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Radio Advertising Strategy |
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Radio Advertising is easy. Just run some Urgent Announcer Bullet-Point Copy on your favorite local station for a few dollars of wallet money. If anything happens, you're elated. If nothing happens: "See! Radio doesn't work!"
Radio Advertising Strategy is hard. It's hard to write a solid Brand Promise and an accurate Media Strategy. It's tough to set financial goals and a firm budget. If you do make the effort you are much more likely to be elated at the results. If you don't, you'll just be lobbing mortar shells at the broad side of a barn door, 500 yards away, through dense fog. My Free Planning for Profitable Radio Advertising Excel Workbook guides you through each of the Four Parts of a sound radio advertising strategy. It will take you 20 minutes to two hours to complete. Send for a copy before you leave this site. Here's what's involved, in about one minute. Reference articles to the right. |
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1. WRITE A BRAND PROMISE. First, answer Seven Easy Questions about your customers, your brand, and your competitors. That leads to a succinct Brand Promise: - One Single Sentence that will guide all executions in radio, or any other media. Lose the Bullet Points. Only one or two of them are likely to hit anything. |
Seven Easy Questions |
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2. DEFINE THE TARGET AUDIENCE. Second, define the size and composition of your Target Audience using the same demographic labels Arbitron uses to generate ratings. The more precise the definition, the more accurately we can select and buy the right stations, networks, and network programming. |
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3. ESTIMATE PURCHASE CYCLE. Third, estimate the length of time the average prospect actively or passively shops your category each week, month or year. The objectives are to determine your Weekly Cume Quota of available customers and to match flight lengths with the purchase cycles of the overall Target Audience. |
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4. SET A BUDGET. Without a budget and a deadline there is no reality. Just wishful thinking. Fourth, we set acceptable long-term financial objectives, beginning with a Target Media Cost per Sale or a Target Media Percentage of Revenue. In order to meet your long-term goals, we have to hit several intermediary targets such as CPM, response rate, and your own conversion rate of inquiries (calls, click, ups..) to sales. Of these, the last exercises the most leverage on MCPS. |
Media Cost Per Sale |
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5. AN EXAMPLE! We go through all this in advance so we'll know what to expect from your first 10-Day Test to your nth network commercial. Say that most of your sales come from Homeowners Aged 35+ earning $55K+. Twelve percent of all such folks buy five times a year or once every ten weeks. In a test market of 1,000,000 population, there might be 150,000 (15%) such persons - your Target Audience. Of them, 18,000 (12%) will buy from you or your competitors five times this year, generating 90,000 total annual sales, or about 1,800 sales every week. We'd buy stations whose weekly cume audiences include at least 15% P35+ Homeowners. We'd plan to run the advertising at least once every ten weeks, probably for one to three weeks per flight. We'd also estimate the Weekly Cume Quota of 160 active shoppers from a station such as WXYZ-AM using simple arithmetic. How many of those available sales you capture depends on how well the creative, the media buy, and your own phone, web, and dealership staff execute the radio advertising strategy, all of which we cover in TACTICS. |
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Good radio advertising strategy sets you up for success. If you also sell a Good Product or Service and you can convert a healthy percentage of inquiry to sales, your Year I pay-as-you-go rollout can easily increase revenues 2%, 20%, 200%, even 2000%. Been there. Done that. To the right are three examples in totally unrelated business categories. All based on solid radio advertising strategy. |
Dinovite: $5K to $180K |
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© 2011 PETER A. BURKHARD (407) 895-3092) peter@burkhardworks.com |