Fast Class On Buying Advertising

Fast Class On Buying Advertising

A few weeks ago I had 10 minutes to give a complete presentation to a couple dozen business leaders.

After about 3 minutes of sharing who I was and my background, I jumped into the subject of advertising.

Not to promote what I do, but just to give them a quick framework on what THEY should do when considering buying advertising.

Here’s what I shared:

First step is KNOW YOUR BUSINESS:

WHO are your ideal Customers and WHY?

WHAT Characteristics of YOUR Business makes your customers your FANS?

There’s also financial numbers that you should know about YOUR business.

You have to take the time to actually stop, think and write this stuff down.

Second step is KNOW THE AUDIENCE of the Advertising Medium that is offering to sell you advertising:

WHO are their readers/viewers/listeners?

WHAT Characteristics of their readers/viewers/listeners is a match for your organization’s ideal customers/clients?

I know that there are some people who will try and get you to buy advertising from them that just doesn’t make sense because you are not a good match for each other.

Third step is YOUR WHY:

  • WHY are you looking at spending money?
  • WHAT are the results you want to achieve?
  • WHEN… what’s the timeline for achieving those results?

It’s extremely important for both you and them to be in agreement of this.

Fourth step is a realistic plan involving:

Messaging

Matching expectations with budget

Fulfillment

Growth steps

I know, this is a lot more involved than creating an ad, but unless you really, really take the time to consider all of this you could blow a bunch of money.

And even though it might go without saying, I said it anyway in my presentation… The Trust factor:

TRUST is the key to all of this:

Think like a real person, a potential customer.

People will not buy from people or companies they DON’T Trust.

EVERYTHING You and Your People say, do and deliver has to be Honest and Truthful.

That includes your Advertising and Marketing Messages.

If you would like my help going through these steps with your business, contact me.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Hiding in Plain Sight

Subscribers to my Free Sound Advice Newsletter received this information last month.  If you’d like a free subscription, just email me: Scott@ScLoHo.net and ask.

As a business owner, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind. But the real magic to keep your business moving forward comes from stepping back and asking, “What’s next? What can I do that’s different, unexpected, clever, or more efficient?”

Comedian George Carlin once joked, “I think someone could make a lot of money if they set up a little stand at the Grand Canyon and sold Yo-Yos with 500-foot strings.” It’s a hilarious image but also a profound lesson: opportunities exist where others don’t think to look.

The best business ideas often come from reimagining something familiar in a fresh way. That’s how Uber transformed transportation, how Airbnb disrupted hospitality, and how local coffee shops thrive despite Starbucks being on every corner. Innovation isn’t always about inventing something new – it’s about looking at what’s already there and making it better, more convenient, or more exciting.

Most small businesses start by filling a need, but too many get stuck just maintaining the status quo. Instead of waiting for challenges to blindside them and force change, business owners should always be on the lookout for the next opportunity or ways to improve what they’re currently doing.

You don’t have to change everything overnight, but committing to even one new idea, improvement, or competitive advantage each quarter can keep your business moving forward.

The next big success in your business might be HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT – you just have to see it before anyone else does.

If you’d like to see 4 quick ideas on keeping your business creative and ahead of the curve, click here.

Increasing Prices Without Losing Customers

Increasing Prices Without Losing Customers

There are many challenges in running a business. One of the greatest is knowing when the right time is to raise the price of your products or services. Last month subscribers to my SoundADvice newsletter received this information in their inbox.  I’ll add you to my SoundADvice email newsletter too if you want.  It’s absolutely free, and I don’t pass along your information to anyone.  Just email me, Scott@ScLoHo.net and ask for the SoundADvice newsletter.  It comes most Wednesdays and is written by my friend Rick at ENS media. Now let’s look at the tips that deal with raising prices because most business owners are faced with this decision.

With the increase in competition and all the talk about potential tariffs, there are more and more articles in business trades about the advantages and disadvantages of tariffs, and how they will affect pricing for both products and services.

One known fact is that consumers nearly always remain loyal to name brands and businesses they have an emotional connection to. If your business relationship with your customers is transactional, meaning price is the most important factor, raising prices is especially difficult. However, if your business with customers is relational, it’s much easier to implement price increases.

Simply put, people do business with people they trust, and they purchase products that they trust! If they don’t know you on a relational level, the chance of them staying with you when you raise prices decreases, dramatically!

Have you ever noticed within your company that people who “like” you and “trust” you rarely ask about the price? Whereas the customers or potential customers that you have not yet built a relationship with inquire about pricing significantly more often.

Raising or increasing prices is a struggle for every business owner. The thought of even having to deal with questions from customers about “why” can be exhausting. However, as the cost of goods increases, along with salaries and wages, rent, and all other related costs of business increases, so must your cost of goods or services. The trick is raising prices without raising a ruckus or losing customers.

Tip #7 of our Tips For Raising Your Prices Without Losing Customers is Don’t Promote or Apologize for Price Increase. Even your best and most loyal customers don’t want to hear that you’re increasing the price of your goods or services. But (there is always a “but”), if you must notify your customers, do it quickly, in as few words as possible, and don’t apologize!

Because some of your customers are transactional, rather than relational, even the best-run businesses will lose some customers when they increase prices. However, as your competitors are forced to increase their prices, you too will have an opportunity to gain some new customers as well.

In most business climates, raising prices is a must just to stay even, much less survive. Increasing your prices must be done with careful thought. If you would like some tips on how to approach raising your prices without losing customers, click here.

Success in Sampling

Success in Sampling

Debbie Fields was only 21 years old when she opened her first Mrs. Fields Cookies store in Palo Alto, California in 1977.  Seven short years later, in 1984, the marketing “novice” had 160 stores selling more than $45 million worth of Mrs. Fields Cookies.

There are a lot of lessons we can learn from Debbie’s marketing success. Her passion and determination caused her to succeed even though she had no experience, and was told by friends, family, bankers, and others that her “idea” would not succeed.

The marketing campaign that drew customers to her stores consisted of simply going out into the streets with trays of free cookies for people to sample. If you have a great product, consider finding a way to offer free samples to your customers.

Car dealers know the value of the free test drive, and vendors at local farmers’ markets have learned they sell more produce by offering free samples.

Advertising that you offer free trials or samples also speaks volumes about the confidence you have in your products or services. Mrs. Fields did not wait for customers to come into her store to offer them free samples, she went out into the streets with trays of goodies. 

“Free” is one of the most powerful words in advertising and giving samples of your product engages “psychological reciprocity” in the minds of your prospects. 

Psychological reciprocity is defined as “a deep-rooted subconscious need to do something for those who do something for us”.

FREE! If you have a product that customers will love, click here to read the 8 Keys to Successful Sampling.

Mrs. Fields Cookies was one of the first franchised cookie shops in the country and we use to have a couple of them here in Fort Wayne Indiana.  We don’t anymore due to the changes in consumer behavior and decline of major malls that was going on for awhile but then took a big hit in 2020 with covid.

When Mrs. Fields started in the malls around the country, that was a strategic location move.  See, the rent in a mall was usually higher than a smaller strip shopping center.  Just the mall itself was a destination, not just specific stores.

So the Mrs. Fields cookie stores took advantage of the foot traffic created by the other well known stores and built their brand that way.

Some of my radio advertising partners have used a free offer that was in response to a genuine need to create increased business in the past few years.  Let’s talk and see if there’s something that might be appropriate for your business.

Lessons to Learn from Proctor & Gamble

Lessons to Learn from Proctor & Gamble

Today’s article  is going to break my usual self-imposed 10 minute rule. Nearly every article on my website and podcast episodes are under 10 minutes in length.  This one is longer because I want you to get all the information and understand why it’s valid.  We’ll start with the last part first.

In September 2023, I attended the Radio Sales Master Summit in Cincinnati, Ohio and got to attend multiple seminars and panel discussions and hang out with some of the guest speakers that weekend about a year ago.

One of the speakers was former Senior Media Analyst for Procter & Gamble John Fix who shared how he discovered the mistake that Proctor & Gamble made that was costing them tons of money and market share and then he fixed the problem.

John retired from P & G and created his own consultancy and has shared some of his tips and wisdom including something this summer that I’ll share in a moment.

John’s background is not advertising.  He’s an engineer and his role at Proctor and Gamble was an analyst.  He looked at numbers and data and using the science of engineering created hypothesizes and experiments to test how the validity of what he was doing.

From this article from RBR.com:

P&G noticed the trend of shrinking TV audiences in 2017. They started pumping more money into radio at the urging of media analyst John Fix. TV CPMs remain expensive due to demand – add an audience in decline and that higher cost is also considerably less effective.

Consumers have more choices on what to watch and how to watch it than ever before.  The mass media of network TV from decades ago has been shrinking to the point of actually having too many choices for companies like P&G.  There’s a term called CPM which refers to Cost Per Thousand that simply refers to the cost to reach a thousand people in reference to the cost of an ad.

Here’s some more facts and figures, originally published in March 2023:

Details of the P&G 2022 radio ad spend come as it was revealed that 18- to 49-year-olds are spending more time listening to the radio than watching linear TV for the first time ever.

It’s a cost-effective method for the company as the CPM to reach that same audience on TV is as high as $35-$65. YouTube CPMs range from $20-$25 and linear TV is in the $10-$15 range. Radio can be bought at a cost-per-thousand of $5-$6.

Those CPM figures are based on volume buying which for Proctor and Gamble is substantial. According to my sources, their total ad spend in 2022 was $2.2 Billion and radio recieved $235 million of that spend.

This increased investment in radio has only increased since 2022.  As reported in April 2024:

The consumer-packaged goods giant boosted its ad spend as a share of sales by … more than $360 million, Chief Financial Officer Andre Schulten said in a media briefing. The Cincinnati-based manufacturer is famous in marketing circles for conducting rigorous and sophisticated research and analytics to ensure its marketing dollars deliver maximum return on investment. Said Schulten, “We will not spend if there’s no ROI.”

So what can we learn and apply to our local businesses when it comes to making smart advertising and marketing decisions?  Here’s the latest from John Fix:

A long-held perception is that sight is needed to create product identity. The following is a framework that was used to talk about the role of media in different situations. It ties into how audio can work with a well-thought-out product.

Audio, specifically AM/FM radio, creates reach and brand awareness. This is important for new products as building awareness is key. A product cannot sell if consumers are not aware of it.

Brands are afraid that audio may not create awareness for new products because there is a belief that it is hard to talk about a product that consumers have not seen. The fear is that awareness may not translate to identifying the product at the point of sale (on the shelf) to make a purchase.

Incorporating audio in a media plan, especially a new product with a budget that does not include traditional mass reach media like linear TV, can be game changing. The next points elaborate on how awareness can work.

New product introduction and the role of audio

  • BRANDING: Say the brand early, often, and spell out the name. Audio best practices highly recommend strong branding and using the name of the band. The brand name would ideally be spelled as it sounds so that saying the brand easily translates to recognition of the brand as it would appear on the label. If the brand name uses non-traditional language or an acronym, spelling the brand would not be a bad idea. Think of all of the new brands with names like “Sploosh” or with names of foreign origin. Lyft, Tumblr, Krispy Kreme, etc. are brand names that may require an audio prompt like “Krispy Kreme, spelled with a ‘K.’” The phrase “spell it out” may be taken literally.
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  • BENEFIT: Lead with a recognizable benefit for the consumer. Products exist to serve a purpose. Advertising can be weak when the benefit is an indescribable aesthetic, which is why beauty brands used to stay away from audio. Advertisers believed that beauty relies on sight and motion. Beauty advertisers learned the way to describe the benefit of “silky hair,” “brilliant, white teeth,” and identifiable terms for curly hair. Laundry learned to use adjectives to describe “clean laundry.” Even scented products learned their way into describing scents (nature fresh) with audio. Brands should utilize their consumer research to find the clearest, simple description of the product benefit and use it in the audio. If a brand can articulate a benefit, then audio will work. If there isn’t a strong recognizable benefit to the consumer, then a brand will have to think very hard about the product and the right of the product to succeed. Natural products tend to be safe and environmentally friendly. If that is the point of differentiation in a category, it should be said. “Natural” all but speaks for itself. Elaborate with audio.
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  • PACKAGING: Tell the consumer what to look for on the shelf. Products ideally have a form similar to the category. Mouthwash is typically a clear bottle with a large cap. Laundry and dishwashing detergent used to be a box with powder. Then they became a bottle with liquid and now, a novel container with pods. If the new product is in a form unlike the category or if the product uses assets unlike those familiar to the brand, then the audio should describe what the consumer should look for: “found in the bright yellow bottle,” “the toothpaste not in a tube,” “dishwasher detergent in a pod.” This allows audio to tell the consumer what to look for on the shelf. This would help a consumer to identify the brand and find the product at the point of sale.
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  • DISTRIBUTION/SHELF: Be descriptive on where to find the product in its category. If a product delivers a tangible benefit, then finding the product shouldn’t be hard. Market structure determines that retailers place substitutable products near each other: cleaning products, auto, household goods. New products should be in outlets where the category is sold. A brand, especially a new innovation, should say which product category it is associated with if necessary: “Found where cleaning products are sold.” This is also where the description of the package can help: “Available at grocery stores in the orange bottle.”

Audio can help your brand become “easy to mind, easy to find”

This framework was very helpful to the advertiser of innovative products. The framework tied the brand name, the appearance, and the strengths of the product to the applicability of audio.

More can be said specific to the belief that “sight is necessary to convey a benefit.” Cosmetics and beauty have long held the idea that the aesthetic benefit requires a consumer to see the end result. A good media brief for an image or video ad would describe exactly what would be desired in a visual medium and that language should be compelling in audio.

Audio best practices stress the importance of branding and conveying the benefit of the product. This framework adds the importance of making the brand physically identifiable and shows that it is possible for audio to lead a consumer to the shelf to find the product that will deliver the job to be done.

John Fix can be reached at johnfixltd@gmail.com.

How do you apply this advice to your local company?  Contact me: Scott@ScLoHo.net