anyone doing radio ad's?

[davegillfishing]

if so do they work?
if your not, why?
just wondering.
thanks
dave

 

[Ken Snow]

Yes, on 6 to 8 radio stations virtually every week, plus 2 network tv stations. Radio is the biggest % of my media budget, tv second, newsprint & mag, then various online mediums then the necc evil yellow pages.

Ken

 

[Walrus Gumboot]

Ken,are you advertising prices? Whole house $99 deals?
Always the same ad?

 

[Ken Snow]

We have never advertised a $99 whole house price point, nor ever had any $99 whole house deal.

 

[Brian R]

What's radio cost?..not for the Rush spot or Howard spot...just the economical carpet dude spot.

 

[Guest]

What is the $$$ amount for radio?
What's the return ratio.

Thanks.

 

[Ken Snow]

FYI moderators, this should really go into the Marketing room. Let me state a few opinions about radio.

1. Rush and Howard are absolute no, no's as would be sports radio. Remmber guys if we listen to it, our prospects likely are not. Women (35-54) are still the predominate prospect and those are found on adult contemporary, easy listening, sometimes country, sometimes oldies (if you want toi skew 45-64) stations, as well as more and more are listening to news/talk.
They are not listening in large numbers to right or left wingers, sports or sports talk etc.

2. Radio is sold on a CPP (cost per point ) or CPM (cost per thousand) basis for 60, 30 15, and 10 second spots as well as mentions in spoinsorships like "traffic report brought to you by """"""" carpet cleaning". In a small market area you might be able to get 60 second spots for $25-35 per thousand of AQH (average quarter hour) of target listeners and less for the shorter ones. In big markets like Detroit it would be less per thousand with more thousands to be gotten so the spots will cost more in real $ but less in terms of cpm or reach.

3. Morning and mid day (5a-10a & 10a-3p) will have a bigger impact for the same cpm than afternoon drive and evenings (3p- 7p & 7p-12m) as the prospects will be in a better buying mode than the later times, when the rest of their days immeduiate neds are upon them, like dinner, soccer practise shopping etc.

4. Never buy overnight 12m-6a, or ROS (run of station) spots, only accept or negotiate them as freebies after you have negotiated a deal for prime spots. These overnites and ROS spots are their sucker spots that reps can manipulate ratings inffo to imply there is an audience but if you drill into those specific times there are almost none and the cpm will be outrageous.

I'd keep going but I'm as tired of typing as you probably are of reading (if you got this far).

Ken

 

[-JB-]

Ken stop pretending you know it all ya hack! :wink:

 

[bob vawter]

Since i stay in a three mi radius of my home...i don think a radio ad would work for me!

 

[Charlie Lyman]

I lost my ass on a radio ad. The salesman gave me the whole spill about how I need to keep at it to see results. Another problem is that everyone who listens could be your potential customer. I had the strangest people call from the dirtiest parts of town. If you do mailings, you can choose who gets your ads. The same with doorhangers.

 

[Scott]

We only have one local radio station and their play list selection is 70s, 80s, and 90s rock, so it's not the best place to advertise to our demographic.

However, against my better judgment, we advertised on the station once. We committed to 3 months.

First month - nothing. Second month - nothing, and I started sweating.

At the beginning of the campaign we cut 3 different ads and I was reluctant to change from the first because I wanted the message to saturate. Well at the second month mark I changed it to a Susie-Homemaker residential testimonial ad (the first was a well-respected restauranteur-Chamber Pres testimonial) and finally got some results by the middle of the 3rd month. Our contract expired and we didn't renew after that series, but we did break even.

Then it got weird.

Several months after the initial 3 months of ads were over we kept receiving more and more calls of people hearing our radio ads. I called the radio station and they assured me they had not run an ad after our contract expired.

In the end we were up triple over the cost of the campaign. It made me wonder if sticking with it another 3 months would have retrieved even better results. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say yes, though.

As a higher priced company one thing was a nuisance about the radio campaign referrals - multitudes of price shoppers called. I don't have the closing ratio handy but it was way less than our avg call closing ratio of 89% presently.

We'll probably do radio again at another time. We'll definitely be better prepared. One thing we're going to try to do better is to prequalify the caller. I.E. Susie Homemaker says, "yes, they are a little bit more expensive but sooooo soooo worth it!"

 

[Ron Werner]

In the end we were up triple over the cost of the campaign. It made me wonder if sticking with it another 3 months would have retrieved even better results. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say yes, though.

What Scott said was the point I was going to make. Only do radio if you are planning on committing to a long term campaign. Going by Scott's results, plan for 3 months or longer, prime spots, targeted to the women.

anything less and you're throwing your money out the window.

 

[Ron Lippold]

I ran radio for 3 month with no results I was am drive and pm drive time

 

[Ken Snow]

It's about the placement (right stations, right times of day) duration and the message. I think Scott is right on and he learned a lot over that 3 (actuallty 6 months). very powerful medium if you have the budget and fortitude to commit to it properly.

Ken

 

[davegillfishing]

we are in our 3rd month with only a few calls..it really surprised me because the station is pretty good..great demo's and all. lots of my customers say they hear the ad and love it but other than a few we have not seen any new business..
i will give it 1 more month and pull the plug.
thanks for all the responses
dave

 

[Ken Snow]

Dave- What dayparts are you running?

Suggestion: ask your radio rep to run you a Tapscan report of your areas top ten stations for W35-64 6a-10a on a 4book average showing AQH, TSL, CUME and Share sorted on AQH. Email it to me without telling me what station you are on and I'll give you some feedback.

 

[XTREME1]

First off unless you poll your customers you never know where your business comes from and even then you don't know. It takes 3 smacks for your customer to know your serious. IE: if they get 3 mailers, 2 mailers and a radio spot, 1 mailer, radio spot and a pic etc etc.

Radio is a great peripheral marketing strategy if your doing the others right. If your not in the public in anyother medium it is a waste of time and money

 

[Ken Snow]

First off unless you poll your customers you never know where your business comes from and even then you don't know. It takes 3 smacks for your customer to know your serious. IE: if they get 3 mailers, 2 mailers and a radio spot, 1 mailer, radio spot and a pic etc etc.

Radio is a great peripheral marketing strategy if your doing the others right. If your not in the public in anyother medium it is a waste of time and money

Greg- Radio or any medium is not a marketing strategy. It and other things are an execution choice or advertising vehicle. The stragety is determining what to do, how to do it, and all the planning and scripting that goes into whatever your doing. I disagree about radio being peripheral and in fact would only recommend it if it was going to be a significant part of someone's budget otherwise it is too expensive to get the results, which do take time to build. For us the significant mediums are one's getting 20% or more of our ad budget and peripheral ones getting less than 10%.

 

[XTREME1]

well Ken we are looking at 2 different budgets.

I use radio as a vehicle to drive my name recognition and not ingite immediate sales. If I wanted immediate sales fromit I would be sadly disapointed. The only ad I ever did that drove sales was my voicing my ad with my son other than that all or most of my customers had said they had heard my radio ads but didn't call until my mailing.
I have called radio "EGO" advertising not much results but makes you feel better about your company and yourself. I think that every company should do this sort of thing to keep it fresh and fun. Thank god I can afford to do this with my budget but my guess is I can afford it because I know what I am doing.

 

[Ken Snow]

That's great greg, glaad to hear you are doing multiple things. I use radio as a direct response medium and find it very effective that way. It is the largest part of our budget and the phones ring right after our ads run and people bring rugs to us. Most of our ads are offer driven vs image though I just started a series of testimonial type for our on location cleaning division that seem to be working without an offer. jury is still out on them though as they are so new.

Ken

 

[Jack May]

I used radio for 12 months to help in re positioning when we re did our brand. 3 adds, all day time slots covering 3 weeks of each month. Across 3 radio stations all with target audiences of women between 30-65.

Extremely little trackable response. About half way through the year, we changed are survey tactics to have you heard any of our adds on the raio? Still nothing noticable.

After 4-5 months we kicked off add two, ran for 3 months then switched to add three...

Waste of time and money from my experience.

John

 

[XTREME1]

again 2 different companies and 2 different plans.

Dave Gill asked the question and got many responses. Your company is a whole lootta different than most of ours. If I dump $1,500 in locals adss into radio a month your will be doing like $25,000 a big difference. That is why I preach caution and only do if you can afford to play. If you play use it as a name recognition because you can not drive sales 2 30 second slots a day

 

[davegillfishing]

Dave- What dayparts are you running?

Suggestion: ask your radio rep to run you a Tapscan report of your areas top ten stations for W35-64 6a-10a on a 4book average showing AQH, TSL, CUME and Share sorted on AQH. Email it to me without telling me what station you are on and I'll give you some feedback.

ken i will get the info to you in the next few days.
all our ad's run between 6am and 6pm. we mix between 30 sec and 60 sec. no weekends at all. we also have some live endorsements and sponsor things like the news and suck to get our name out.
we did a bee the 10th caller give away for a gift cert for 5 days straight..all in the morning slot.
i really feel like we have given it the chance it needed to work and feel like i can increase other things that are working and be better off in the imediate future..however i am looking at the not so immediate future, i am looking at setting up the company for next year and so on from there..
i am trying to jump on the step that will take me to the next level.
i dont have the budget for tv yet but am really thinking about putting michel out on the street corner to raise the money needed to jump into it..(i am kidding about the street corner)
it would be by appt only..
dave