Location – Location – Location

Location – Location – Location

by | Nov 25, 2019 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

Location – Location – Location

In the pre-internet world, it was said that the three keys to success were location, location, location.

Your location had to be easy to find and convenient to access.

In the internet age, all businesses are easy to find and convenient to access online and via mobile devices. A search for what you sell will invariably reveal a long list of your competitors who are all in the race to be near the top of a search.

While there are tricks to the trade of being found online, the only sure way your business will be found online is if your customers search for you by name.

Therefore, the most important location for your business is in the minds of your prospects and customers. Your business needs to establish a pre-need, pre-search preference and Top-Of-Mind Awareness in order for your prospects to search for your business by name.

Click here to read the Formulas for Success to capturing Top-Of-Mind Awareness and more internet searches.

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Who Are You and What Do You Do?

Who Are You and What Do You Do?

by | Oct 28, 2019 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

Who Are You and What Do You Do?

Does your business name say what you do, or does it leave the public guessing?

In a perfect world, the name of a business clearly says what they do or sell…names like Valvoline Instant Oil Change or Lawn and Snow Company instantly “says” what the company does.

If your business name doesn’t say what you do, we’re not suggesting that you change the name, but, it’s not too late to develop and promote a slogan that can be every bit as strong for your identity as the name itself.

Strong slogans not only say “what you do” but more importantly describe “what” you want your business to be “known” for.

GEICO’S “Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent on your insurance” is a prime example of a slogan that tells the prospect “what” they want you to remember about them.  They will save you time and money!

For several years, I had an advertising partner that had a name that was confusing because it made them sound like they were an investment company, but they really were an alternative real estate company.  Problem was when the company was created, the name the used was geared to attracting people who wanted to invest in Real Estate, but when I got involved, they were looking for their end users, people who were buying or selling homes.  Our campaign worked because we used WOWO radio to tell listeners of our afternoon talk show, exactly what they did.  The message was out there every hour, 15 hours every week, between 3pm and 6pm.

If your business name says what you do but you don’t have a strong slogan, a good, strong advertising campaign can cure some of these ills. Today, there are simply too many names, too many competitors, and too much fragmentation for you to be remembered for your name alone.  On my radio station we have 7 or 8 heating and cooling companies.  You can’t just toss your name out there and hope that you get some of the business.  I work with 4 of them and each one has a different and distinct slogan and advertising campaign that reflects their unique selling points.

A strong slogan, used consistently over time, will differentiate you in your prospects’ minds and give you a competitive advantage.

Having strong Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA) is even more important in the age of electronic media. Studies suggest that 70% of people will click on the first business they are aware of or have a preference for, rather than clicking on the first name revealed at the top of the search engine page.

In the new electronic era, radio and internet are the perfect combination.  Having strong TOMA (Top of Mind Awareness) is always the best SEO (search engine optimization).

Click here to receive “7 Secrets of Successful Slogans” that will help you create better Top of Mind Awareness for your business.

You can also sign up for my weekly Sound ADvice email newsletter which contains tips and insights just like this. Fill in your info in the box below.

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Digital Burnout

Digital Burnout

by | Sep 24, 2019 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

Do you ever get annoyed at advertising?

I did an informal and unscientific poll of friends and strangers recently and discovered that the answer is Yes.

This is nothing new.  As long as there have been advertising, there are reasons for people to dislike it.

Music radio stations that play too many commercials in a row, that’s an annoyance.

TV ads that are just plain awful, usually it’s the locally produced ones that look and sound bad.

In the digital world there are a couple of irritants I discovered too.

One is the number of times we are shown an ad when we are online.

There is a practice called remarketing that is as old as digital advertising, that is part of the culprit.

When you visit a website, it places a tracking pixel, or “cookie” on your computer and adds you to their database of website visitors.

Then when you are visiting other websites, you start seeing ads from that website you just visited.  The reason is statistics tell us less than 10% of us buy the first time we visit a website.  So to remind you of that website you were visiting and the stuff you may have bought but 90% of the time, the stuff you didn’t buy, these ads that follow you around online.

It’s a neat concept from a marketing standpoint but it has become an irritant. A recent survey said that if you are still sending ads to people who visited your website a week after they were there, you are annoying 85% of the people you are trying to convert to customers.

Nearly half only want to see your ads for 24 hours and after a couple of days, you are just creating a bad vibe for your company.

One company has taken this seriously.

Proctor and Gamble which spends between 6 and 7 billion dollars a year in advertising announced this summer that going forward, they are reducing the number of times a consumer sees the same digital ad.

I know that there are multiple ways to track our online actions and one that seems to be missing involves connecting the dots between visiting a website and making a purchase.

If the digital marketers could get an alert when we make a purchase so they stop bombarding us with ads that are wasted, because we already spent our money on what you are still trying to sell us, everyone would be happier.

I know the technology is out there to do this, it just needs to be implemented.

If you are currently doing or are considering digital ads, talk to me first.  There are better ways to invite people to become your customers and buy your stuff without annoying them to death.  Drop me a note Scott@WOWO.com.

By the way, you can subscribe to this weekly ScLoHo Media and Marketing Article update that I share on my website, you can also subscribe to the podcast version which is pretty much the same weekly content that you can listen to in 10 minutes or less.  I also have a separate email business tips newsletter called Sound ADvice that you can get by filling in the information in the box below.  All free and yours just for the asking!

 

 

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Avoid A Digital Disaster

Avoid A Digital Disaster

by | Sep 10, 2019 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

I walked in for my 1 o’clock meeting, and there was a strange kind of energy at their office.

I’m talking about energy in the air, the people were not their usual happy selves.

I asked if Doug was in and they pointed to his office and went back to their computer screens.

I climbed the steps to his office and he greets me and tells me what’s going on.

It turns out Facebook shut down his company Facebook page.

Now that may be no big deal to you and your company, but it was for Doug and his business.

If you are relying on some marketing platform like Facebook to keep your business alive, you are risking a Digital Disaster.

Long story short for Doug is that he lost a lot but his business will recover, but it is expensive in time and money.

You may not be so fortunate.

By the way, the story I am telling is true, but Doug is not the business owners real name.

Let’s dig into the details and see how you can avoid losing your business.

Lesson Number ONE, when you name your business, register that name with the proper authorities. That’s usually at the city, county or state level. Depending on what your business does and what marketing you do, you may even need to trademark it which is at the federal level.

Doug’s business page on Facebook was shut down by Facebook because the name he had been using was trademarked by another company hundreds of miles away.  Doug was unaware of this conflict when he selected the name of his company and it wasn’t until that Monday morning that he became aware of the problem this could cause.

Doug used Facebook as his primary marketing and lead generator. His second most successful lead generator was my radio station, WOWO and it reality we married the two of them as a marketing tactic. 

Doug’s business is a home improvement company and everyday his team would be taking pictures of the transformations they did at peoples homes and sharing them on Facebook which worked when you put a considerable amount of money behind those Facebook posts like Doug did.  He spent double on Facebook what he spent with my radio station, otherwise we would have been his top lead source.

Anyway, the mistake Doug made was that he trusted Facebook.  When they took down his business page, they did without warning and all the hundreds of pictures and success stories were not just gone, but lost.

Lesson Number TWO is to Keep Everything Yourself.  Doug and his team deleted their copies of the pictures and posts once they were on Facebook. Doug now saves all those pictures in the cloud on a space he controls.  

By Wednesday, Doug had moved on and decided to rename his business.  This time he did a more thorough check for conflicts and once he was satisfied he contacted me with the new name.  It was easy for me to help him with his rebranding to our radio listeners, that’s part of the beauty of radio, we can make changes often within 24 hours.  That’s not the case for TV or print advertising.

Over the next few days, Doug started his Facebook marketing from scratch.  He had plenty of jobs that he could post and share pictures of, just like he did before, but the Thousands, yes THOUSANDS of people who were connected to his old Facebook business page, were all gone.  So once again he poured money into promoting those Facebook posts and was able to get things up to a satisfactory level of activity in about a week.  He had one handicap with Facebook marketing however.  He could not mention his old company name or he would risk being shut down again.

WOWO radio to the rescue.  The tactic that we used for Doug when he started with us is live endorsement ads and the call to action was to call them and also visit their Facebook Page.  For the first two weeks since the Facebook page was gone, we continued to promote the old name and phone number since Doug still has the old website up.

This week and for the rest of the month, the radio ads will do something that Doug could not do on Facebook. 

We are promoting the name change on the air.  Both names are mentioned as a transition.  This keeps the reputation and good will that Doug has built with our radio audience and we are also telling people to check out the work at the new company Facebook page.  The only reason I didn’t make the switch earlier is I needed Doug to have at least a dozen completed jobs as Facebook Posts so our listeners would see that this is the real thing.

I mentioned that this is an expensive lesson for Doug.  Besides the money spent to handle all of this mess on Facebook, he also needs to spend money fixing everything else online.  That includes a new website, new email addresses, getting Google reviews built up for the new company name for example.  There is also the hard costs of changing everything else with the old company name to the new name including quote forms, bank accounts, business cards, embroidered shirts for everyone on his team, vehicle wraps for their fleet and work trailers. New logo design, and the list goes on and on.  Did I mention he spent a few thousand on a radio jingle that is now worthless?

The only reason that Doug is not out of business today is he has deep pockets because this has been a good first year for his company.  Also he was not solely relying on Facebook to keep his business leads coming in.  His relationship with me and my team at WOWO Radio has made this painful lesson just a crash, but not a crash and burn.  

Please, there are ways to avoid a Digital Disaster, and I can help.  The earlier I get involved the more likely we can prevent this from happening.  Contact me: Scott@WOWO.com.  And you can also get free weekly Sound ADvice marketing tips by signing up for my newsletter in the box below.

 

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The Mass Media Myth

The Mass Media Myth

by | Jul 17, 2019 | 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

Continuing my series based on Roy Williams article about Advertising Oversimplified with my thoughts on points 2 and 3…

Roy talks about Mass Media and targeting your advertising message:

They call it “mass media” for a reason: it reaches the masses. Consequently, you can’t really target using mass media. (TV, radio, billboards)

But don’t worry about that. Use mass media anyway. Targeting is overrated and ridiculously overpriced.

I just got my hands on the latest ratings for radio listenership and I’m going to use that to prove Roy wrong.

Sort of.

Since I have my hands in both the traditional mass media and the new digital media worlds, I know a thing or two because I’ve seen a thing or two, (to borrow the tag line from Farmers Insurance ads.)

I’m going to clear up some misconceptions about targeted digital ads first.

The people selling you these highly targeted ads are liars. Most of them don’t know they are lying because they don’t dig deep enough to see who those targeted ads are really going to.  When I sold them, I only dug deep enough to see the good stuff, but when I looked deeper, below the surface, I pretty much stopped selling targeted digital ads.

Why?  Because all the targeting and algorithms and “stuff” just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

For example, when I examined the response rate of a targeted campaign and saw where we were getting clicks and somewhere from locations that we did NOT target, I started to see the cracks in the not-so-perfect world of targeted digital ads.

Heck you probably have seen so-called targeted ads when you are online, maybe playing a game on your phone and you keep getting ads for dog food which you’ll never buy because you don’t own a dog.  True story.  That was my story recently.  You probably can come up with your own now that I’ve pointed this out to you.

So the alternative to digital ads that are targeted is to use mass media, as Roy mentioned.

Mass media reaches the masses.

In the most recent radio rating survey for Metropolitan Fort Wayne, Indiana, they listed the area has a population of 460,900 people age 12 and older. The radio station with the most weekly listeners had 141,202 listeners. while the station with the smallest audience had 4,936 weekly listeners.

That’s a huge difference.

However there is more to the story than just the number of listeners.  Each station has a format that attracts fans as listeners and those fans/listeners have characteristics about them.  The station with the largest audience is mine, WOWO radio with a news and talk format. Also in the top 10 are a Pop Music Station, a Country Music Station, a Rock Music station, a Public Broadcasting station,  a Contemporary Christian Music station,  a Classic Hits Music station, a Soft Pop/Rock Music station, a Hip-Hop Music station and a Classic Rock Music station.

That’s just the top 10 of 29 stations that had enough listeners to get mentioned in the Spring Rating period.  There are also another dozen stations in the area that didn’t make it because their weekly audiences are even smaller.

The point is that each of these radio stations have an audience that you can target with your advertising simply by advertising on the stations that have the target listeners that you want to invite to your business.

You can target with mass media.

I’ll even give you a deeper example that I have with my station, WOWO.

We just launched a new weekly feature and a new weekend talk show that is focused on health news.

My friend Lee Kelso, whom I’ve known since we were in our early 20’s, is now WOWO radio’s health news correspondent.

WOWO radio’s audience of 140,000+  has less than 1,000 teenagers and less than 7,000 18 to 24 year olds.

That means 95% of WOWO’s audience is age 25 and older.

When we reach the age of 45, our interest in health and well being increase significantly compared to when we were in our 20’s.

WOWO’s audience of people age 45 and older is 70% of our listeners.

Once a week on Tuesday Mornings at 7:10, Lee Kelso reports with his 5 minute HealthCall feature during Fort Wayne’s Morning News with Kayla Blakeslee.  Lee also does another report on Health most Thursday afternoons during a segment on the Pat Miller Program also on WOWO Radio.   Our news department also uses Lee’s stories in their regular newscasts.  

All of this HealthCall stuff that Lee Kelso does during the week reaches the masses of people who listen to WOWO each week.

That’s one way we’ve combined mass media with a targeted message matched with an audience that has a significant number of listeners who are interested in the targeted health messages.

But wait, there’s more…

We have now launched an hour long Saturday morning talk show called, you guessed it: HealthCall Live! 

Hosted by Lee Kelso, HealthCall Live features interviews with health care professionals and listeners call in and ask the doctors questions.

The Saturday HealthCall Live radio show on WOWO is very targeted.  If you don’t care about health, then you’ll find something else to listen to during that hour.  But if a doctor or health care practice wants to target their message directly to the people they want to serve, this is it.

See, mass media, when used properly can also be targeted media if you work with someone who knows how all this works.

(That’s me, waving my hand.)

Want to know more?  Contact me: Scott@WOWO.com

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