New Marketing Muscle from an Old Media (cont.)
Why Consider Radio in the First Place?
Radio has an enormous daily programmed fan base. Some 93% of Americans listen to radio every week, most of them every day and they do so more than cable TV watching and newspaper reading combined.
Radio is the “mobile media”. It’s usually the first advertising exposure a consumer has when they get in their cars with a shopping goal and it’s one of the last they experience prior to purchase.
Flexibility. As a practice, radio does not charge for producing spot commercials and will do several over a period of time to avoid consumer boredom and button pushing. And, radio ad strategies can be stopped and started on a dime to reflect unpredictable market competition or business operation changes. Unlike traditional printed newspaper or TV ads, the head time for producing and then airing your radio spots is minimal.
Demographic Match. The freedom for selecting age range via the correct stations or station format, or ad times within a day, the days of the week for the ads etc., allows you to tailor your message to focus on the exact consumer grouping you’re aiming for.
Cost per qualified consumer is lowest of all media. Because radio can be focused by age, gender, income and somewhat by
geography, its likelihood of hitting your targeted consumers is much higher than the shot gun approach of news print or broadcast TV.
Some have tried radio without success. When we do a postmortem on their efforts we usually find that one of the following elements was present:
- Inconsistent use of radio/jumping in and out of spot runs for weeks at a time
- Use of wrong station formats i.e.. AM talk radio
- Ineffective ad content or poor production
- Wrong use of day parts and ad run times
- Too much reliance on their stations “managing” the ad schedule
- Poor follow thru by advertiser and or station personnel