Finding New Radio Advertisers

(By Marc Greenspan) As advertisers’ choices expand for where to spend their marketing dollars, it is more important than ever to bring new dollars to radio. For those advertisers who have not used radio, it may seem like an uphill battle. One thing that can overcome the challenge of getting these new advertisers into our medium is making sure that they are right for radio. Telling the story effectively using convincing data is as important as finding the right advertisers

So how do we do that?

The most important step is finding out which advertisers to focus on. How do you do this?

Most agree that advertising has the biggest impact on the heaviest users of that medium. Using qualitative data (Scarborough, The Media Audit, etc.) you can find a tremendous amount of information about heavy radio users. This is best accomplished with a quintile analysis. Most simply put, quintile 1 represents 20% of the market’s population that are the heaviest users of that medium, in this case radio.

If you are pulling Scarborough data via Tapscan, you can run either a Target Profile or Crosstab report to find who the heavy radio listeners are. You can be as broad or narrow as you need, for example:

• Demographic skew
• Geographic appeal
• Socioeconomic characteristics
• Planning to buy particular products/services
• Past purchases of particular products/services
• Spending at particular stores

If you need a simpler system, many organizations – including Research Director, Inc. – have built tools to help salespeople find the right places to focus.

First, find the categories that are right for radio and focus on them. Once you find good categories, it might also be valuable to compare it to quintile 1 for other media. For a certain category, if radio quintile 1 indexes well and TV quintile 1 indexes poorly, then you can easily demonstrate that radio is a better advertising medium for that particular advertiser or advertising category.

Again, focus on those categories that are right for radio, and close the business.

The next column will take this strategy and apply it to your individual station or cluster.

This essay is part of a series titled “Growing the Radio Pie.” To view past articles, visit The Ratings Experts at Research Director, Inc. online Here.

Marc Greenspan is President and a founding partner of Research Director, Inc. He can be reached at 410-295-6619 x11 or [email protected].