Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Ron,

For radio or television advertising, clumping your budget together to achieve some sort of saturation is the best. So if you only have enough for a week of daily, several ads through the day, do one week a month.

But I have a more fundamental question for you: If these are the wrong media to reach your target and they are proved ineffective (minimal customer feedback), why do you want to air on these radio stations at all? Surely, you can invest the money on other vehicles that have proved effective. It seems you are throwing away money. If you have something else that you know is effective, then invest more there and forget radio. You don't have enough to do radio right - don't do it! It's that simple. Spending on known ineffective advertising is like buying a lottery ticket for the wrong numbers for yesterday's lottery or a road map for England to help you drive around in Spain.

I hope this helps.

Wayde

These are good questions, and I can clarify in a couple areas:

Summer/hot weather gives us a concentrated time period when radio ads could help move the needle, but this product is used year-round.

One of the local stations appears to be effective, and we've been told by sales that customers listen to it. The other 3, I'm more skeptical of impact/results.

In general, we do little advertising, and it is all about creating awareness. I overstated the sales link. While I don't always expect a direct link between advertising and sales, since radio is a more immediate medium, showing ROI of some kind would be nice. Maybe I need more effective measurement tools.

What little advertising we do is mostly print. Billboards are a waste, TV is way too $$$, and we use radio only where we have good distribution. Although we sell across the U.S., we advertise in select localized areas where we have dedicated sales reps. We also mail a newsletter 4 times a year.

We don't have online ordering. You may buy at a retailer, order by phone to our toll-free number or fax. Our Website is outdated and needs a redesign (maybe next year), so Web ads might build awareness, but directing people to our site makes me shudder. Sorry to get so lengthy. Still have more questions than answers?

Since we don't know the specifics of your product, further discussion is less effective. Do you mention your web site in your ads - if it isn't up to standards, it could be a large part of your ad concerns. Advertising doesn't neeed to be shooting in the dark.

Call me if you want to shoot with the lights on.

Bob
AdsValue.com

Bob: in past :30 ads, we mention the toll-free number twice and web URL once.

Phil: Our sales staff and sales/field reps from our major distributor in one part of the state tell us alot of their customers listen to that station. However, the marketing manager of that distributor doesn't believe in radio, so discussion ends there.

We are primarily buying 1-2 spots in morning drive, M-F, to maximize listener numbers.

Ron of Station... you made a funny.
Thanks again.

Ron,

Yup, definitely wasting your money. Let me sum it up for you. 1-2 spots in the morning (1???), no, you're not reaching any kind of saturation and getting any kind of brand recognition. Further, you have no formal way to measure what effect you have anyway except for the sales figures. Blanket statement: Billboards are a waste. Your website is abysmal because it's outdated.
You're listening to "gut instincts" - a sales guy once said some customers listen to this station. A marketing manager of a distributor doesn't believe in radio (What? Is it a god of an advertising religion?)
For the Radio Gods' sake, STOP. You have no budget for serious marketing so you throw a little up in the air occasionally to appease the marketing gods? For the marketing gods' sake, STOP!

Advertising is part of a marketing plan. The plan is based on a strategy that focuses on the target customers' needs and influencers - where they find information about your kind of product. It's based on research. The plan includes money spent on activities to reach those customers and defined, concrete ways to measure the effects of each activity. There's no gut feels or opinions in there. It's not a religion where you throw money up in the air and hope the marketing gods will smile on you favorably and your sales grow. It's science. Budgets are fixed all the time. Based on the knowledge from your research, you spend money based on the effectiveness until it's gone and then carefully monitor the effects on a real time basis, not monthly based on sales. If you're not getting an effect in real time, you question that activity and change the plan until you see the desired effect. If it takes $10,000 to make an effect with a particular method and you only have $1,000, you don't do 1/10 the job and hope for 1/10 the effect. You simply don't do that activity because it won't work. If you don't have enough money to do any activity the way it should be done, don't do any. Period! Or find money ito cut from other activities within the company. Given your philosophy in marketing, I'm betting your wasting money all over the place and you should be able to find what you need so you can do marketing right.

As I mentioned above, you want to saturate the airwaves in radio. As Phil mentioned, hit 2-3 days in a week with 10-15 commercials a day. If you can only do this once a month on one station, it's going to have a bigger impact than what you are doing now. BUT: don't do anything until you do your marketing research, put a strategy together and a plan with measurements in place. To measure radio effect, you need to do some surveying to find out your effect. Ahead of that, you need to do surveying of your customers and/or target customers to see if they listen to the target station(s). Start approaching your marketing scientifically.

Wayde

Wayde,
Thank you for the advice. I wish I had seen it before I awarded points--sorry.

We don't do enough research on the front end, and my outside research budget is zero. Thus, I'm left with hearsay and gut instincts all too often. Two years ago, I did a 1-page/6-question survey attached to samples of a new product handed out at a trade show. The incentive was $10 if they filled out & returned the survey, which had a stamped envelope with it. I think we got 2 back.

Our management has a general impression that advertising doesn't work except to gain some level of awareness. But awareness is worth something too, right? It's just a lot harder to measure than sales.
Ron

Ron,

From what you say, your management doesn't understand "Marketing." Marketing is a teeny tiny part of marketing. Marketing is an investment, just like a piece of equipment out on the shop floor. Your management should expect a return on investment similar to a piece of equipment - a payback in months or no more than 2 years - and in the case of many marketing activities, the return on investment should be many times the investment in profits. And just like buying a piece of equipment, some homework has to be done before the investment - an investment of time and possibly dollars to understand the situation. For a piece of equipment, you need to understand the process, alternative solutions and suppliers. Your management wouldn't just buy a piece of equipment because it's the only one they are familiar with - and then expect it to work. They also wouldn't invest in a hair drier for $10 when they really need a powder drying machine for $100,000. They also wouldn't buy .01% of a powder drying machine because they only had $10 and expect it to work for them. They probably wouldn't buy the powder drying machine and not measure its output either.

Yes, awareness is worth something. What do you think Nike's swoosh and "just do it" is worth? Brand awareness is an asset and can be "sold" with a business. It could be worth much more than the physical assets. The effect can be measured - first in brand recognition and then in buying effect. Simplifying it a bit, one can ask a few questions: Do you buy nutritional supplements? What brands of supplements do you know? Which is the leader? Is it important to you to buy a leading brand when you're making the buying decision? NOTE: I wouldn't implement this as I have written it. I just wanted you to get the idea. The information you'd get here can be taken over time and related to sales. You can correlate this to marketing activities and show a direct relationship to the survey results and show that, given a determined time lag, the marketing activities have an effect on sales. No more smoke and mirrors or wizardry. With this data, you can go up against anyone selling your management on an investment and show them that your proposed marketing investment will pay back more - and get the money because of this.

Of course, none of this is worth a hoot if your management runs the business "seat-of-the-pants" on a shoe string and with a coin purse doling out pennies. Don't get me wrong. Being smart about spending money and in what you invest is critical to success. However, poking your head in the sand because you don't understand how to gather and use data to make business decisions is a bit 1950's. Culture of successful businesses have changed since then. Cultures of struggling businesses have not. There might be a correlation. Obviously, I don't know your business or management, but I'm getting an impression from your dialogue...

Wayde

Wayde,
I opened a new question under the title "Brand Awareness/Assigning Value to it"

If you reply there, I'll give you the points for it. You've spent plenty of time helping me here and I appreciate it.

Ron

Let's cut to the chase - management doesn't believe advertising works. Prove to them it does.

You need a targeted tool to quantifiably prove to them that $X invested equates to $X in sales, and quantifiably follow the process through the steps to point to areas that are choke points in your revenue-generating system.

For about $500 inclusive we can answer this question for you in about 1 week in hard cold numbers and find out key details about your marketing effectiveness. Call for more details.

Bob
AdsValue.com