According to the Portland Radio Group, the number one reason for radio advertising failure is lack of a clear objective.
Meaning, like most marketing efforts, having a clear and precise understanding of who you are targeting and what you are trying to achieve is a critical foundation for success when advertising on radio.
Who are you targeting?
It is extremely important to have a clear understanding of your target audience when advertising on radio – in order to marry this with a radio station’s audience, for optimal results. You should be able to quite easily identify your ideal customer by analyzing the sales data of your business.
For example, if the vast majority of your customers are males, between the age of 30-60, who love sport… then this is your target audience. Keeping with this example, if the most popular radio station in town has listeners who are predominately 18-28 and love music, they obviously don’t reach your target audience, and you could quite easily end up wasting your money with this station (despite being the biggest radio station in town).
What are you trying to achieve by advertising on radio?
As well as identifying your target audience, you need to have a clear understanding of what you’re trying to achieve. There are 3 predominant categories with radio advertising objectives:
- Branding Objectives – used when you want to build brand awareness by letting your target audience know who you are and what you do.
- Promotional Objectives – used to advertise a specific event or promotional offer.
- Tactical Objectives – used when you want to evoke an immediate response from your target audience.
The objective of your campaign will greatly impact the design and cost of your advertising package, and is thus critically important to think about this before you get started.
Once you understand your audience and objectives, you can begin to focus on what stations to advertise with, based off their ratings.
Understanding Radio Ratings
In Australia, there is one leading research company that measures radio audiences, and reports the raw data back to the radio stations to help them understand their position in the market. This information is not publicly available. Unfortunately for those considering radio advertising, a radio station is not going to analyse your objectives, understand your target audience, and then tell you “sorry, our station is probably not the right fit for you.” That’s simply not their job, nor in their best interest.
This is where Radio Results can help!
As independent radio advertising experts with over 20 years’ experience navigating the Australian marketplace, we use the most recent data to analyse local and national radio ratings, and custom-build advertising campaigns for our clients. Because we are an independent company, our objective is to get the best results for our clients, and thus we make sure that you are only connecting with radio stations who can best reach your specific target audience, to help achieve your specific radio advertising objectives.
We have experience building successful local advertising packages, as well as helping national companies get the most out of their radio advertising efforts in each state.
For more information or advice around advertising on radio, contact Sue at Radio Results today by filling out the .