Thanks to Megan Black from Second Street and Tucker Young from Bryan Broadcasting for sharing our latest advertiser success story. “Mathnasium, The Math Learning Center” needed a little jolt of success to drive more customers to its College Station, TX, franchise. Young, the Operations Manager at KPWJ-FM, and Second Street came up with a killer idea that not only netted the station a $3,000 sale but also had the client hootin’ and hollerin’ with happiness.
Radio Ink: Tell us how this idea came together.
Tucker Young: This idea came together out of necessity. The local Mathnasium franchise (which is a tutoring business) had run spots for a few years and had seen the results start to stale. We knew we needed to get a fresh strategy to help them cut through. They’re very digitally savvy and had been building some Web tools themselves that had seen some results so we decided to put together a digital engagement campaign and pair it with a revamp of their on-air spots.”
Radio Ink: Tell us specifically what the idea/promotion was.
Tucker Young: The concept was to find a way to impress on parents that they probably didn’t know as much about elementary math as they thought. This was pretty easy to do! We put together a series of math quizzes from 3rd to 5th grade curriculums and used taking the quiz as an entry point for a sweepstakes giveaway of a semester of tutoring at Mathnasium. The parents predictably didn’t do as well as they thought and therefore the idea of getting a tutor looked a lot better by the end of the quiz. We also integrated an opt-in that allowed a parent to get a call back from Mathnasium staff directly to talk pricing if they wanted.
Radio Ink: Why would you say it worked for both the radio station and the client?
Tucker Young: For the radio station it was great! Peace 107 is a Contemporary Christian station that focuses a lot on family, so a prize like tutoring or tuition is something that plays extremely well. For the client, it introduced their product to the audience in a fun way that really got people’s attention. The digital element allowed us to provide them with a list of quantifiable leads of top-tier prospects that they could work with and changing their spots to a client testimonial with parents and kids helped them tell their story better by showing their successes working with kids who needed a little help in math.
Radio Ink: As the Ops Manager, why did you like it?
Tucker Young: Digital promotions scale so well as opposed to a lot of what radio has done in the past. This took some time to brainstorm creative, build out the elements, but after that it was just the bread and butter of promoting the contest to the listeners…even that is easier though since we used a pretty robust email strategy to get it in front of the interested parents in the audience.
Radio Ink: How do you know the client got results?
Tucker Young: This is my favorite part of these types of campaigns. We know they got results because we have a database of all the listeners that took the quiz, expressed interest in learning more, joined Mathnasium’s email database, and even those that wanted a phone call to talk pricing. Deliverables like that didn’t exist prior to integrating digital with broadcast. Outside of that, they ended up buying similar campaigns on three occasions after that on two of our stations. They loved the results.
Radio Ink: Did you get feedback from the client?
Tucker Young: I remember them being skeptical at first but after the ads started airing and the quizzes started taking off they were thrilled! The testimonial spots even caught the eye of their corporate HQ who commended them on their strategy and started looking at implementing it in other markets.
Radio Ink: How was it received by the listeners?
Tucker Young: Listeners really enjoyed it. I think people are primed to take quizzes online now with the rise of Buzzfeed and others. They’re just fun, and the best part of it is it allows us to tell the story of a client in a new way where the listener is taking an active part in discovering it. One thing that radio has always valued is new ways to engage with listeners, the online world has given us so many new ways to do that and it’s very exciting.
