The Right Media Recipe

The Right Media Recipe

by | Jun 16, 2020 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Sound ADvice, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

The Right Media Ingredients

A little of this and a little of that can work when making cookies in the kitchen.  But when it comes to marketing your business, having the correct “Media Mix” is crucial to capturing your immediate sales, and more importantly, your future sales and market share.

Digital media has made it possible to narrowly target, locate, and reach those precise prospects who are “ready to buy” today, but many businesses have fallen victim to the pitfalls of micro-targeting.

The flawed “targeting” strategy suggests that advertising that reaches the broader market with mass media is a waste of time and money.  It claims that if they are not in the market to purchase today, they’re not worth talking to.

But here’s the thing…What if your competitor has been using mass media effectively to establish a brand and create a pre-need preference for their business over yours before the consumer is ready to buy? Waiting to reach your prospects until they are ready to buy can be too little too late.

The world’s largest advertiser, Proctor and Gamble, discovered this the hard way.  They learned that by targeting, or niche marketing, via digital and social platforms they were not reaching their potential future customers.  Therefore, they were actually losing brand identity and ultimately market share.  They quickly re-adjusted their media mix to include even more traditional media (Radio/TV) which turned the tide and grew their sales. (No pun intended as Tide Detergent is a P&G product!)

Human beings are stubborn animals. Reaching them when they are ready to buy is of little use, especially when they are biased towards your competitor or not familiar with you.

Conversely, if you have created a strong pre-need preference for your business, your competitors’ online and search efforts will be in vain.

Like cookies with added preservatives, the good ole’ traditional advertising (Radio/TV) is what makes your advertising investment last longer.  Of course, it’s not wrong to reach consumers when they are ready to buy, particularly if they are already familiar with you, trust you, and prefer you.

To see what the Advertising Research Foundation (a media-neutral organization) says about the right media ingredients, click here. If you would like to receive weekly marketing tips like this delivered to your inbox, fill out the Sound ADvice info in the box below.  My team at WOWO Radio have ways that you can create pre-need brand awareness and preference and also create a hot list of customers who want to hear from you now.  Contact me, Scott@WOWO.com for more information.

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Consumers Crave Open & Honest Relationships

Consumers Crave Open & Honest Relationships

by | May 19, 2020 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

Last month I was cleaning out my email inbox and found an article from 2018 from Mediapost that I had been saving for the future.

Today is the future.

As much as things have changed this year, I’m sure you’ll agree that somethings have changed very little.

The Mediapost story is titled Boomers Crave Open, Honest Marketing and when I first read the story, I thought, not just Baby Boomers, but everyone craves honesty in the advertising and marketing they are exposed to.

First, let me share some quotes from this 2018 article:

Target. Equifax. Cambridge Analytica. Our system of voting.
It seems every day a new report comes out explaining how a major company has failed to protect our personal data or attempted to monetize it in an exploitative way.

While senior users make up only a fraction of all internet traffic, they are very concerned about their privacy. A 2017 poll by AARP found that 78% cite privacy as a major concern, while 84% fear having their personal information hacked or stolen. The boomer market is fearful about information security.

In recent weeks, the concerns about internet security have hit people of all ages.  The video conferencing company Zoom was discovered to have lax security measures and yes there have been multiple more companies that have had data breaches over the past couple of years.

Healthcare providers and financial corporations are moving away from person-centered customer interactions, automating as much as possible to save money.  In reaction to this trend, we find many boomers and seniors attempting to eschew digital interactions because it makes them feel safer. With the news blaring the pitfalls of Facebook, online credit scams, and major privacy concerns, it’s no wonder that this is a trend. But the modern world makes it hard for boomers to escape the clutches of marketers.

Nearly every boomer and senior has adopted the ubiquitous “membership card” for local grocers and other stores. Maybe they’ve even signed up for emails about upcoming deals. After all, who doesn’t love a sale?

Yet each of these contacts provides a way for a retailer to collect data about consumer preferences and interactions. Even the simple act of having a Facebook account causes this to happen.

The Covid-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders really made it impossible for everyone to avoid the web.  So what is the solution to give all consumers, not just Baby Boomers and Seniors, what they really want, which is open and honest relationships with the companies they do business with?

In a word, Transparency.

Here’s my challenge to you.

What can you do to over communicate the stuff that your customers might feel uneasy about?

If you are a service business, how about upfront price guarantees?

If you sell online, how about a big bold message that states how you will use or not use your customers information?

If you say, you do this stuff already, is it buried in a bunch of fine print or legal terms and conditions that no one reads anyway?

Change it.

We want to trust you.  Give us open and honest communication and transparency and in return we’ll give you our money.

Signed, the consumers of the world.

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The Timeless Truths in Marketing

The Timeless Truths in Marketing

by | Apr 28, 2020 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

2020 is not the year we were expecting when we were making our resolutions a few months ago is it?

State after state has issued some form of stay-at-home order to protect their citizens from Covid-19.

While I just stated the obvious, I’m going to delve into the not so obvious.

The advertising and marketing principles that are timeless.

Some of you are wondering what to do with your ads.

Should I switch to a different medium?

Should I change up my message?

Should I just stop and wait until things return to normal?

Let’s take those three questions one at a time.

Should I switch to a different advertising medium?  If you are doing online marketing and it was working for you before then the answer is probably no, if it is working, continue.  If you were using billboards there are less cars on the roads so you are probably getting less viewers than you were promised.

Speaking of viewers, has TV viewing skyrocketed with everyone staying at home?  Yes, a month ago, at the end of March, both broadcast, over the air and cable viewing jumped 30%.  But then something else happened too that is still going on.  The TV series that were still in production for this season had to end their seasons early because the virus shut down the studios.  The real benefactor of all this extra screen time has been the streaming services like NetFlix and their competitors with little or no advertising.  That doesn’t help you out as an advertiser does it…

I will tell you that with the insider knowledge and data that I have access to, radio listenership is actually up.  Stations like mine, WOWO radio with their news and talk format have seen tremendous increases and a big portion of that increase is coming from the smart speakers we all got the past couple of years.  Alexa is becoming radio’s best friend.  Contact me and I can share with you the specifics on the increased listenership to WOWO radio and how we can get your business in front of thousands of consumers every week.

The next question is, Should I change up my message?  Probably but not in the way you are thinking.  If you think your ads need to say that your business has instituted safety measures, or you are now cleaning more than before, you are just like all the others advertising right now.  That is if it’s your main message.  You need a stronger message, one that tells consumers why they should give you their money and not give it to your competitor.

Here’s the Timeless Truth in Marketing that is really important right now. You need to follow Human Relationship Principles in your advertising.

Human Relationship Principles are the principles that we instinctively are drawn to because we are human.  We want to feel good about others, to trust others, to believe that the others are going to be honest and have a good heart.  Does your advertising and marketing reflect this type of message?  Or are your ads filled with gimmicks and cliches?

Four years ago I wrote about Human Relationship Principles in Marketing and I invite you to follow this link and read it again.  It’s timeless.

Now the last question. Should I just stop advertising and wait until things return to normal?  The answer is a qualified no. If you can afford to, keep advertising.  Many companies will stop.  This means your share of voice will increase, if you continue.  Here’s an example:  Six restaurants are all advertising and dividing up the audience 6 ways in proportion to the number of ads each place is airing.  What if 3 of those stop advertising?  Now instead of dividing the audience 6 ways, you are only carving it up into 3 and everyone who is still inviting listeners to eat their food, will win.  Meanwhile the ones that stopped advertising, have a good chance of going out of business since they stopped inviting people to spend their money with them.

These Timeless Truths about Marketing have been around not just for a few years or even decades.  They are centuries old and will be even more important as we adjust to what the rest of 2020 and this decade has in store for our way of life.

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The Power of Persistence

The Power of Persistence

by | Feb 4, 2020 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Really? The Personal ScLoHo, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

Today I have a personal story to share with you and I’ve titled it the power of persistence.

The audio version of this article marks a milestone of 150.

This will be the 150th episode of the Genuine ScLoHo Media and Marketing Podcast.

Since I do weekly updates, that means nearly 3 full years under my belt of writing and producing a weekly podcast.

If you are a new reader or listener, indulge me for a moment while I tell you the back story of the podcast.

I work for Federated Media in Fort Wayne Indiana.  I joined them in 2013 as part of their advertising sales team for radio station WOWO. In 2016, our company started a podcast initiative and a couple of our local managers approached me to ask if I would be willing to create a sales podcast.  Why me?  I’ll get to that in a moment.

Anyway, I said yes and in December of 2016 I created the first 4 episodes of the Genuine ScLoHo Media and Marketing Podcast.  However due to staffing changes, over the holidays, the launch of the podcast was delayed a few months until March 2017.  In about 6 weeks, it will be 3 full years that I’ve been doing a weekly podcast on media and marketing.

The reason I was asked to launch a podcast was because of what I was doing and what I had done in the past.  Around 2004, I started writing and publishing a few blogs including a couple focused on media and marketing.  In 2011, when I launched this website, I migrated over 10,000 articles that I had published and included them here.  Hang on, how did I end up publishing over 10,000 articles in 7 years?  I would sometimes write up to 4 times a day, 7 days a week.  This was just a hobby and passion, believe it or not.  It was not my paying job, I was working full time for another group of radio stations back then.

My online activity over the years has continued week after week, non-stop, even when I took a break from radio and worked full-time in the web world.  If you dig back into the 14,000 plus articles I have published you’ll see what I wrote about during my time in the digital marketing profession.

But there is more to my background, I also spent a number of years behind the microphone as a radio personality of sorts.  I have the technical background to produce a podcast.

The Power of Persistence in marketing myself has paid off.

Ten years ago, when I was cranking out 20 or more articles every week, I was also invited to teach some college classes.  I was also asked to lead a couple of workshops on social media, digital marketing and personal branding.  I was named one of Northeast Indiana’s Top 101 connectors by Leadership Fort Wayne and was also nominated a few times for some statewide awards in social media.

6 years ago, this website won another award for the content I was putting out every week.

I never did this for the awards, I did it and do it as a creative outlet and to help others.

A couple more examples of the Power of Persistence pertaining to what I do.  This year I have had more people come find me, seeking me out to offer advice, plan their advertising and marketing and spend money due to my expertise.  The other day I was contacted by a local medical group after they found an article I originally wrote a few years ago.

They said:

It is refreshing to hear of the integrity and passion you have for your work, that was conveyed through the article we read about advertising.

We are very much looking forward to meeting with you!

The other example is a frequent comment I get and my co-workers get about radio ads that I have running on WOWO offering marketing tips similar to what I write and podcast about.  Nearly every week, someone tells me that they appreciate what I am sharing.

The Power of Persistence can work wonders for you and your business too.  I have some fantastic advertising partners and friends who have seen the Power of Persistence pay off for them.  Some are in their first couple years of business, others are over 70 years old.  They have been doing the right thing, the right way and letting others know that they are available to take care of them with their business expertise.

My advice to you, is to first off be honest.  Honest in every way with everyone.  Do the right thing, and keep doing the right thing every day, every week, every month, every year, persistently. And don’t be shy, let others know about you and invite them to do business with you.

It really works.  If you want my help contact me.  You can also sign up for my free Sound ADvice business tips email newsletter in the box below.

 

 

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Cutting The Cord and The End of Local TV Advertising

Cutting The Cord and The End of Local TV Advertising

by | Dec 16, 2019 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

It was about three weeks ago when we became a full fledge streaming household.

And now the end of local TV advertising impacting us has hit our home.

It was a gradual process and our story is both personal and widespread.

If your business has been using the local TV stations to advertise, you’ve probably seen a decline in new customers coming from your TV ads.  Today I am going to share with you my families experience with TV viewing and at the end offer you some alternatives.

My wife and I are Baby Boomers and our 5 kids are all in their 30’s.  My wife and I grew up with over the air TV.  I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana with ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and an independent station (now FOX) as my 5 choices.  If we wanted to watch a show some other time than when it was broadcast, my parents would record it themselves on real video tape cassettes.  (My wife grew up in the Chicago area,where they had a few more TV stations available).

In my 20’s I had cable TV with nearly 100 different channels available for less than 30 bucks a month.  CNN was the 24 hour news channel, TBS and WGN were the two local stations that were now national and then there were things like the Home Shopping Channel, the Weather Channel and American Movie Classics that I recall getting significant viewing in my family but the local channels were still getting the majority of our screentime.  This was the 1980’s and 1990’s I’m talking about.  MTV with video jocks debuted and they actually played music videos the way a radio station would play music back then.  I worked on the air at a top 40 radio station and remember seeing all of this unfold and wondered in the back of my mind, what would happen to radio listenership now that music television was competing with us.

However as you know, the MTV of the past couple decades is nothing like that now.  It’s just another one of the 200+ video channels out there.  Music radio has had other competitive challenges but MTV and their sister station VH1 don’t compete with radio anymore.

When I returned to Fort Wayne 20 years ago, I was talking with a friend of mine who worked in TV advertising about the impact of cable TV and he said it was minimal at the time.  Despite the fact that Comcast was in 70% of the homes, people were still watching what we call Live TV.  Live TV is what the stations and networks are broadcasting live at the moment.  Well that has changed.

Just like the internet of today is nothing like the internet was when Facebook launched about 15 years ago, TV viewing is different too.  Even the terms have changed.  The words screentime and video are replacing viewership and television and for a good reason.  My first computer was a desktop computer with a dial-up connection in 1998 or so.  It was slow and clunky and you had to sit at a computer desk.  Watching video over the internet was unheard of.

Within 5 years I bought a new desktop for the family, a laptop for myself and we had flip phones now too.

Fast forward a few more years and the kids are all out of the house, some in college, some married, everyone has a phone in their pocket that is more powerful than my first desktop computer and we can now watch video on any number of devices.  The concept of the family gathering around the TV together is gone forever except for special occasions like perhaps the Superbowl.

Meanwhile there’s this company called Netflix that started out as a DVD rental company but has evolved to an internet delivery system.  Amazon has grown from the original bookseller to the seller of everything and their Prime Members are now able to watch movies and shows online too.

YouTube started in 2005 and 15 months later gets bought by Google which continues to support it and make it a huge money machine for them.  Want to learn how to fix a leaky faucet?  Watch a video on You Tube.  I give this example because the radio station I work for, WOWO in Fort Wayne had a long running home improvement show every Saturday morning for a couple of hours. Listeners could call in and talk to an expert free about their home project.  Over the nearly 20 years the show was on WOWO we started to see a decline in listener participation.  From my own experience as a homeowner, I can see how this corresponded with the growth of YouTube.  No longer did I need to wait until Saturday to get my answers,  I could search for a YouTube video on Tuesday and get the answers. YouTube has been listed as one of the top 5 search engines in recent years.

So now you know the backstory of how TV viewership converted to video screentime over the past 30+ years, there is more that has been going on in the past couple years that is hurting local TV viewership today.

It’s two things actually.  Cord Cutting and Television Programming.

Television Programming has had the biggest impact.  The shows that the big broadcast TV networks are showing are not getting the viewers compared to years ago.  Part of this is ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX have failed to recognize who watches Live TV.  It’s not the younger generations.  My kids have no need to watch.  Sure they’ll watch some PBS Kids shows with their kids, but not over the TV broadcast airwaves live.

Most of my 30 year old kids don’t have access to local broadcast TV.  But they have Netflix.  Which brings me to the Cord Cutting revolution.

With my wife and I being empty nesters, the last time we moved we had 5 TV’s hooked up to Comcast/Xfinity which I scaled down to 3. One TV in the family room, one in the bedroom and one in the guest room for grandkids.  Our internet and TV package was $200 per month and going up.  I called this stupid money.  For a couple of years I tried cutting the cord but could not get my local broadcast TV channels.  Finally in the summer of 2018, after researching on YouTube I came up with a way to boost my local TV’s broadcast reception and switch to an Internet only package from Frontier.  $40 per month instead of $200.  However since my wife wanted to watch her cable news shows, I also added another $40 to get the DirectTV Now streaming package, which made it $80 per month.  Still less than 1/2 the price of having cable.

I had to add a few inconveniences, to make it all work like Chromecast on the two main TV’s so we could send the streaming from our laptops to the TV’s but we worked it out.

Direct TV is owned by AT&T and recently they renamed the DirectTV Now streaming service to ATT TV Now and they’ve also been jacking up the price.  What was $40 became $50 and now is $65.   ATT has been losing money on their streaming services and losing subscribers too.  Millions of them have left.  Last month I left too.

Our family now uses the YouTubeTV streaming service.  I did my research and even signed up for a 5 day free trial.  After the first day, I saw a vast improvement in the user experience.  So did my wife.

On the second day, I bought a Roku Streaming Stick to convert our family room TV to the smart TV experience.  Our bedroom TV I bought last year was already a Roku smart TV.   My wife was instantly impressed with the options and quality and the convenience, considering that before I did this she had to lug her laptop from room to room and chromecast her stream to the TV.  This new experience was reminiscent of the convenience we had with cable TV but even better.

So here we have two baby boomers doing what the younger generations have already been doing and that is abandoning local broadcast TV and traditional cable TV for a streaming package that offers more at a fraction of the cost.  YouTubeTV in Fort Wayne does offer the local broadcast channels live if we want to watch them.  However the programming from CBS, NBC, ABC or FOX, we are more likely to watch later, not live and we can do that easily.  When we watch Bull, or NCIS on our own time schedule, we don’t get any local ads.  This is much different from decades ago when my Dad used to record his favorite shows and they included the local TV commercials.

Here is the advice I give my friends and clients regarding local broadcast TV advertising.  Buy the local news. Skip the rest.  However even that idea is questionable.  My local newscasts are now broadcast online live without the commercials.  Because they are doing whatever they can to find viewers.  The sad part for you as an advertiser on those local TV newscasts, is it doesn’t include your business.

Here’s the other advice I give.  Buy ads on my radio station.  WOWO radio has remained the most listened to radio station for decades for grownups age 35 and older.  You know, the people who are buying stuff, big stuff like homes and cars and kids stuff and grandkids stuff and vacations and well, you name it.

WOWO is wrapping up the year with another record breaking year in producing results for our advertising partners and I expect this to continue for many years ahead.  Sit down with me and I can share more with you.

UPDATE: I just received information that the time spent with radio each week is DOUBLE the time spent with TV. 

According to a new report from Nielsen, the ratings firm says adults 18 and older spend just shy of six hours with their TV-connected devices every week. Time spent with radio is nearly 12 hours per week. Also News/Talk (like WOWO Radio) is the most popular radio format nationwide.  Details are here: https://radioink.com/2019/12/18/radio-listening-dwarfs-tv-watching/

Also if you are looking for Sound ADvice on business and marketing, fill out the form below for my Sound ADvice weekly newsletter.  We take time off during holiday weeks but every other week, it will appear in your email Wednesday mornings.

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