BurkhardWorks: Radio Advertising Results


Radio Advertising Results


Radio Advertising is easy. You now spend, say, 22% of gross revenues on advertising, sales & marketing. So every dollar you invest in radio advertising should bring in $4.54 in extra sales, instantly, Day One, right? Profitable Radio Advertising Results are hard to achieve at first (what isn't?), but if you have the discipline and patience, you can easily sustain them over time. Let's say we've tested a few commercials and fielded favorable results. How do you roll out locally, regionally, or on national networks? The key to success in Radio Advertising is to run memorable, persuasive creative just often enough to pick up the maximum response from this week's Cume Quota while maintaining brand awareness and intent to try among next week's, and next month's. That's a longish sentence, so let's break down into bite-size chunks.
My Free Planning for Profitable Radio Advertising Excel Workbook guides you through each of the Four Parts of a sound radio advertising Strategy. That leads to a Tactical Plan. That leads to actual Results. Send for a copy before you leave this site. Here's what's involved in your last one-minute read. Reference articles to the right.

1. BUY THIN & WIDE. Radio stations and network programs each deliver a fairly loyal weekly cume audience. Some of those listeners are in your Cume Quota. Some of them are at or near Steam Heat. All your response will come from those folks. If they like and remember your creative, when they're ready, they'll Act Now. Many advertisers pound one or two stations to death, hoping to extract every last sale from the audience. It's much smarter to spread the same dollars across five or six stations or network programs, especially those that share listeners. Build awareness across the cume-cume. Meanwhile, Fish like a Pelican.		Cume Quota Steam Heat Pelican Fishing
2. SET TARGET FREQUENCY. Conventional wisdom calls for an average frequency of 3.0 each week or purchase cycle. But "average frequency" is a statistical contrivance of Arbitron. f = 3.0 requires buying enough spots to "reach" the entire cume, even those people who listen to a station as little as 15 minutes a week! Most response comes from the loyal cume or P1s, normally about 70% of the entire cume. These folks Prefer that station to any other. You may only need to reach them once or twice a week. If so, your "average frequency" per station or program may be f = 1.0 or less! Do the math. Save money. I like to plot an Optimum Effective Frequency Range from tests and on-going flights. The method is a bit complex. Click the links to the right.		What Is Optimum Effective Frequency? OEF & Response Rate
3. SET OEF FLIGHT PLANS. How fast you achieve Optimum Effective Frequency, and how often, depends on the speed at which your Cume Quota moves from Room Temperature to Steam Heat. Should you run once a week, twice a month, or once every six weeks? We can infer Steam Speed from the fundamentals of your business category and from clues we gather in test and over time. Proper flighting can prevent Burnout in Direct Response Radio. It can also maintain long-term G at stable levels in any format. We get the same response rate (G) for Dinovite today that we got in early 2006.		Steam Heat Steam Speed OEF Flighting (Concept) OEF Flighting (Math) Predict & Prevent Burnout
4. TRACK G, M, C and X. Response Rate, CPM and Conversion are dynamic variables. Dynamic means. "They Always Change!" Poor conversion sinks most radio advertising tests. Paying too high a CPM sinks most rollouts. Running the same copy against ever-diminishing response sinks most brands. To achieve a target Media Cost per Sale or ROI (say, $4.54 in for every $1.00 out) you must keep an eye on G, M and C. Fortunately, due to the wonders of Sixth Grade Arithmetic, any three acceptable values define a target value for the fourth. Avoid Common Errors. Use my Math:
4. BUILD BACK END PROFITS. A finely tuned Direct Response, Retail, or Brand Support Radio campaign can quickly build awareness, response and trial. Your long-term profits, though, will come from retention, re-orders, brand extensions, and upsells, all of which you can estimate in my Free Planning for Profitable Radio Advertising Excel Workbook. The better you do on the back end, the more you can afford to spend building the front end. Your own customers will happily pay-as-you-go. Are you ready to get started?		Ten Case Histories The Radio Show Advanced Concepts of Radio Planning for ROI.xls