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

By The RadioActive Media Team

Radio offers so many advantages over other media for advertising, but sometimes advertisers forget some important things about radio advertising. This is the first of a series in which we will expound on each of these common mistakes.

Give it enough time

Advertisers never give enough time to their advertising schedule. Most figure if they don’t see results in 4 or 5 weeks, it’s not working. WRONG! Give your schedule at least 13 weeks to work. Listeners can hear your spot anywhere from 3 to 10 times before they take action. If your schedule is too short in length, you may miss an opportunity to reach someone at just the right time. Prepare to be on the air for a minimum of 13 weeks and your response will increase.

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

Hit the right target market

Now that you have your 13 week commitment, make sure you are on the right stations. I know that sounds simple, but your favorite radio station may not be the right audience for your product. Make sure your target audience is the audience that listens to that station.

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

Run the right amount of spots

Again, it sounds simple, but you want to make sure you are running enough spots to reach your target audience. You want to create the right frequency to get response. If you know that your prospects take six times to respond to your ad, make sure you have enough frequency in your schedule to get that response.

Creating Enough Frequency – Common Mistake #3

Create engaging copy

You are not advertising on TV; you are advertising on radio, so paint a picture and have copy that engages the listener. Change it up frequently; don’t let it get stale. People respond to different things and you want to get the most response out of your audience. Also, you will want to have a simple phone number to remember or text to and an easy website to direct people to. Your audience may not be able to write your number or website down immediately so you want it to be something that they will remember easily.

Create engaging copy – Common Mistake #4

Track your response results and make changes

When you track your responses, you’ll know what time slots are working best for you. Then you can make adjustments to your schedule to get the best results. Don’t be afraid to change things up.

Radio advertising can give you the best bang for your buck. Just remember to keep these things in mind. Radio isn’t strange or difficult, but you can’t think of it in the same way you think of television.

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.