December | 2017 | Sioux Falls Radio Advertising

advertising and marketing sioux falls

It’s the week that two more Sioux Falls restaurants are closing. It’s possibly some evidence that they could have used a good radio advertising campaign, eh? I never heard one from either of them. Actually, they needed a good marketing consultant. Someone who could be trusted to give them the honest truth – good or bad. The truth that their customer service or their menus needed a bit of improving. They needed someone to consistently be their 2nd set of eyes. Every business needs that.

First of all, there are about 17 billion restaurants in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. You almost need an act of God to make it last. But I don’t want this blog post to be specifically about restaurants. It’s about those who have a pack of wild dog competitors… all fighting over the same pie.

ANY BUSINESS with ample competition, could benefit greatly from a long-term, consistent radio campaign.

I think of the dentist that I’m working with to eventually get them advertising on the Radio. (There are almost as many dentists as restaurants, I think.) As I was gathering some information and doing my research, I noticed this dentist had about 10 Google reviews. 4 of those reviews were terrible. Like BAD BAD. I brought it up to them. I advised that they fixed whatever issue was going on, and start burying those bad reviews with good reviews before they started their radio advertising. I didn’t want people who heard the radio ads to then find their phone number and location on Google, and have their poor “review star average” sabotage the radio campaign right from the start.

When you have a lot of competition, everything needs to be pumping on all cylinders, otherwise you’ll fall hard and fast. If we had started their radio ads too soon, it would have only brought more eyeballs to their bad reviews, helping them to eventually go out of business.

Let’s pretend you have all your ducks in a row, and are ready to get going with a better marketing plan…

The easy part is to set your budget annually for your radio campaign. Radio’s superpower is unleashed when you schedule your ads 36 to 52 weeks per year. We’re BRANDING here. We want to stamp your business name onto the brains of consumers. When they need what you sell… we want them to think of YOU.

I can make this work for you. Period. If you’ll give me the time to do some digging and get to the bottom of what you do best, how you do it best, and how your best customers feel about you… I can help you make the next year and beyond… better than you’ve ever experienced. Especially, if you’re frustrated with marketing and advertising. There are so many choices out there! And they all try to make you believe that you MUST buy advertising on their medium. It’s not true. You can’t do it all. You can’t afford it. Especially, when most of it doesn’t work.

When you focus your advertising efforts on just a couple of things (instead of dozens), then you give yourself a chance to succeed. When you run a business that sells products or services to the masses… then, mass media is where you should put the big part of your budget. And when Radio reaches 90%+ of people, doesn’t that sound like a great place to start?

I mentioned the easy part was setting your ad budget annually, and starting a 36 to 52-week radio campaign (depending on the competitive landscape). The harder part of your “advertising success equation” is the creation of Ads that actually work. It’s the harder part because it’s the most important part.

Your ads can’t sound like every other ad. Your ads can’t sound like a newspaper ad read into a microphone. There are a bunch of ways to do advertising the wrong way, but only a few ways to do it the RIGHT WAY. Radio is for entertainment. So, your ads need to have an “entertainment factor” included in them. They also need to hit the emotional hot buttons of your potential new customers. If you remember that your ads are NOT ABOUT YOU, but about your customers… that’s one of the most valuable lessons you can learn about marketing.

Whether you’re a restaurant, a plumber, a mattress store, an auto dealer, a roofer, a medical center, etc., you need to talk to the needs of your potential new customer. Make them feel something. Make them feel comfortable with you before they even meet you. Increase their trust in you. Decrease their risk of doing business with you. Make them feel at ease. Cause them to LIKE you. Cause their eyebrows to raise a bit by something you share with them. All you’re trying to do is make friends with new people. And one of the best ways to do that in your radio ads, is to tell them stories, be vulnerable, be transparent, be funny, be honest, and talk to them about the things they care about. Most importantly, be human. Don’t be an annoying salesperson in your ads.

Because when your ads sound like “ads”… people ignore them. They don’t even know they’re doing it. Our brains do it for us. Automatically.

Another way to break down some barriers and increase the “trust factor” is to have someone from your business be the “voice” in your ads. Either the business owner or manager, preferably. Let me explain something first about how our brains interact with “ads”. Your brain filters out things that you don’t need. It scans your environment for relevant items. It tells you to ignore irrelevant ones. And advertising is usually in the irrelevant category. But your advertising can sidestep a brain’s “gatekeeper” by not sounding like typical advertising.

By voicing parts of your own radio ads, it provides a built-in level of trust that will speed up your radio advertising success. Wouldn’t you agree? Who would a consumer potentially trust more? A “radio voiceover person” who has nothing to do with your business and is just reading the script that they were given… or someone from your business?

Are you thinking… who the heck is going to write my radio ads?!

I am. It’s what I’m trained to do here at Results Radio.

We’re constantly learning and training on how to make your advertising work. And the #1 “making it work” factor is the writing of your radio scripts. It’s what I love to do. Once we have the strategy figured out… and the direction you’d like to go… then we grease up the wheels and hit the Start button.

It’s exciting. And then, it’s not. Because you want your advertising to be like a switch you flip On and Off. But remember… you’re branding. Radio’s superpower is getting people to remember you first when they need what you sell. And getting your business name (and what you stand for) stamped onto consumers’ brains… takes some time.

You need to give your radio advertising campaign at least 3 to 6 months for the ball to start rolling a little easier (Depending on the purchase cycle time for your product or service). Not that you won’t get some people acting right away because of the ads that they heard… but the majority of your new customers will come later. Building trust takes time. Making new friends takes some time. You’re planting seeds. And that seed needs a time to mature. And then, once harvest time comes… it gets exciting again.

When you do this right, your competition will know something is happening. You’ll be taking a bigger slice of the pie. Their slice. And that’s good… because you’ll be treating your new customers better than anyone else could. Right? Right. And when that happens, you’ll be on your way to some pretty eye-opening growth. Growth that you’ve been seeking, but couldn’t find. Until you discovered the power of sound in your advertising. The power of good radio.

Ready?

Duane Christensen

Results Radio Townsquare Media – Sioux Falls, SD

605-940-7984

duane.christensen@results-radio.com

Radio Advertising Success

No… not me.

Even better… it’s one of my clients who had a record month!

And the best part, they give credit to the Radio advertising they do with me.

But it wasn’t that way in the beginning. I remember weekly conversations. One week radio rocks. The next week it sucks donkey. Cancel. No, double my schedule.

And all through their growing pains, I kept preaching, “This is going to take a little time. You’re on the right track, but be patient. You’re in a long-term purchase cycle industry. We just have to keep saying it better than your competitors do. You’ll start earning trust with more and more people in time. We need to let your strategy sink into people’s brains. Patience, grasshopper. Give this ball a chance to start gaining momentum.”

This client also isn’t afraid to put a few dollars out there. They had to. They have a massive amount of competition in Sioux Falls.

Uff Da. There were a lot of times it was stressful and frustrating for me. They would threaten to cancel or reduce their radio schedules every other week. But I had faith. Faith in our radio stations and faith in the strategy and ads that we were sharing with a whole bunch of people every single day. I knew it was just a matter of time until there was a tipping point.

So, how does this happen? What kind of ads work? Why radio? How much should someone spend on advertising?

The owner was courageous. He wanted to “say it different” in the ads. He wanted to be bold and shock people a little bit. Those are the best kinds of business owners when it comes to creating a radio campaign. Too many want to “water down” their message and make sure it doesn’t offend anyone and make it sound just like every other ad.

The radio ads were sincere. The owner voiced most of the ads. Or parts of them. The ads had headlines that make people stop what they’re doing… and listen. This was retail, and we knew their business had a better product to offer consumers. All we had to do was gain their trust. But it took time because the industry was full of big national brands pushing their fluff all over every media outlet… for decades.

My client started focusing ad dollars where they knew it was making an impact. Radio was at the top of the list. So, now, instead of spreading marketing dollars across dozens of media choices, they put their dollars into what they knew was working. And then, they weren’t overspending either. Now, they just needed to be patient and let their ad message start sinking into more people’s brains.

The ads never say anything like, “for all your ________ needs.” They never say anything cliché that goes in one ear and out the other. Each line in their ads has the power to make people reconsider where they were going to make their next purchase. There is no wasted ad time. No fluff or filler, just to make sure the ad timed out correctly. Stories were told, testimonials were included intermittently, and the same overall strategy was kept throughout the campaign. And guess what… there’s no phone number or website address given in the ads. Ever.

Because of deep competition, my client needed to have enough “share of voice” in the market. Meaning, they had to have enough ads on each radio station, so they weren’t drowned out by their competition. They couldn’t just trickle a few ads here and there to the radio audiences. They needed to start “owning” mindshare. And they needed to be in people’s ears frequently and consistently.

A 52-weeks per year radio schedule was crucial to making this record month come to fruition. We needed enough radio ads getting attention and making a positive impact with people each and every week. And we needed to keep the radio ads fresh. The longest any ad has ever aired was 3 weeks. Sometimes, an ad would run for a week and we’d get a better idea and freshen it up. Sometimes an ad would be so impactful, we knew it wouldn’t have to run as long or would “burn out” with people fast. If we let it run longer, it would start annoying listeners. So, we switch it out with a different ad that came at listeners from a different angle of some sort. We had to keep telling their story in different ways because not everyone responds the same way to every ad.

This is highly competitive retail. So, the ad spend was upwards of 20% of revenues when they were spending the most. But once they “dialed in” that Radio was the best generator of new customers, they scaled back spending to between 10 and 12% of revenues.

They have a lot of market share to continue to gain, so, I’m predicting many more record months coming for them over the next couple of years. It’s going to be exciting to watch it all unfold.

If you want your advertising to make an impact, you have to be passionate about it. You can’t just throw some dollars to the media wind, and hope something sticks. You need to be active in your marketing efforts. I know you wish you could just insert your ad dollars into a vending machine and automatically get a decent return on that investment. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. And if you think it should… you’ll have a really frustrating and unfruitful journey in regards to trying to attract new customers.

If you’d like to discuss how this works in further detail, just give me a shout. I love helping good, local businesses who love their customers!

Thank you.

Duane Christensen

Results Radio | Townsquare Media – Sioux Falls

duane.christensen@results-radio.com

605-940-7984

Radio Sales