How to Determine if Radio or TV Advertising is Right for Your Business

Over the last few years, internet and social media channels have become the favorite advertising platforms for owners of small and medium-sized companies. Most business owners gravitate to online channels instinctively, therefore completely ignoring legacy media such as radio and television. While internet advertising should not be ignored, it is important to note that national companies still flock to television and radio networks for several reasons.

For a major brand such as Heineken, the legendary brewery from the Netherlands, advertising on television is a matter of return on investment. In 2011, a Heineken advertising executive confessed that the brand was not enjoying substantial ROI from its online marketing strategy, which seriously lagged behind the company’s clever TV commercials. The ROI Heineken derived from TV ad campaigns was about 6:1 while the online ROI was below 2:1 and took greater effort.

What many business owners fail to realize is that TV and radio advertising is not only very effective but also affordable. A lot of attention is placed on those exorbitant Super Bowl television commercials, which can easily cost more than $3 million. By comparison, posting a YouTube commercial may cost next to nothing, but getting it to reach the massive audiences of the Super Bowl would certainly cost millions of dollars.

To determine whether TV and radio advertising is adequate for your business, consider the following:

* Arbitron statistics estimate that analog radio still reaches about $200 million Americans on a daily basis.

* TV commercials are not as expensive as many people think. In late 2016, a 30-second commercial spot aired on a local station started at just $200.

* Radio advertising is not limited to commercial spots; special sponsorship opportunities within special programming, known in the industry as “audio billboards,” can be more effective since they are more likely to reach listeners before they tune to a different station.

* For all the hype surrounding the local reach of Google’s mobile advertising campaigns, the best way to narrowly target local communities is through local radio stations and TV channels.

The bottom line of radio and TV advertising is that it is probably a good fit for your business; however, before venturing out to produce a spot, you will need to think about the following:

The Immediacy and Intimacy of Radio

Podcasts are considered to be the most intimate form of marketing, followed by radio productions. Years of research into the impact of radio advertising shows that many of the largest purchases made by consumers in a single day originated from a radio prompt they heard two hours before walking into the store, and this is a reason why supermarket chains often make it a point to run radio spots during rush hour. In terms of intimacy, there is nothing like the human voice to stir up emotion and get listeners thinking.

The Attentiveness Factor of TV Commercial

Online marketers mention engagement as the Holy Grail of effective advertising; when they talk about engagement they mean being able to produce promotional content so interesting that internet audiences will not click away from it. It is a lot easier to explain online engagement than it is to produce it; this is not a problem with TV advertising because viewers are naturally focused on the screen. Being able to combine sight and sound for promotional purposes means getting the attention of audiences, and this is easier to achieve with visually appealing commercials. Even those viewers who choose to leave their TV sets on for “background noise” will react to the right audio cue and will return their attention to the screen.

One important word of advice about radio and television advertising: these are not advertising channels that you can try out like Google AdWords by spending $15 over a few weeks to see how the system works. By virtue of being extremely effective, TV commercials and radio spots will require that your business is ready to handle the immediate response by viewers and listeners; in other words, you will want to make sure that the marketing materials do not contain any mistakes and that your business is adequately prepared.