The Message vs The Media

The Message vs The Media

by | Jul 8, 2024 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

This weeks article is from a recent Sound ADvice newsletter that my subscribers received this summer.  If you would like a free weekly subscription, email Scott@WOWO.com.

In the never-ending maze of online media, on-air media, outdoor media, direct mail, and print media, business owners often ask, “Which media works best?” or, “Which media platform will give me the highest return on my investment?”

If you ask an honest and knowledgeable media person, they will tell you that the media isn’t necessarily the most important criterion when it comes to effective marketing. The truth is, there is no media that will not produce results; there are only messages that do not produce results.

The next time you hear about a hugely successful ad campaign, look at the message. I can guarantee you it was profound and something other than the norm.  Seldom will it be the media, but rather the message, that created the results. Of course, the media must be scheduled appropriately, with the right combination of reach and frequency, but it is the relevance of the message that will make consumers respond to a campaign… on any media.

Former Katz Marketing Solutions President and one of America’s smartest marketing minds, the late Bob McCurdy said, “No medium is any more captivating or engaging than any other, as the effectiveness of any medium is largely determined by the quality of its commercial content. If the creative is weak and ineffective, the medium will be thought of as weak and ineffective”.

It’s understood that generating great creative is an art form but there’s some science behind it as well. McCurdy created 14 key creative insights derived from five years of Ipsos Research, spanning dozens of radio commercials and thousands of respondents.

 

Click here to receive McCurdy’s 14 Key Creative Insights to ensure that your marketing message achieves the results you desire.
 
I also have tips and insights and the pros and cons of different media options and ad placement etc. that I’ll be glad to talk with you privately about, just reach out.
Culture is the Key

Culture is the Key

by | Jun 3, 2024 | Sound ADvice, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

The last few weeks I’ve been sharing my Sound ADvice newsletter content on my website and podcast and I’ve got another one to share.  This time I’m also going to include content that wasn’t in the Sound ADvice newsletter too.  And if you want to receive my free newsletter in your inbox, send me an email to Scott@WOWO.com

It was the famous line from the movie Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come”.

Today, good employees want more than a good paycheck; they want to “enjoy” where they work.  So, the new hiring mantra should be… “Make it fun and they will come”.

Attracting, hiring, and retaining good employees is as difficult as it’s ever been. Last summer i reviewed 400 applicants in order to hire 2. Because we are very particular with finding the right person for the openings we have, we also make a diligent effort to keep them and culture is a key component.

If you have a “fun” place to work, exploit, promote, and tell people about it. They will come.

If you don’t, start building the “fun” culture today.

Study after study has proven that companies who put fun into their company culture are more successful.

Here are some startling statistics that may make you want to consider “intentionally” creating a fun and happy work environment:

  • Companies with happy employees outperform their competition by 20%
  • Happy salespeople produce 37% greater sales
  • 36% of employees would give up $5000 in salary to be happier at work
  • Happy employees take 10 times fewer sick days

It only makes sense that happy people are more productive.  The obvious rings loud and clear, but the fact is, most companies don’t intentionally create a fun culture.  It either happens or it doesn’t.

To put “fun” into your culture, first, start by recognizing it won’t happen on its own.  It’s you, the owner or manager, who needs to implement a plan to have fun!  Come up with fun or positive events plotted throughout the year, either monthly or quarterly.  If you are struggling to come up with ideas, create a “fun idea” team and let them bring ideas to you!

It can be as simple as implementing “Casual Fridays” or “Bring your Pet to Work Day” and can be as deep as paid company trips. Having a company picnic in the summer and a Christmas party around the holidays is not enough in today’s competitive work environment.

In today’s extremely competitive recruitment and retention environment, businesses must make every effort to not only attract new employees but also retain the ones they have.

If YOU make it fun…they will come and Stay!

If you’d like to start putting more “FUN” into your business culture, click here to read 12 Ways to Create a FUN Work Environment.

P.S.  If you are currently looking for better success with your recruitment efforts, reach out to me, Scott Howard. I can help guide you on how to target better-qualified candidates.

Some of the additional information beyond what was sent in my Sound ADvice newsletter is based on some conversations I’ve had recently and a special training session that our company, Federated Media conducted this summer.

Culture is more than fun and games, it’s also the interaction between staff and particularly between employees and their bosses.  In 2013 the company I worked for had a management change in the department that I worked in.  Within 5 months, I decided to return to radio because of conflicts.  But it wasn’t just me.  Within 18 months the entire digital marketing team resigned due to bad management including a couple of my co-workers who’d been with the company 10+ years.

This year, I’ve had conversations with a half dozen people who had similar situations.  They were happy in their jobs and then management changed and it was not a good match.  That led to career changes for the employees and their former companies had to find their replacements.

Federated Media’s C.O.O. Brad Williams brought back an advanced training program that he personally presented to all the full-time staff at our company.  It took several meetings as we were limited to 20 participants each.  This was an adaption of a program from Wilson Learning on Social Styles.  End goal was for each person, no matter what their title or position to be able to identify their own style and that of others so we could improve our relationships with each other.  This was a full day investment for everyone and for Brad, multiply that by at least 5 days, one for each group, plus travel and preparation.

Culture is the Key to attracting and retaining your team.  Are you purposefully creating a culture that works?

Lessons from the NCAA Basketball Finals

Lessons from the NCAA Basketball Finals

by | Apr 22, 2024 | ScLoHo Sales Tips, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

It’s been a few weeks and hopefully the sting of your broken bracket has faded enough to apply some lessons from college basketball to our businesses.

Living in Indiana, I was rooting for the Purdue Boilermakers to win it all.  In my family we even have a Purdue grad, my step-daughter.

April 7th and 8th, the top teams played in the Womens and Mens championship games and as I was listening to some of the commentary during and after the games, there was a common theme that the champions had that was different from the runner-ups.

In the Women’s championship game, Iowa had Catlin Clark who was their superstar and has been a media favorite.  She scored 30 points and was the leading scorer of the title game.  Catlin Clark is a college basketball superstar.

The next night, Purdue’s Zach Edey racked up 37 points and outscored everyone of the players from both teams.

Both Catlin Clark and Zach Edey finished their season on the losing team.  Purdue lost by 15 points to UConn and Iowa got beat by a dozen points to South Carolina.

Why is it that Iowa and Purdue, both teams with nationally known superstars lost the most important games of the season?

It’s because Basketball is a team sport.

As I glanced at the scoring stats, this years college champions, both the Men’s and Women’s side, the schools that took home the top trophies had a balanced team that didn’t rely on just one superstar.

The Iowa Hawkeyes had just 5 players that scored while the Women’s champs had 9 players adding to the South Carolina Gamecocks final score.

The UConn Huskies had 7 players contributing points in their win, while Purdue’s Zach Edey, only had 4 teammates sinking the ball.

The day after the Men’s Championship game I was talking with my boss about all of this and applied it to our situation at Federated Media.

My station, WOWO is one of 10 in our company.  5 are in South Bend, Indiana and the other 5, including WOWO are in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  During the 11 years I have been with WOWO, either on the sales team or as the General Sales Manager, WOWO has grown to be the highest scoring revenue station out of all 10.  It’s not the one with the largest audience, and it’s not the one with the most popular music.  They don’t play music, WOWO is a news/talk station.

WOWO’s sales team has depth and balance.  When I was hired in 2013, I was the 5th person on a 5 person team and typically that position is a revolving door.  However in a few years I became 2nd in longevity and when I was promoted to General Sales Manager in 2020.  The year before, in 2019, I was named the top Account Executive in our entire company so my priority was to hire someone to replace myself.  Nearly 4 years later, I hired myself back to the sales team for WOWO and left most of the management duties.

Then and now the WOWO Advertising Sales Team of Account Executives has been filled with strong players.  Tracy has been with us 23 years.  Rob joined 11 years ago and we just added another Federated Media veteran, Brad who spent two decades with our sister station WMEE and returned 6 months ago, this to on the WOWO team.  Having a strong team has helped us nearly triple the revenue results and it doesn’t rest on one person.  Everyone has a slump every once in a while and if you don’t have the others to carry your team through, it can be very challenging.

What about your organization?  How much of the success relies on one person?  Are you vulnerable if something were to happen to that person?  I understand that most companies in the past few decades have become lean and reduced redundancies and back in 2020 with the Covid pandemic, our company did too.   However, we should also create backups for people, not just systems.

Need help on any of this?  Ask me and if it’s not in my portfolio of services, I have connections to people who can assist.

 

 

 

3 Ways To Grow Your Business

3 Ways To Grow Your Business

by | Feb 19, 2024 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice

Last week subscribers to my SoundADvice email newsletter learned we the advantages of knowing your competitors and finding ways or areas where you can exploit your competitors’ weaknesses and find areas where you can grow your business.

As owners or managers of a business, it’s our responsibility to not only figure out how to keep our business functioning properly and effectively but also how to GROW our business.  Staying even or going backward are not options.  Growth is vital!

Growing a business is not nearly as easy as it may appear and it’s certainly more complicated than just increasing sales.  Understanding that there are only three ways to grow a business is a great place to start.

Regardless of what type of business you have, there are only three ways to grow. They are…

  1. Sell more of what you are currently selling.
  2. Sell what you are currently selling for more money.
  3. Add additional product(s) or service(s) to what you are currently selling.

Regardless of how you slice it, nearly everything you can come up with to grow a business will fall under one of these three headings.

We suggest that you look at each area and identify within your business how you might increase your sales.

  1. Selling more this year than you did last year isn’t as easy as it sounds and simply opening up your doors and hanging a “We’re Open” sign isn’t the answer. What can you do to get the same people, or new people, to buy more of your products or services?
  2. Can you increase prices? If not on every product or service, can you increase the pricing on some of them? Which ones? Identify them!
  3. Adding products or services gets tricky. Think within your business category and then think outside of it. Are there products or services that you can add that won’t distract from or replace your current offerings?

Attracting a customer and getting them to open their wallets can be a difficult and costly process.  But once they’re in your showroom and have their wallets open, an accompanying up-sell is relatively easy.  Once the customer has chosen a new outfit, getting them to consider adding a pair of shoes or belt is relatively easy and it can be a big step towards growing your business.

The formula works regardless of whether your business is retail, service, medical, or professional.

If you would like to see a simple worksheet that can help you start the process of utilizing the three ways to grow your business, click here.

Also if you want to start receiving these Sound ADvice emails free every week in your inbox, let me know.

Digital Discrepancies

Digital Discrepancies

by | Nov 20, 2023 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

I was born in the 1900’s.

I heard that line last month when comedian Nate Bargatze was hosting Saturday Night Live. Of course I didn’t watch it live on Saturday night, I saw it a few days later because we have YouTubeTV as our streaming service and my wife was catching up on some of her favorite shows.

Back in the 1900’s, (I’m talking about the century, not the decade) we saw a change in advertising targeting options mostly with the growth of cable TV that happened in the 1980’s and 1990’s and what that brought us as consumers was hundreds of TV viewing channel options instead of just the local broadcast TV signals.

Baby Boomers like my wife and I, Gen X and even Millennials like my kids are different from the current Gen Z in terms of media and entertainment experiences and choices.  Social Media giant Facebook is on the cusp of being 20 years old, and that was a game changer.  Media was not just one way from them to us.  With Social Media, we all got the opportunity to have a voice online and share our thoughts and media beyond what the traditional media companies were offering.

A dozen years ago, I took a break from radio and worked for a couple of web based companies.  Targeting to the “right people” was the sales pitch for these new digital advertising options which was pretty cool we thought.  I mean if you could only send your ads to the people who are most likely to respond… that was a game changer too.

However, there are a few flaws with that kind of thinking because it ignores Human Behavior.   I’ll dig more into that in the future but the basics are that we don’t just respond to targeted ads when they are presented to us, there has to be a need on our part to spend our money, or something stronger than a targeted ad that has created the desire within us.

There is a real problem with highly targeted ad placement, in that the controls for the systems that spit out those ads are not very reliable. Some of us are overserved ads for things we might want to buy is one flaw.  Another is getting served ads AFTER we made the purchase because the algorithms haven’t been created to address that flaw.

MarketingCharts.com released a report that says:

Only 15% of US advertisers are very confident in their ability to see all creative running across all channels, and even fewer (13%) are very confident in their ability to tie creative performance back to campaign ROI, according to a survey  commissioned by Claravine and conducted by Advertiser Perceptions.

In total, the advertisers surveyed – all of whom spend at least $50 million on digital advertising each year – estimate that the wrong creative is served to the wrong consumer about one-quarter (25%) of the time. That includes a majority (56%) who believe the wrong ad creative is served at least 20% of the time, and about one-sixth (17%) who estimate that it’s served to the wrong consumer at least 40% of the time.

Advertisers believe that their ROI would increase by an average of 29% if they were able to serve ad creative to the right consumer every time.

Now, I’m not at all against digital advertising, I just believe it’s not as complicated as some will have you believe.

Instead of targeting individuals, you need to go back to targeting known audience groups.  You can do this with social media and other digital advertising but it’s what really what advertising was all about back in the 1900’s.

When mass media like radio, print, TV, heck even Cable TV were the choices business had, they used the characteristics of the media channels audience as the determining factor for where to spend their advertising money.

Going back to my knowledge and expertise in tracking digital targeted ads, I know that when you dig deep enough, all the data becomes less and less reliable.

I challenge you to think like a person, a consumer, a person that could be your customer and the habits and characteristics they have, and then create ad campaigns that speak to them with a relevant message on a form of media that they are likely to use.

If you’re in the Fort Wayne Indiana area, I can help you walk thru this process in person.  Contact me, Scott@ScLoHo.net and we can set up a time to help you avoid all of these Digital Dispensaries and actually grow for the future.