules for determining what you marketing budget should be. A popular method with small business owners is to allocate a small percentage of gross sales for the most recent year. This usually amounts to about two percent for an existing business. However, if you are planning on launching a new product or business, you may want to increase your marketing budget figure, to as much as 10 percent of your expected gross sales. Another method used by small business owners is to analyze and estimate the competition’s budget and either match or exceed it.”

    That information is also available from the SBA: Click here.

    So how much will advertising cost you? Perhaps a better question to ask yourself; “How much is NOT advertising costing you?”

  • How Advertising Works

    How Advertising Works

    The successful Philadelphia retailer John Wannamaker once said, “I know that half of my advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half.”

    That feeling of uncertainty about advertising plagues many business people. They know they should advertise, but they don’t really understand the process … so most of them simply end up doing, as one local businessman said recently, “what my father did.”

    Regardless of what medium or media you choose – they all have their strengths and weaknesses – there are certain principles that always apply.

    Effectiveness is a Combination of Reach and Frequency
    “Reach” can be defined as the number of people who hear or see your message over time. “Frequency” is how many times the average person hears or sees your message. Your advertising needs to reach as many people as possible, as often as possible.

    Those million-dollar ads you see on the Super Bowl have great reach but lousy frequency. An ad run on the front page of every edition of the Left-Handed Accountants’ Daily (if there were such a thing) would have lousy reach but good frequency.

    Research shows that your prospect has to hear or see your message more than three times before they’ll act on it. So you need to make sure that the advertising medium you select has a wide enough audience for your needs, but more importantly, is designed and priced for frequency.

    Keep Your Message Simple and Consistent
    Many people don’t realize that if they run two or more ads in their schedule, they are reducing their effective frequency. So the best plan, for maximum results, is to run one and only one ad at a time. If you absolutely need to run different copy, have your advertising consultant construct a “shell” that remains the same, with the different copy inserted into that shell. That way the first thing your listener hears or your reader sees is that consistent impression, even though the middle or your ad may vary.

    If you are running in more than one medium, you’ll get the maximum impact if your message is the same in all media. You should coordinate the efforts of all your media representatives to make sure that your message is consistent everywhere.

    Concentrate Your Advertising
    A common advertising mistake is to do too little in too many media. It is better to dominate one medium than to water down results by spreading out your ads.

    On the other hand, a “media mix” is a powerful way to get your message to as many people as possible. There is research that shows how you can reduce your investment in one medium without significantly affecting effectiveness – which frees up budget that can be used in another medium. (Our radio marketing consultants have the details on this.)

    Test Your Advertising
    Most of the time you don’t just throw money down a hole and expect it to work for you … and you shouldn’t do that with advertising, either! Advertising should be an investment, not an expense.

    If a friend of yours told you about an investment that produced a guaranteed 50% return – and you could verify it absolutely – you’d scramble to find as much money as you could to put into it. Similarly, if you are getting measurable results from your advertising program and you know how and why, you’ll advertise more!

    Smart business people test their ads, their schedules, and their media – but not all at the same time! You need to test only one variable at a time.

    How do you test? Well, you don’t test a medium by asking customers to “Mention you heard about it from …” People don’t do that! The best way to test is to run one ad, one schedule, one medium at a time – and see what happens to your traffic and your cash register. (Be sure you understand how much time you need to give the medium and the schedule to work; your advertising representative can help you with this.)

    Keep Testing
    Once you’ve found the ideal medium or media for your business, understand that things can change over time. Here are some reasons to reopen the issue:

    The competitive situation among media has changed (more media competitors, new opportunities, different rates, etc.).
    Your “share of voice” on your medium or media has changed (your competitors are advertising more, so your message is cutting through less).

    You have saturated the prospects of a given medium (declining traffic is one indicator of this)

    Keep Advertising!
    There’s an old saying: “A funny thing happens when you don’t advertise – nothing.” If you want your business to grow, you have to get your name and your products or services in front of your customers and prospects – and keep them there.

    Even if you just want your business to stay where it is, you need to advertise – because it’s a proven fact that you will lose up to 25% of your customers each year to relocation, competitors or death.

    A Brief Commercial
    As we’ve said elsewhere, our Radio stations and website are not in the business of “selling ads.” We sincerely want to help you achieve the greatest possible success, and advertising is an important part of that success. We want to work with you in a marketing partnership to suggest proven, creative ways to achieve greater success through advertising. If we mutually determine that we can help you, nobody will work harder to earn and keep your business – and we’ll even suggest complementary media when appropriate.

    But if our exploration shows that one or more of our stations are not right for you at this time, we’ll suggest media that are more on target. We’d rather part friends than rope you into something that doesn’t work!

  • 12 Causes of Advertising Failure

    12 Causes of Advertising Failure

    1) The desire for instant gratification. The ad which creates sufficient urgency to cause people to respond immediately is also the ad most likely to be forgotten immediately following the “expiration” of the offer. Such ads are of little use in establishing an identity for the advertiser in the mind of the consumer.

    2)  Attempting to reach more people than the budget will allow. For a “media mix” to be effective, each element in the mix must have sufficient repetition to establish “retention” in the mind of the prospect. Too often, however, the result of a media mix is too much reach, not enough frequency. Will you reach 100% of the people and convince them 10% of the way? Or will you reach 10% of the people and convince them 100% of the way? The cost is the same.

    3)  Assuming the business owner knows best. The business owner is uniquely unqualified to see his company or his product objectively. He is on the inside, looking out, trying to describe himself to a person on the outside looking in. It’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle. Too much product knowledge causes the business owner to answer questions that no one is asking. This makes for extremely ineffective advertising.

    4)  Unsubstantiated claims such as, “Highest quality at the lowest price. Advertisers will often have what the customer wants, but fail to offer any evidence. A cliché is nothing less than as unsubstantiated claim to the public is tired of hearing. You must prove what you say in every ad. The prospect will not make a new decision about your product until you have given him new information and a new perspective. Do your ads supply new information? Do they provide a new perspective? If not, prepare to be disappointed with the results.

    5)  Improper use of passive media. Non-intrusive media, such as newspaper and yellow pages, require the use of a reticular activator (such as a photo or illustration) because passive media tends to reach only those buyers who are actively in the market for the product. Passive media is very poor at reaching prospects prior to their need, which means it is extremely difficult for passive media to create a predisposition toward your company. With patience, the consistent use of intrusive media (such as radio and television) will win the heart of the customer before he is in the market for the product.

    6)  Creating ads instead of campaigns.  It is foolish to believe a single ad can ever tell the entire story.  The most effective, persuasive and memorable ads are those most like a rhinoceros. They will each make a single point very powerfully.  An advertiser with seventeen different things to say should commit to a campaign of at least seventeen different ads, with each ad being given sufficient repetition to accomplish retention in the mind of the prospect.

    7)  Obedience to unwritten rules.   For some insane reason, advertisers want their ads to look and sound like ads.  Why is this?

    8)  Late week schedules.  Advertisers justify their unreasonable focus on Thursday and Friday advertising with the statement, “We need to reach the customer just before he goes shopping.” Why do these advertisers choose to compete for the prospect’s attention each Thursday and Friday when they can have a nice, quiet chat all alone with the prospect each Sunday, Monday and Tuesday?

    9)  Overconfidence in qualitative targeting.  The importance of qualitative data has been grossly overestimated by many advertisers and media professionals.  In reality, Saying The Wrong Thing has killed far more ad campaigns than Reaching The Wrong People.  It is amazing how many people become “the right people,” when you are saying the right thing.

    10)  Event driven marketing.  A special event should be judged only by its ability to help you more clearly define your market position and substantiate your claims.  If one percent of the people who hear your ad for a special event actually choose to come, you will be in desperate need of a traffic cop and a bus to shuttle people from remote parking lots.  Yet your real investment will be in the 99% who did not come to the event!  What did your ad say to them?

    11)  Great production without great copy.  Too many ads today are creative without being persuasive.  “Slick, clever, funny, creative, and different”, are poor substitutes for, “informative, believable, memorable and persuasive.”

    12)  Confusing “response” with “results.”   The goal of advertising is to create a clear awareness of your company and its Unique Selling Proposition.   Unfortunately, most advertisers evaluate their ads by the comments they hear from the people around them.  The slickest, clearest, funniest, most creative and most different ads are the ones most likely to generate these comments.  See the problem?  When we confuse “response” with “results” we create “attention getting ads” which say absolutely nothing.

    Article Compliments of Roy H. Williams Marketing in Austin, Texas. 

  • 10 Reasons to Advertise

    10 Reasons to Advertise

    Why Should You Advertise? Here are 10 Good Reasons…

    My store has been here forever…  Everybody knows about us…  We’re doing just fine without advertising…  I have such a great location, I don’t need to advertise…  Don’t kid yourself.  It’s virtually impossible to build a successful businesses without advertising.  There are many good reasons to advertise, including attracting new customers, increasing sales and business growth.  Below we present 10 of the best (courtesy of the Radio Advertising Bureau).

    1)  You must advertise to reach new customers.

     The market changes constantly.  New families moving into the area mean new potential customers for you, or for your competition.  Customer’s income levels are constantly changing, which means changes in lifestyles, needs and buying habits.

    2)  You must advertise continuously.

    Shoppers don’t have the same store loyalty they once had.  Automobiles give shoppers mobility and freedom.  The National Retail Merchants Association says “mobility and non-loyalty are rampant.  Stores must promote to get former customers to return and to attract new ones.”

    3)  You must advertise to influence shoppers throughout the buying cycle.

    People often go from store to store comparing prices, quality and service.  Advertising must reach them consistently through the entire decision-making process.  For example, the average new car purchase is a 13-week cycle.  Your name must be fresh in their ears and minds when they ultimately decide to buy.

    4)  You must advertise because it pays off over a long period.

    Your advertising today is selling customers whose buying decision may be weeks away.  Advertising gives you a long-term advantage over competitors who cut back or cancel advertising.  A 5-year study of more than 3,000 companies found that advertisers who maintained or expanded advertising over the five years saw their sales increase an average of 100%.

    5)  You must advertise to generate more store traffic.

    Continuous store traffic is the first step toward sales increases and expanding your base of shoppers.  For every 100 items shoppers plan to buy, they make at least 30 unanticipated “in-store” purchases.

    6)  You must advertise to make more sales.

    Advertising works!  Businesses that succeed are almost always strong, steady advertisers.  Look around – you’ll find the most aggressive and consistent advertisers are almost always the most successful.

    7)  You must advertise because there is always business to generate.

    As long as you’re open for business, you’re got overhead to meet and new people to reach.  Advertising will generate customers now, and in the future.  Your doors are open.  Even the slowest days produce some sales.

    8)  You must advertise to keep a healthy positive image.

    In today’s competitive marketplace, rumors and bad news travel fast.  Advertising corrects misleading gossip and punctures “overstated” bad news.  Advertising that is vigorous and positive can bring shoppers into your store regardless of the economy.

    9)  You must advertise to maintain store morale.

    When advertising and promotion budgets are suddenly cut or cancelled, salespeople may become alarmed or demoralized.  Positive advertising boots morale.  It gives your staff strong, positive, motivational support.

    10)  You must advertise because your competition is advertising.

    There are only so many consumers in the market ready to buy at one time.  You must advertise to keep your share of customers or you will lose them to the more aggressive competitors.