Did you know roughly 83% of Americans listen to the radio at least once a week?
If you run a business, you might be thinking about running a radio ad so that you can reach this massive audience. That said, if you’re new to radio advertising, you might be worried about doing things the wrong way.
This post will cover some of the common radio advertising mistakes business owners run into. If you finish this post, you should be able to avoid some of the pitfalls that catch most people out when running radio ads.
Let’s begin!
1. Not Having a Compelling Offer
People listening to the radio are bombarded by ads all the time. Therefore, if you want people to pay attention to your ad, you need to provide them with a compelling offer.
Now, what counts as a compelling offer will depend on what your business does and what you can afford to do. For example, if you run a gym, you might run a radio ad that offers people a free one-month membership if they become a member.
If you can create something compelling like this, without hurting the finances of your company, you should be able to generate a lot of inquiries.
Of course, it can be difficult to work out what people will actually care about, and this can make it hard to develop a compelling offer. Luckily, you can get around this problem by creating several offers, and then asking people to pick one.
For instance, if we take the gym example from above, you could create the following offers:
- One-month free membership
- A free backpack and drinks bottle
- A free personal training session
You could then ask people you know to pick the one they like the most.
If you do some offline testing like this, you can figure out what people actually care about. You can then use this knowledge to create a radio ad that’ll deliver brilliant results on day one.
2. Not Going After the Right Audience
If you want to succeed with radio advertising, you need to make sure you’re promoting your offer to a relevant audience. For instance, suppose you sell a product that generally caters to those under 40. If that’s the case, you probably will not achieve great results if you put your ads on a station whose main audience is primarily over 60.
So, with all that said, how do you make sure you reach the right people? Well, luckily, most radio stations provide targeting data ahead of time.
This data describes the traits of their audience and what they’re generally interested in. You can then use this data to figure out if they’d be interested in the product or service you’re trying to sell.
Keep in mind that some radio stations might host a wide variety of shows, and so they might cater to several different audiences on any given day. Due to this, you should always try to get data based on ‘shows’ rather than the station as a whole.
If you do this, you can identify the shows with the most ‘relevant’ ad slots, and you can then formulate your radio ad strategy around this info.
3. Not Split Testing Your Ads
When it comes to common radio advertising mistakes, failing to split test ads is one of the main ones that a lot of people run into. A split test is basically when you create two versions of a specific ad. You then run both of these ads alongside one another, to figure out which one produces the best results.
In some cases, the differences between the ads might be very small. So, one might just be a few seconds shorter than the other one.
However, in other instances, the changes might be very significant. For example, the offer might be different, or you may have a completely different person reading the ad.
You can also conduct split tests without changing the actual content of the ad. For instance, when running a split test, you might run one ad in the morning and one in the evening.
If you run split tests like this, you’ll get a better ROI out of your ad campaigns. This means you’ll generate more customers without spending more money.
4. Not Working With a Professional Radio Ad Agency
Not working with a professional radio ad agency is another one of the common radio advertising mistakes people make. After all, radio ads seem like a fairly simple thing to create, so most people just go ahead and do things on their own.
However, the individuals that do this often end up losing a lot of money. That’s because their ads seem very amateurish, and thus people don’t really trust them.
Luckily, there are lots of radio ad agencies that can help you with radio ad content.
These companies know what they’re doing, and if you work with them, you’ll end up with an ad that really lets you experience the benefits of radio ads. Note that some of these agencies only work with firms that have a certain budget.
Thus, before you approach agencies, you should first figure out what your radio ad budget is. If you don’t do this, you might just waste a lot of time talking to a firm that can’t actually help you.
You should also try to work with a radio ad agency that has some experience with your niche. Such firms will have a strong understanding of your audience, and so they’ll know how to create ads that your target market will care about.
Experienced ad agencies will also know about the various targeting options for radio stations. Following this, they’ll know how to create your campaign so that it reaches the right people.
Will You Make These Common Radio Advertising Mistakes?
This post has covered some of the common radio advertising mistakes that most people encounter.
Running radio ads can be very scary if you’re new to this kind of thing. However, if you’re worried about wasting a lot of money on radio ads, just consider running ads on smaller stations to start with.
If you do this, you’ll get a feel for radio advertising and how the whole process works. You can then use this experience to improve your odds of success when advertising on some of the bigger stations in your region.
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