Remnant Radio is commonly used by Direct Response Radio advertisers to produce a steady trickle of business from fresh Cume Quota prospects at an acceptable media cost per sale.

When local sales reps cannot sell out next week's inventory of spots, a remnant broker may pick up those unsold "remnants" on Thursday or Friday night, for cash up front, at a pre-negotiated rates that are often 60% to 70% less than the rate local retailers and national advertisers pay.  

A $100.00 :60 on WXYZ-AM for only $35.00 must be a good deal, right?   How many would you buy?  40 or 50 a week?  Maybe less...

 

A well-planned Remnant Radio Blitz spreads a reasonable budget thinly (perhaps 15 x :60 per week) across four to ten stations that deliver your Target Audience.  You quickly build awareness and credibility among persons who listen to two or three stations on your list.  A sudden blitz buy can often produce a lemming phenomenon.

"Gee, I hear them everywhere. They must be pretty good!"

Remnant Radio Blitz Planning & Tracking

To plan and track Remnant Radio Blitzes, you must be able to monitor actual orders by area code or DMA ZIP-cluster.  If you just buy some stations to see what happens, you won't really know.

For example, the Cleveland/Akron/Canton DMA covers 372 ZIP Codes and a P25+ Radio population of 2,602,200. A remnant blitz will buy some number of gross impressions among some of those persons.  All or most incremental sales will come from those 372 ZIP Codes.

Your first task is to select a good test market for a Remnant Blitz.  If you are fairly well-established in several markets, use the P & PI Tool to select the hottest natural market for a blitz.

Next, estimate EXPECTED baseline sales in a potential DMA, and then set a reasonable multiple you hope to achieve during a one to three week blitz.

You set an affordable Media Percentage of Incremental Revenue, i.e. a Budget, and impute your average conversion rate from in-bound telemarketers or your website.

My brokers supply their own estimated Cost per GRP for the market. (Good brokers do NOT reveal their spot prices!)

That input plus 8th Grade Arithmetic produces market-wide CPM, an estimated number of Gross Impressions, a target number of Inquiries, and our target Response Rate (G).

After the Blitz, we track actual incremental business from actual dollars placed and compute actual multiples, Cash In : Cash Out, and Blitz G.  You'll use those refined values to plan future markets.  Click here for the math.

Sustaining Remnant Radio Flighting

If you wish to support back end reorders you can set your sustaining budget as a modest percentage of target re-order revenues.  Run proportionately fewer spots on the same stations four or five weeks hence.

Sustaining mini-blitzes protect the establish base, encourage re-ups from previous first-timers, and attract trial from people who have just achieved Steam Heat in your category.

Conservative initial planning can produce better than expected initial remnant radio blitz results.  Subsequent sustaining flights can build your up front and pipeline business at an ever-diminishing MCPS.