Radio Advertising Secrets

By Killeen M. Gonzalez

With any form of advertising reach and frequency are the keys to your ad campaign’s success. Radio advertising is no different.

Just because you can run your radio ads during a whole host of time slots on a whole variety of stations doesn’t necessarily mean that you should do just that. Take the time to think about your consumers listening and purchasing habits, the radio station’s targeted audience and format, the purpose and message of your advertising campaign as well as what kind of budget you are working with before designing your ad schedule.

Once you know what you want, where you want it and the resources your working with you can begin to sketch out a rough draft of your schedule. Here are a few things to think about while sketching out your draft.

A good advertising rule of thumb to remember is that it takes more than one ad exposure for a consumer to recognize, recall and respond to your ad. It is just natural human behavior. To fully understand consumer behavior you need to first acknowledge that it is based in part on two age old psychological learning theories – cognitive and behavioral.

Think about how young children learn to read and write. It takes several exposures of the letters of the alphabet before they recognize them. Additional exposures until they can recall them and even more exposures until they can use those letters to form and understand words. As the child’s exposure to letters increases so does their mastery of the language.

Positioning your product or service into the minds of the consumer and getting them to not only recognize and recall but respond to your message also takes time. Much like it takes time for children to master a language.

Therefore when designing a radio ad schedule you should try and have at least three exposures run per advertising period. You can use a variety of exposures to get to that number such as 30 sec, 60 sec, 60 min live remote, 15 sec live mention, or 15 sec tags. However, do not get stuck on the mentality that you have to run a certain number of ads and that it has to be during drive time for your campaign to be successful. You can run all of your ads on one day all running between 4 and 5 am if you want to. How do you decide what to do? It all goes back to knowing and understanding your customer. Use your knowledge as a guide.

If your resources are limited consider the less expensive ROS rotating donut ads for multiple or individual messages in place of the more expensive “drive-time” slots. In addition also consider asking your advertising representative if they would supplement your paid ad schedule with free mentions in exchange for you gifting your products and services to them. Items such as gift certificates are normally used by the radio station as part of show sponsorships and or promotional on-air giveaways. Often these giveaways are done during peak listening times so when you employ them you can get a lot of extra “holler for your dollar” without the corresponding big price tag of prime time slots.

In the end, no matter what radio advertising schedule you choose just make sure that the reach and frequency you decide on is right for your business.

If you would like additional information on this topic contact your local advertising professional.