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

By the RadioActive Media Team

We live in an age of instant gratification. People want what they want and they want it NOW! We are impatient for results. If you want to make sure that your target audience hears your ad enough times to take action, don’t skimp on the length of your campaign. You should plan on a minimum of a 13 week commitment for your schedule. Anything less won’t bring you the results you are expecting and you just might miss some potential customers.

With radio direct response campaigns you will already be getting a sense of performance with great frequency at its inception that sets the benchmark for improvement as the campaign progresses.

For clarification let’s make sure we are defining radio direct response in the same way. Long Form direct response is 30 or 60 minute shows that you’ll most likely hear on the weekend or in the evenings, but can be scheduled whenever the station has airtime available. Most common show themes include mortgage, financial, home repair, real estate type shows, but Sunday morning religious shows can also be considered long form direct response. Short form is, well, shorter! They run a minute or less (:5, :10, :15 or :30) and ask you to do something – call, e-mail, text – take some kind of action.

Let’s look at long form. You can promote the heck out the show on the station you are running, but it doesn’t mean everyone will tune in the first show out of the gate. It might be 2 to 3 weeks before the public becomes aware of the show’s existence or remembers to listen to the show. Sometimes a listener will stumble upon a show and will think wow – great show, but it can take a while before it becomes a habit. Statistics show it takes any where from 4 to 6 weeks to create a habit and to tell others. Remember you are building your audience over time and allowing your expert to build a rapport with listeners.  Don’t shortchange your program by pulling it after a month because results aren’t what you wanted or expected.

What about short form?  Do you know how many times someone needs to hear your ad before they act? Some people will respond right away, but most people will take several hearings before they take action. Depending upon your product or service, it might take 6 to 8 times before someone is moved to act. With an ever evolving radio audience you want to make sure your message gets the proper exposure and you don’t want to pull your ad before that happens. When your Account Executive shows you a schedule, the frequency absolutely has to be a minimum of 2 using PPM ratings and a minimum of 3 using diary ratings. (Check your market to see what rating system is currently being used.) Any less frequency won’t work and you can bet your AE doesn’t have your best interest at heart.

The bottom line is don’t be impatient with your radio advertising campaign. Give it time to capture its audience: 13 weeks for long form and make sure your short form campaign has a good reach with a 6-8 frequency for your listening audience.

More articles in this series  

Finding the Right Radio Station for Your Product – Common Mistake #2

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

By Jeff Pollak

It is that time of year again when finance and marketing teams work that love-hate relationship in putting together the marketing budget for the new fiscal year.  Whether you like it or not, it is as certain as death and taxes.  Many small business owners and marketing managers often overlook the full potential of their marketing efforts.

There are many ways to go about creating a marketing budget, however, there is one common mistake most often made by business owners:  projecting out a full year’s marketing budget appropriate to the expected results.   Small business owners tend to be a bit conservative when projecting their marketing budget as well as their return on investment (ROI.)  Allocating too thin of a marketing budget usually results in missed opportunities to grow their business as desired, or exceeding the budgeted amounts.

As a general rule of thumb, new businesses should appropriate 20% of the budget towards their marketing efforts.  However, in today’s competitive environment and multi mediums of marketing, that may be understated.  It is still surprising how frequently businesses fail to even allocate 20% of the budget towards marketing endeavors.  Even if you have the best sales staff in the world, you need marketing.  Whether it is used for producing professional collateral materials, launching a pay-per-click online campaign, or going full scale with a radio or TV campaign, money needs to be set aside to build and advocate the brand.

As any good marketer is aware, no one medium works alone.  In my many years in marketing, I have come to know first-hand that communicating a clear message is essential to the success of a campaign.  The message should not necessarily be that of your own preference, but that which will translate well to your targeted customer.  As difficult as it may be, the marketer’s own predisposition needs to be put aside in favor of the preference by their customers.

Marketing should not be considered an expense but an investment in your business.

With any investment, the key decision component should be the return on that investment.  This is where it becomes complicated. Analyzing the results can be clouded by different factors. First off, each individual medium contributes to the overall success.  Let’s assume you are using radio and driving customers to a proprietary web address.    The radio campaign has a call to action incorporated into the message.  In a perfect advertising world, the customer acts exactly as we expect, the radio ad suggests going to a proprietary web page and taking action.  In reality, the listener may simply Google the company name as a result of hearing the ad on the radio.  That is how individual results become clouded with credit going to the online campaign over that of radio.  It is clear that mediums do not exist in silos and instead work in concert to enhance one another’s own success toward the common goal.

Slicing and Dicing

In addition to the overall budgets being too thin and often less than a 20% allocation, the budget is sliced and diced across mediums, promotions, times of the year and other factors. I believe in marketing because I know and I can prove that marketing (in our case Radio) drives business. Too much slicing and dicing diminishes the power of any campaign.

Calendaring

Media planners are very good at “calendaring” or creating a visual schedule for the fiscal year.  This calendar should be multi-layered taking into account the seasonality of the business (if any), special promotional activities (sales) and the ability to take advantage of marketing specials.  Take advantage early and get the worm; specials for 1st quarter begins now.

Longevity

Too often I hear “well that didn’t work” and it doesn’t matter what “it” is.  Often the campaign was not long enough to build any significant momentum. Some campaigns are planned to be short in duration to promote a holiday or annual sale and a significant amount of the budget may be allocated to this campaign. I will go back to building and advocating the brand.  This is not a short term goal, but a sustainable effort that builds on itself over time communicating a clear message that is essential to the success of a campaign and therefore the business.  Give some more thought to the long-term goal over the demand on the budget of special sales and annual events.

It is early in the year so take another look at your budget with both short-term and long-term goals in mind.