In a blog called Everyone’s Listening — Radio Advertising: Driving Sales And Building Brands, on the Westwood One website, Local Ad Recall CEO Tom Meyer says his company has fielded 27 local ad recall studies involving 8,377 consumers. The research company quantifies the impact of radio advertising and measures what advertiser attributes are important to listeners. Here are six strategies Meyer says work the best…
#1. Build brand awareness to cultivate a reputation. Consumers cite reputation as the most important attribute for major car, health, home improvement, financial planning, and legal service decisions. Erwin Ephron, father of modern media planning, described it best when he said the job of advertising is to remind people of the brands they know when they need to make a purchase.
#2. Use AM/FM radio to build unaided awareness. To measure unaided recall, we ask consumers to name retailers they know in a category without giving them any help. These are the brands consumers consider when they are ready to purchase products. Brands advertising on radio experience an average unaided recall five times greater than those not advertising on radio.
#3. Devote more ad time to brand building, less to price or item. In a sample study, we looked at car dealers and their major marketing challenge. They sell car brands that are already made famous and well known by billions spent in national ads instead of their own local brand. We listened to auto dealer ads from around the country and found on average, only 21% of the ad time is devoted to building the brand of the dealer. Seventy-nine percent goes to call-to-action.
National retail brands can learn from this example. Don’t get caught up in promotions, price cuts, or item-specific information. Use time wisely to convey important brand messaging.
#4. Find out what matters to consumers and tailor accordingly. We’ve listened to dozens of car dealer ads and found they are all the same. But depending on the market, there are huge differences in what’s important to new car buyers, even between station audiences in the same market.
#5. Have real people tell their story about your brand. Face it, most ads sound like ads. Consumers are growing less interested in what a brand has to say about themselves and more interested in what their consumers have to say. When a real person starts telling a story, we lean forward and engage.
#6. Use radio personality endorsements to develop listener trust. Why? Our studies have shown listeners strongly consider radio personalities to be trusted friends. After reputation, 45% of listeners consider recommendation and referral from a trusted friend in deciding on an advertiser.
Read the entire Meyer blog on the Westwood One website HERE.
