Too many business owners and office managers are making poor decisions about which radio stations they should be advertising with. They think that they should be on the stations that they listen to, or they should be on the most or highest rated station in the market. They even (as crazy as it sounds) end up buying from the station rep that they like the most and don’t really consider much else. But why would they look any further? One of their reps has brought with them studies that show that their station is the “perfect fit for their demographic”… Sound ridiculous… it’s true.

Here’s the thing, business owners, office managers, or administrators really don’t know any better. After all, they are not marketing professionals and they do the best they can with what they have.

Let me help shed a little on media buying (radio):

After you have decided that radio is the right advertising medium that your business is interested in doing, the next step is to contact an account executive at each one of the 40 or so radio station in your market area and begin your research. You will be given station rates, ratings, and demographic information (age, gender, income, etc) about each one.

First you will want to determine which stations best fit your demographic and give them special attention.

Then take the rates and ratings (which represent a certain number of people) and determine what the cost per rating point is. This help “level the playing field” and gives you a very accurate cost for reaching the same amount of people on each station.

You will also need to consider if your product/services cater to a group of people that may heavily sku to a specific type of music genre and factor that in. Example: I sell sporting good and hunting equipment… a country music formatted station may be more saturated with more of my consumers then other genres.

Finally,  after you have narrowed it down to a few of the top candidates you will want to begin negotiating those stations to get more aggressive rates.

There you have it… almost. There are many other variables that can factor into making a decision about where to spend your radio budget but i am out of time…

The typical formula for tracking the “effectiveness” of a marketing campaign for most business owners is pretty simple. They run an Ad, in one or more avenues and hope that the phones ring. Once the phone rings they rely on office staff to hopefully ask how they heard of you or where they got your number. (tip: your office staff doesn’t think this information is really that important and they likely give it little thought, if at all).

Often, it is not as easy as that. Example: We track the phone calls of our clients and these phone calls are recorded. We were reviewing the recorded calls from a specific number that was only on their print ad but after listening to the call, the caller said that she had heard them on the radio and then just received a mailer and so she called.

This is an example of how advertising works together to brand, create top of mind awareness and gets your phones to ring. If you are not putting special tracking numbers on your marketing material and analyzing the data regularly then you are wasting marketing money. This is just one reason why your business should have a competent advertising agency working to ensure that nothing is being missed and everything is being considered when you are determining whether or not a specific medium was successful.