(By Marc Greenspan) What categories will be strong for this year? Some of the top categories we expect to be strong in 2024 include Recruitment, Travel, Healthcare, and Auto Repair. Are you ready to show advertisers the value of partnering with your station(s) to help them grow their business?
Nielsen Scarborough, The Media Audit, and MRI/Simmons are great sources to prove your audience is perfect to reach an advertiser’s target consumer. Let’s look at the specific ways you can profile your stations for each of the top categories.
Recruitment:
- Plan to look for a new job
- Plan to go back to school/college, etc.
- Currently taking online or adult education classes (maybe this is for a new career)
- Internet used for career development or research schools
- Current employment status
Travel:
For this category, you can profile many aspects including airlines, hotels, car rentals, type of vacation planned for next year, and possibly destinations. Focus your profile to show that your listeners are active travelers and then get more specific depending on the advertiser.
Healthcare:
This category can be broken down into sub-categories of hospitals/urgent care, specialists, mental health, and cosmetic/elective procedures. Here are a few ideas for profiling your station:
- Medical services used past 3 years
- Hospitals used past 3 years
- Actions taken as a result of health ads
- Reasons take medications
- Specialists used past year
- Medical items bought on the internet
- Ways used internet – health information, medical services/info
Auto Repair: (both body work and mechanical)
First, profile your audience for number of vehicles in the household and age of the vehicles (model year of vehicles). This demonstrates that they are in need of service and repair. You can also profile your station listeners for auto repair services in the past year.
As you build your station profile for each of these categories, also include market data to define the category and potential consumers for the advertiser. You can get this information by selecting Base Persons and % of Base in your Tapscan qualitative report.
Some advertisers will need a creative approach to match characteristics found in your qualitative data source to their target consumer. We are experts at doing just this, so let us know how we can help.
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 the CEO and founding partner of Research Director, Inc. He can be reached at 410-295-6619 x11 or by email at [email protected]. Research Director, Inc. offers consulting services to media companies to help them grow their audience, ratings, and revenue. Read Marc’s Radio Ink archives here.
