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Spending The Dough
Posted By: TnTPoP* on 11/15/2004 10:02 AM (CST) 125 Points
Simple. I think that the Health Club company I work for is spending far too much money allocated in the wrong forms of media.

I would like to know between Billboads, Radio, TV and Print what Percentages of cash would you allocate (read recommend) towards branding?

Currently we funnel HUGE amounts of cash to Newspaper (Full color Full page ads are EXPENSIVE!) and we have a TON of Billboard advertising. We are branded very well in our towns that we have clubs and I personly think we need to cut pack on Print and bilboard and move towards radio.

However I have no data to help support my belief for the upcoming age.

Currently we look like 30% of cash to BillBoards 40% to Print 20 % to radio 10% misc. We are a 6 million dollar a year company.

Any data that supports radio for branding vs print that I can use as evidence?

Posted by: night_butterflz Accepted Answer
11/15/2004 11:36 AM (CST)
Here are two links that are interesting:
http://www.publishers-edge.com/Paper_vs_Radio.html
http://www.vmr.com/research/860.html

And now my own thoughts on your situation:

You have to target the right listeners with radio. The ad would have to be short, positioned to play at the end of a song. The most memoriable radio ads are actually Jingles-- short verses of song that will stick in someone's head.

I understand that you are well branded in your community? If so, I would lay off the billboard/NP thing and go with direct marketing (mail). Radio would work since you are already established in the community, but as far as reaching to other communities with radio- may not work as well as a TV ad. Newspapers are usually the trusted media source, but may not reach the younger (16-24) crowd. Don't forget adv. on the internet.
 
Posted by: amandavega Member Response
11/15/2004 11:52 AM (CST)
Why don't you alter ALL of the ads to give them each separate trackable phone numbers and landing pages on your site so that you can track them all yourself, and make better decisions? I could give you stats, but they are just that - random stats with guesstimations. The best thing we do for our clients is track THEIR ads, and then reallocate dollars based on actual results.
 
Posted by: mac504 Accepted Answer
11/15/2004 2:40 PM (CST)
1)How about some direct marketing to high school and college atheletes.They are the ones who usually go to gyms regularly anyway.

2)Continuous advertising on radio.

3)Free standing inserts in newspapers offering a coupon for a free smothee for a month or whatever if they join your club for 6 months or whatever.

4)How about a small sales force giving out flyers TALKING about the club.One on one comunication from an actual human being.

5)Some kind of contest to stimulate word of mouth

6)Adverting works on the mind but sales promotion works on behavior.If people are already aware of your club its time to alocate more creativity and money to sales promotion to increase membership and sales
 
Posted by: Papadoc (Steve)* Accepted Answer
11/21/2004 2:30 PM (CST)
Cash allocations depends on your ROI and there is no way that you can know this without measuring consumer response. If you have no idea where a customer came from, you cannot know what drove them there.

Either do as above and give them separate phone numbers or simply ask when they walk in the door. Just be sure that everyone in the company is doing it or your answers won't be as accurate.

Also consider the tagteam effect. Would a radio spot be as effective without people also seeing the billboard? These things can be quite tricky and less than obvious. Each medium has its own curve, but that curve is affected by the other curves as well. The hard part is determining the degree to which each campaign segment is successful on it's own vs the degree that it is affected by other segments.
 
Posted by: mcherif* Accepted Answer
12/3/2004 8:53 AM (CST)
Hi,

I would use two metrics to decide on how much should be spent on each of these media:

1- Cost per GRP
Radio, TV, billboards, print ads have each a certain cost per contact. GRP actually goes a bit further and combines reach & frequency: how many times do you touch how many people belonging to your target group:

ex:
- if you touch with a billboard campaign in average 2 times 60% of your target group it equals 2 x 60=120 GRP.
- with a radio campaign you can touch let's say in average 2 times 50% of your target group therefore it will be 100 GRP.
- Then you divide the total costs of each campaing: ex: radio = 140'000 $ / 100 GRP = 1400 $ per GRP and billboard = 156'000 $ / 120 GRP=1300 $ per GRP.
With this you can compare the efficiency of campaigns using different media.

Now of course you might want to privilege frequency Vs reach for instance, in that case you would still privilege radio.
This method supposes you have defined who your target group is and you know their affinity with each medium.

2- Effectiveness

Cost per GRP will give you an efficiency factor, however if you privilege the effectiveness bear in mind that:

- surveys show that the strength of the link you create with a consumer will depend on the medium you use (to quote Marshall McLuhan: "The medium is the message").

- it seems that the greater the trust in the medium, the more effective the ad is. European surveys have shown that a lot of people trust radio more than newspapers and newspapers more than TV.

- independently of the quality of your ad, using an interactive or at least sound&image medium is likely to increase the involvement of the people seeing the ad. In that case, you can consider Billboard as being on the bottom of the list, compared to Radio, TV, or even better, the Internet.

Finally, as shardman rightly pointed out, the combination of different media will increase your ad effectiveness because it will trigger people's mind.
Therefore I would recommend (my gut feel, not based on a survey) designing a plan where you would ensure that during your campaign 80% of your target group has an opportunity to see your ad more than one medium.
Hope that helps, good luck
 
Posted by: Jim Deveau/Catalyst* Accepted Answer
12/3/2004 3:00 PM (CST)
Hi:

I think the above advice is excellent. Here are simple suggestions to help understand which advertising is working.

1. Do as Amanda has suggested - include a specfic response mechanism.

2. Create an Advertising test by town - change the mix dramatically and see what the impact is on sales. Example:

Town A: 1/3 each to newspaper/billboard/radio
Town B: 50% radio, 25% each to newspaper/billboards
ETC.

Try to pick towns of egual size and media markets - and watch the fun happen. Measure telephone/web inquiries, visits, and net new customers (measure renewals separately as a % of customers with expiring memberships).

You will have your own answers soon enough.

I hope this helps.
 
Posted by: Sanjeev Kumar Vyas Accepted Answer
12/5/2004 10:43 PM (CST)
Hi TNTPOP,
I think you already have fair bit of advice. To justify you will need to do your own calculations as the examples of other might not be valid for your industry or your company or even your area.
You already have a good advice on how to track which works and by how much. Different telephone numbers and different website address is a good idea.
Apart from this you should have a standard questioner that you should get each new member while s/he is joining or 1 day after they have joined (as many people don't like it). I would personally suggest that you do not survey older customers as they might remember very accurately as to what motivated them to join.
Hope that helps.
Regards
Sanjeev
 
Posted by: thinkmor Accepted Answer
12/9/2004 11:37 AM (CST)
Hi Tntpop

Alot of Great advice has been already given from my colleagues.

What I would like to add is on the implementation side.

When you have your measurement ratios in place and mechanisms in your messaging (direct response ads as opposed to building brand awareness), there are still alot of variables (headline (pain or pertinent issue important to customer), copy, call to action, benefit, image etc) in your messages that can hugely impact the % of response.

I've seen print single headline changes give over 200% increase in response rates and online subject changes give more than 150% response increase in open email rates. So, just like you will mix your channel strategy by region, list or profile of you customers, you will also need to track your creative messaging too.

From experience, if you want to accurately know , what factors have influenced % response rates only change ONE element at a time.

This applies to your marketing mix like your channel changes as it does to your messaging.

You will be able to see far easily what impact this Single change has had because you will have it recorded. If you change more than one element at a time you cannot gurantee it was because X factor changed.

I hope this helps and adds to the great advice already given.

Zahid Adil
 
Posted by: Val (Moderator)* Moderator Response
12/13/2004 2:40 AM (CST)
Hello all. I am closing this question, since its more than 10 days old. We do this to make sure members' contributions are rewarded in a timely manner and to improve the visibility of newer questions.

Thanks, so much, for participating!
Val (Moderator)
 


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