How to Deal with Media Fragmentation

An advertising post today.  On a topic that I hear from potential advertising partners.  The concept is Media Fragmentation.metrics

First let’s define it.

40 years ago, there were fewer media options for us as consumers.

The same with businesses and advertising options.  A business in Fort Wayne had  2 newspapers, a phone book 3 or 4 tv stations and maybe 8 radio stations that served our city.

Now, with the advent of F.C.C. rule changes we have 20+ radio stations.  With cable TV, hundreds of channels. The newspapers are hanging on for now, but they have only survived by operating under a joint advertising agreement and the number of readers is at an all time low based on their share of the market.

That’s the correlation that is most often used when describing fragmentation, share of the market.  We can step back in time just 10 years and see how the internet really started decreasing everyone’s share of the market, not just in media but all aspects of life.

Actually for awhile there was a contraction in choices for consumers.  Look at the small towns that had a Walmart come in and soon the small specialty stores that had been around for decades were shutting down.  Walmart was big and shiny and had low prices (and a Made in America pledge).

But now with so many options for consumers to get their news, entertainment and information, how does a business advertise with all of this media fragmentation and decreasing market share of each media?

The reality is that some advertising media options have had very little change in the last several years while others are growing and shrinking big time.

Instead of looking at the numbers as a whole for each option, look at the smaller increments.

So, instead of looking at Broadcast TV, look at how many people watch the 6pm news on channel X.  Look at the trends for the past couple of years and decide if that is a good place to place your advertising message.

My radio station, WOWO in Fort Wayne which I joined a couple years ago, has consistently had over 100,000 listeners every week for as long as I have data.  This makes it consistently the station with the most listeners in the Fort Wayne area.  Half the other stations in town have changed formats since 2013.  But most businesses would have difficulty if just 1% of our listeners became new customers every week.  So I’ll offer a smaller increment.

Instead of placing your ads anywhere during the 168 hours in a week, I’ll suggest 15 hours a week.  That’s 3 hours Monday through Friday on one of our talk shows.  With that kind of self imposed fragmenting, I can still tell 50,000 of our listeners (or more) each week about your business.

Before we leave this subject of market share and fragmentation, a quick story from 10 years ago:

I was meeting with a cranky old guy who owns a few auto repair places about advertising on our radio station. “Hank” commented that there are too many radio stations, in Fort Wayne etc. I asked him for his copy of the yellow pages.

I found the page listing radio stations and ripped it out and handed it to him.  Before he could say anything about my tearing up his phone book, I flipped to the Auto Repair section and found 20 pages filed with his competitors.  Again I tore all 20 pages out and then asked him how he is able to survive?

He was speechless for a moment over the gall I had to tear up his phone book until I handed him a new book.  And he also understood that his industry was more more fragmented and why he was losing market share each year unless he started inviting more people to do business at his shops.

Q & A: Where Do Radio Station Ratings Come From?

I was asked a question the other day about radio station ratings and surveys and where it all comes from… Information

So today, a primer on how radio and other media get this information and what it means.

There are two independent companies that conduct surveys to determine who listens to radio stations and watches tv shows.

I’ll focus on radio, you can ask someone in the tv business how it works in their business.  While it is similar, there are some differences.

The two companies that measure radio listenership are Eastlan and Nielsen.  Nielsen bought Arbitron which was the standard for decades.

However Arbitron/Nielsen has had some flaws in their methodology that they were slow to fix.  Along comes a new research firm in 1999 designed to overcome the complaints that were not being addressed by Arbitron.

Arbitron used a diary method of record keeping. Listeners were contacted by phone to qualify to be in a survey.  Then they were mailed a survey book to fill out for 7 days and return by mail.  The flaws in this system were multiple with the changes in technology.  First off you had to have a landline phone, cellphones were not included.  With the number of homes discontinuing home phones, this became a problem in getting a big enough sample especially of certain demographics.  Then just because you qualified someone and sent them a diary to fill out, would they do it?  The response rate shrunk the sample even more.

Accuracy of the data in the diary was always questionable. But Arbitron tried to overcome all of this with a new way of collecting data. …Arbitron’s launch of the Personal People Meter, or PPM, in 2007. The PPM is a small, wearable device that measures what radio stations people listen to.

However the PPM with its hand off approach is expensive and also considered inaccurate. Only Major and Large Markets are using PPM’s.  Fort Wayne is ranked as market #113 and Nielsen uses the old paper dairy method.

Along comes Eastlan and they have a plan to build a better research company.   From their website:

  1. Sample Size Eastlan sample sizes are significantly larger-often by hundreds. Eastlan also believes in surveying only one person per household for broader representation.
  2. Weighting No response rate problems here. Eastlan’s hybrid of random stratified telephone-recall sample and daily e-surveys is very precise and closely matches the population composition of the survey area. By contrast, diary methodology surveys tend to be heavily weighted as telephone calls or direct mail are used to place diaries but there is no control over which diaries are actually returned.

Now you know a bit about how the data is gathered.  By an independent research company (Eastlan) that sells access to their research to radio stations and others who want to know.  When I mention that WOWO has over 100,000 listeners, that is from the information I have access to from Eastlan.

I can drill down into the data, using the software from Eastlan and pull reports and data on all kinds of demographics for Fort Wayne radio stations and their listeners.

Some of the information is interesting but not very useful.  For example I can see that WOWO averages over 7000 listeners that are age 18 and older at any time during the week, compared to the next highest station which has less than 5000.  Here’s why this is not very useful.  This number represents an average number of all 168 hours in a week, 24/7.  A more useful number would be the total number of weekly adult listeners 24/7.  Again WOWO dominates was the only station with over 100,000 adults age 18 and older. The #2 station has 10,000 less according to the rating data.

Surveys in Fort Wayne are done twice a year, in the Spring and Fall and we get the results a few weeks after they are concluded.

Before I wrap this up, I’ll touch on the other advertising media options and how they measure their audience.

Print which includes magazines and newspapers offer counts in a couple of ways.  There are the number of subscribers and the number of papers published.  Neither number really tells us how many readers they have.

Billboards use traffic counts.  Using data from the highway departments they have estimates of how many vehicles drive past each sign.  Again, this doesn’t really count how many people looked up and read your message as they drove by.

How about the web and digital marketing?  We have gotten better at determining how many people have seen a page, an ad or visited a website and clicked on something.  However there are still several missing links in the chain of events that leads from that first exposure online to tracking the purchases.  I learned this when I worked for an internet based retailer and saw differences in our own internal tracking systems and Google Analytics.

Questions?  Go ahead and ask.

How To Build Top Of Mind Awareness

Last week I shared the story of how important Top Of Mind Awareness (T.O.M.A.) is for a business when my wife and I needed someone to fix our air conditioning.  Today, I’ll share the basic elements of building Top Of Mind Awareness. picplz_20110911_00004305146_00001

It’s really this simple:

Repetition.

Let me say it again.

Repetition.

Again.

Repetition.

Say it with me.

Repetition.

Say it out loud.

Repetition.

Fill in the blanks

R_p_t_t_on.

Let’s see if you got it right.

e  e  i  i

Put it together and you have:

Repetition.

By now I have drummed the word Repetition into your head.  But let’s go deeper.

The music of your youth is music that you recognize instantly. Why?

You heard it all the time.  Repetition.

The popular music stations that play the newest hits, used to be called Top 40.

But in reality, they played the top 10 or 15 over and over again.  Some songs were played every 70 minutes at one station I worked.  As a jock, we hated it.  But listeners loved it.

It wasn’t just the fact we played the song so often, but it was also a song people liked due to the music and lyrics.

Apply this to your marketing.

Your message (Music & Lyrics) has to be good.  Something your target market wants to hear instead of mentally tune out.

And you need to expose that message to your target market repeatedly and often.

It’s that simple.

A few cautions to toss out:

Don’t abandon ship to quickly.  This applies to both your message and the medium you are using.

As consumers we are creatures of habit.  We will drive to work at the same time each day and listen to the same radio station or stations on our way.  We may switch on occasion but even if there are 30 radio stations, we’ll stick with no more than 2 or 3.

There are commercials on our radio station that have been on the air for nearly 10 years.  While that is extreme, it makes a point that you don’t always have to make a switch in your message just because you are tired of hearing your ad.

I used to have a doctor who advertised and never wanted to change her ads.  I let her except I insisted on making a slight change twice a year.  In the spring, I changed a phrase to, “Now that the warmer weather is here…” and 6 months later would change it to, “Now that the colder weather is here…”

One other warning about abandoning ship, this pertains to the advertising medium you are using. If you stop using one radio station and switch to another station, “just because I want to reach their listeners too,” you are not really doing what you are saying.  You are saying goodbye to the first radio stations listeners.  You are starting fresh, from scratch.  Those listeners you were talking to with your ads on station A are going to forget about you if you stop inviting them to do business with you.  Your competitor will take your place on station A while you are trying to establish yourself on station B.

If you can’t afford to be on both stations, you need to seriously evaluate your marketing plan.

Because you really want to build Top Of Mind Awareness with enough people to be successful, so people don’t have to hear your advertising when they have the need for what you sell.  Repetition builds Reputation. You are Top Of Mind already.

Ranting about a Panera Bread Marketing Fail

I rarely rant publicly about stuff like this.  Oh, I used to… a few years ago I called out Arby’s and JC Penney. It got some attention.  But today, I’m going to do it again and this time Panera Bread’s online marketing department is getting my attention.

Over the weekend I received an email from Panera urging me to use a reward I earned.  It was $5 off an order and expired on July 21st.  So Tuesday my scheduled meetings allowed me to visit Panera for lunch.  $5 off would mean about half off.

The email

The email

I stopped in at noon, they swiped my Panera key fob and I placed my order.  But there was no discount.  They checked and said the reward was only for online orders. I missed that detail. My fault.

A little disgruntled but hungry, I went ahead with my order.  As I was eating, I thought, what can I order online before I leave to take home?  So I checked.

My online rewards dashboard

My online rewards dashboard

See the Order Online link in the upper right corner?  I clicked it and here’s what I got:

Looks like No Soup For You!

Looks like No Soup For You!

Okay, Panera, this is bad.  Most people will not speak out about this circle of marketing failure.  But then, I’m not like most people.

I have worked fulltime in internet marketing and I know that sometimes those IT people don’t communicate with the marketing people. But they should.  And unless your website is really broke, don’t do “system maintenance during your prime time busy hours.  Do it overnight on the weekend.  Not lunchtime on a weekday.

End of rant.

As a side note:

This week I am organizing an email campaign for one of my advertising partners that kicks off in August that was pretty simple.  And I’m also organizing another online campaign that includes weekly email offers, a text club offer, YouTube video mentions and social media contesting with Facebook and Twitter in addition to radio ads on WOWO.  We’ll kick this off next month for a local movie theater.

Both of these will be fun, not frustrating.

Connecting Dreams, Goals and A Plan

Ever wonder why some businesses succeed and others fail?  There is an easy answer and we’ll tackle that today with a short answer and some homework for you to do.

This applies to individuals too, by the way, so just because you don’t own a business, hang on and you might learn something.

Businesses aren’t born out of thin air.  They begin with an idea. 6a00e54fafb9508834010535cfe543970b-800wi

Actually many of them begin with a problem and that leads someone to start thinking of ideas on how to solve that problem.

Those ideas can lie dormant, or they can grow up into a dream.

However having a dream is just the first stage of a successful business.  It’s also the first stage of a business that fails.

Let’s continue.

To convert a business dream into reality takes some organization and one important step is to have solid goals.  Some never progress to this stage and can’t really be called a legitimate business, but we’ll focus on those that take their dreams and formulate goals for their success.

Ideas > Dreams > Goals > Plans

Now we have the tough part, planning and working your plan.

You may get extremely lucky and your original plan may work out perfectly, but as I said that would be extremely lucky.  A more realistic scenario is that your original plan is going to need to be revised and adjusted as you move forward.

Some of it is just some tweaks, others may be complete overhauls.  You may need to rethink and change some of those plans due to changes completely out of your control such as technology changes that I mentioned the other day.  You may need to make changes for any number of reasons but believe me, changes will need to be made sometime.

The reason most businesses either succeed or fail lies in how well they convert those dreams into reality and then adjust those goals and plans accordingly as the world around them changes. ScloHobook banner

Your homework assignment is to go back and start writing down the ideas that lead to the dreams that evolved into goals and the plans that you put in place to make it all work.  If you have never done this exercise, you really, really need to do this ASAP.

Need help figuring this out?  Ask me, I’ve been helping people do this for quite a while.

The Importance of Top Of Mind Awareness

Last week I meet with a friend and as we were talking, Bryan mentioned he wanted to created T.O.M.A. for his business locally.

He actually said TOMA. It’s pronounced “Toe-Ma”.  It is shorthand for Top Of Mind Awareness.

That’s an excellent goal for a business to have.  It needs to be refined and tweaked but the general principle is there.

Top Of Mind Awareness is what prompted my wife to spend a few hundred dollars this month.

So what is T.O.M.A.? 6a00e54fafb9508834010535cfe543970b-800wi

Top of Mind Awareness is being at the top of a potential customers mind when they have a need for your services or products.

On the 4th of July weekend, the temperature in our house climbed to 83 degrees.  We have our central air set at 73 so we knew something was wrong. Three companies came to mind.

  1. Rolf-Griffin.  They were the company we used over the past 8 years at our previous house.
  2. Doc Dancer. They have been around “forever” and I know the 2nd generation owners and see Nancy and Bill at least once a month.  I went to school with them 30 years ago too.
  3. Brockmans.  They installed central air in a house I bought 13 years ago and left a good impression.

All of these businesses do some advertising of various sorts along with several other heating/cooling contractors.

All of them were Top of Mind with my wife and I, in a positive way and that was the order they were called last week.

Actually only the first two were called.

The woman my wife spoke with at Rolf-Griffin could not find us in their system, even though we had been an ongoing customer for 8 years.  A service call was going to be a minimum of $99 plus parts, labor and who knows what else.  That $99 was to be paid no matter what.  My wife, who is a pretty good negotiator, hang up in frustration.

Call number 2 was much better. Doc Dancer would give us a new customer discount on their service call fee and they fit us in that afternoon.  That’s why Brockmans never got a call.  They were 3rd on our T.O.M.A. list.

There are many ways to build Top Of Mind Awareness and we’ll discuss those in the days ahead.  Also I need to share more about this experience in another article or two.

Let me ask you this: What are you doing to build Top Of Mind Awareness for you and your business?  Have you even thought about this?  Want help? Contact me.