RadioActive Media : Marketing, Promotions and Advertising: Radio, Television, Magazine, Internet.

By the RadioActive Media Team

It seems like every advertiser is only interested in one of two demographic groups: those who are 25-54 or those who are 18-49. These are pretty large demo groups and cover a lot of different types of people. There are so many radio stations to choose from and their ratings  can be within tenths of each other. How do you decide?

Direct response advertising doesn’t necessarily rely just on ratings. Your focus needs to be more on the psychographics of the individual station. If you are selling lawnmowers, you don’t want to advertise on a station where the majority of listeners live in an apartment even if they have the highest ratings in the 25-54 demo. That would be a waste of money and your results would not be stellar.

Most radio stations should have available some type of psychographics for their station. The information can be syndicated like Scarborough or Media Audit or proprietary, gathered by station personnel or a third party. This data can give a better insight into the people behind the numbers. It can tell you where they fall in the 18-49 demo. Are they on the younger end or the older end? Do they have children? Do they own a home? Are they planning on buying a home, a car, a computer or a pair of eye glasses? What is their household income? Where in the metro area do they live?

This type of information is vital to you when you are deciding where to place either your short form or long form advertising. At RadioActive Media we can direct your advertising to the best station for your product.

More articles in this series

Give It Enough Time: Make a Commitment to Your DR Radio Campaign Common Mistake #1

Creating Enough Frequency – Common Mistake #3

Create engaging copy – Common Mistake #4

Tracking Results of your Radio Direct Response Campaign and Making Changes – Common Mistake #5

@radioactivemed

Tags: buying habits, demographics, direct response, long-form advertising, Media Audit, psychographics, Radio Advertising, Scarborough, short form advertising

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 9:17 am and is filed under Expert Advice and Case Studies, Radio Advertising, Radio Direct Response, Sponsored Radio Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.