How To Build Instant Trust For Your Business

How To Build Instant Trust For Your Business

by | Aug 9, 2022 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

If there was only a way to get someone to trust you instantly…

Actually we were born that way.  We trust from the very start.  Then as we experience life, we discover that things aren’t always trustworthy.

Depending on a persons life experiences and outlook, we develop either an optimistic or pessimistic attitude.  Most of us are a blend of both depending on the situation.

As I’ve talked about in the past, Trust is one of the key foundations of our lives and this applies to everything.

I’m going to focus on the necessity of trust in business and marketing including your advertising.

I’m also going to share with you examples that you can use today to create “Instant Trust”.

Trust is an emotion first, and logic second. No matter what the data says, you have to win the heart, not just the mind.

Certain forms of media are trustworthy for different people.

A century ago, newspapers were the trusted source of information.

Half a century ago, TV was, especially CBS News Anchor Walter Cronkite who would end his nightly broadcasts with his signature sign-off, “And That’s The Way It Is”.

All of this was before the online world which gave anyone and everyone a voice.

The most trusted media people in my city are now the local radio and television personalities.

But they are not all equally trusted.

Particular stations and networks have their own brand and people put trust in that brand.  If your business advertises on a particular station that is trusted, there is a transfer of trust that spreads to your business.

In the TV world, we have newscasts on 4 stations and over the past couple of decades there has been a changing of the guard so-to-speak as some TV veterans retired and others took their place.  TV viewership has eroded as alternative sources of news and entertainment have continued to become available.  I no longer have to sit down at the appointed time to watch the evening news to see what happened while I was at the office.  I get news instantly from the apps on my phone, whenever I want. I have not watched a single local newscast from start to finish this year and I see no reason for that to change.

The radio world in Fort Wayne has nearly 2 dozen radio stations.  The oldest is WGL which I worked for a couple of times. Listenership is very small according to the rating data I have access to and the format has changed numerous times.  The next oldest is WOWO.

WOWO will be a century old in 2025 and for more than a quarter century has been a news and talk radio station.  In December I will have completed 9 years at WOWO with many more to come.  When I was a kid I listened to WOWO and it was the most listened to station with over 70% of all of the listeners tuning in each morning.  WOWO is still one of the few stations with over 100,000 weekly listeners.

Federated Media bought WOWO in the 1990’s and owns and operates other heritage stations in Fort Wayne including WMEE, which I once worked for a few decades ago. 98.9 The Bear and K-105 are the other two Fed Med stations that have huge audiences in Fort Wayne and have earned the trust of our listeners.

One of the things that makes WOWO unique however is the whole news/talk format and how listeners interact with WOWO.  When you listen to a music station, you pick the station that plays the music you enjoy listening to.  The radio personalities are there to complement the music and add to your listening pleasure. 70% or more of what your favorite music station plays is music.  Music is the main emotional connection.

With WOWO being a news and talk radio station, we don’t play music.  We talk instead. In the morning, it’s news, weather, sports, traffic, farm reports, and interviews. The rest of the day the newscasts are twice an hour with talk filling in the rest of the hour.  People listen to WOWO to hear people talk.  Big difference.

WOWO Listeners Trust the WOWO Brand.

WOWO Listeners are not annoyed by talking the way they can get annoyed by too much talk on a music station.

WOWO’s advertisers are trusted simply because those businesses are on WOWO.  There is an implied trust and emotional bond that businesses get that advertise on WOWO.    But that’s not all.

WOWO cranks it up two more levels for our advertising partners.

There is what I refer to as a Platinum Level for WOWO Advertisers.  We all know that the Gold Standard is the highest level of any business.  This is a step above the Gold Standard.

Platinum Level Sponsorship on WOWO is the personal endorsement or testimonial of one of either or afternoon host Pat Miller or morning host Kayla Blakeslee.  This is the trust factor on steroids that no other station in Fort Wayne offers.  A Pat or Kayla endorsement campaign means they will be your local spokesperson and do live 60 second ads for your business.

They receive a talent fee for this and WOWO charges a premium for that minute of airtime.   But it’s well worth it.  I’ll give you a couple of examples in a moment.

These live ads are exclusive for a business category.  For example, Pat Miller endorses Fairhaven Funeral Homes.  Fairhaven will be the only funeral service provider Pat will endorse.  Other funeral homes can advertise, but none will have Pat’s voice on them, endorsing them as long as Fairhaven continues.  Kayla Blakeslee endorses Shield Exterior Roofing and so while other roofers can advertise on WOWO, none will have Kayla as their spokesperson.

WOWO Listeners have an emotional bond with Pat and Kayla and they are trusted by their listeners.  When Pat and Kayla are talking about something political, you bet their listeners are emotionally invested.  That emotional trust carries over to our listeners when they also talk about the businesses they endorse.

A few years after I started at WOWO, before Kayla was hosting Fort Wayne’s Morning News, she was the news director and news anchor in the morning.  Charly Butcher was our Fort Wayne Morning News Host until he suddenly passed away 4 years ago this week.  I worked with a small specialty shop that was going to have a special open house on a Saturday and they bought a ton of radio ads on a music station and just 3 or 4 ads with Charly’s endorsement.  After the event, the owner continued with WOWO because he heard customer after customer tell him that Saturday they were at the open house because Charly told them to come.  The music station’s ads did nearly nothing apparently.

Before I wrap this up, I mentioned two levels of trust building beyond the regular ads on WOWO.  The 2nd one is something I started using a lot of when I came to WOWO and they create an implied endorsement of a business to our listeners.  We have news and weather sponsorships that are done live by the WOWO local newscasters.  We have local news 13 hours every weekday starting at 5am, so there are plenty of these “embedded” sponsorship mentions that are live 10 second messages.  This was my secret sauce for success for my advertising partners when I came to WOWO.

Instant Trust? Hmmm, not quite but pretty close.  Contact me for more details.

 

 

You Can Only Coast Downhill

You Can Only Coast Downhill

by | Jun 14, 2022 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

What are you doing to build your business right now?

It’s a question I ask when I am in front of a business owner.

Sadly, many don’t have a plan.

Or some are afraid of what the future might hold and they are behaving very cautiously.

Too cautious I dare to say.

“Oh, we’re going to take a few months off from advertising and see what happens”, is something I hear by many. 

Good luck with that I say.  Sometimes I say it to their face.  Sometimes I say it to myself and write them off.

We are going thru a time of uncertainty that some of you are experiencing for the very first time.  However there is plenty of history in the recent past that points to a positive outcome for those who are willing to step out instead of retreat.

About 14 years ago, in 2008 our economy was seeing economic collapse that created panic and downturns that were just as scary to the casual observer.  For years, lenders were taking us down a path that was going to create a crash, and basically in 2008, it all came crumbling down.  In a nutshell, lenders had been told to make it easier for people to buy a house.  Sub-prime loans were a part of this along with no-doc mortgages.

I saw first hand how the no-doc mortgage loan was abused.  I had a client that was running a mortgage company and we were supposed to meet about 1 o’clock one afternoon in 2008.  I got to his office before he returned from lunch and overheard one of his mortgage guys reviewing an application with a client over the phone.  As their customer told them their monthly income, the mortgage guy said, we’re going to bump that up so we can get you a lower interest rate. 

Afterward, I spoke to the owner of the mortgage company about what I heard and he told me that was common practice now since they didn’t need to provide any documentation to back up the figures they were putting on the loan applications.  Also they could get people into bigger, more expensive homes this way and the mortgage lender would make more money without risk because they were just a broker and these questionable loans were sold off and he had no liability as the mortgage broker.

I decided not to renew his advertising contract when it expired a few weeks later because I had a gut feeling that this was not right and I didn’t want my radio listeners to be taken advantage off by this company that was putting people’s finances in jeopardy in this manner.

When things took a crash in 2009, this guy’s mortgage company went out of business. That was a good thing.

There were other companies that went under back then but it wasn’t because they were crooked.  Many of them did what I see going on right now and they decided to be conservative and act like a scared turtle and hide in their shell, waiting for things to get better.

They decided to coast for awhile.

Problem is, you can only coast downhill.

Sure if you have enough momentum you will continue to be fine for a bit.

But if you stop inviting people to do business with you, eventually they will stop doing business with you.

And that’s all that advertising really is… a paid invitation from you and your company to potential customers to consider you when they are going to buy.

Some of your best customers will eventually decrease their spending or stop.  It may have nothing to do with you, just circumstances in their life.  For this reason alone, the average business will need to replace 20% of last years customers with brand new customers just to stay even.

That 20% number fluctuates greatly depending on the type of business you are in.

We have roofers advertising on my radio station that offer lifetime warranties.  That means they will never be able to sell that customer another roof until the customer moves to a new house.  Roofers like that have to replace nearly 100% of their customers every year!

Besides the business owners that say they are going to coast for awhile, there are others that are in the start-up or growth phase of their business plan and those are going to advertise.  They are going to earn the trust of your potential customers now and once a consumer buys from someone else, they are out of the market to buy from you.

I actually don’t mind the fact that some businesses are going to coast for now because it makes room for those that want to grow and those are the ones me and my team enjoy working with.

I’ll boil it down to this:

If you want to grow, contact me.

If you are considering coasting, contact me and we’ll continue this discussion.

If you have already made up your mind to pull back and coast, thank you for making it easier for your competition that I’ll be working with to take your place.

 

Adjusting To New Realities In The Workforce

Adjusting To New Realities In The Workforce

by | Jan 11, 2022 | Marketing and Advertising Insights

The saying that we are in a new reality was one that many of us didn’t want to hear last year.

But it’s true and the quicker we see what is happening, the sooner we can adjust.

At the end of the year, I read the Monday Morning Memo from Roy H. Williams that talked about 3 realities we are facing today:

  1. Inflation
  2. Covid
  3. Employee Shortages

I’m not an expert on any of these, but I deal with them just like you do.

The first two are out of our individual hands, we are powerless as individuals to solve the increase in prices of goods and services because many of us we are needing to also raise the prices to pass along the costs that inflation has had on our goods and services.  Covid, well that has turned into a political football that I’m not about to address, and like you, we have limited power to fix.

What Roy mentioned in his Monday Morning Memo was a concept that I’m going to pass along to you to solve the Employee Shortage reality of 2022.

The staffing shortage was entirely predictable.  In the United States of America, the birthrate has been declining for decades.

“For years many demographers have been warning of a permanent worker shortage in the coming decades. It may just be that the pandemic brought the shortage earlier.”

“An important concept in demographics is the ‘replacement birth rate’. This is the birth rate needed to replace deaths and keep the population unchanged. If the actual birth rate is higher than the replacement rate, then the population increases. Demographers estimate the replacement birth rate is 2.1 children per woman. If the birth rate is lower than this replacement rate, then the population decreases. In the case of the latter, a declining population will eventually result in a declining labor force.”

“Statistics show the US birth rate has been steadily declining and is below the replacement rate. The latest birth rate for 2020 is 1.6, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. This means that, based on domestic births alone, the nation’s population would be declining. So far, immigration has prevented this, but there’s no assurance this will continue in the future…”

The specific idea that Roy Williams shares is for a company to offer free private daycare to employees on-site (or close to) the companies location where parents can drop off their young ones with the assurance that they will be taken care of while Mom and Dad are taking care of business.

That idea might actually work for some companies, but it’s not a universal solution right now.

So what is a universal solution?

I have a two part answer:

1st off, you need to become a company that people want to work for. In the past few years, the company I am with has undergone a specific plan to access our company culture and then improve it.  The ideas come from those who are already here.  We looked at those ideas, and found a few that could be implemented and then measured again and asked again.  It’s an ongoing process at Federated Media.

We realize that not everyone who works for us is going to stay forever. Many will leave for many different reasons, but what we want to do is keep the best and hire others that will contribute both to our mission and also our company culture. As a result, I have coworkers who have been here for years, even decades, not because they have to work here, but because they want to.

Personally the real reason I left most of the jobs I had were due to something in the culture.  The real people problem was not that we couldn’t hire enough, but we hired the wrong people at other places I worked. The answer to this for you and your company is to take that same evaluation and find out why people work for you and what can make it even better.  That is what you need to promote in your recruitment messages and ads.

Here’s the 2nd part of my solution to the labor shortage: Change the number of employees you need to run your business.

The reality is there are less people available to be hired as I mentioned at the beginning and so your business model needs to change.

Business models have been evolving and the side effects of the pandemic shut-down just accelerated some of what was going on already.  Several fast food restaurants closed their dining rooms and some are not planning on opening them up.  Instead they have become drive-thru only establishments.  I’ve seen this in my area for nearly two decades as multiple Pizza Huts created this style of restaurant. I’m sure there are others in your area that are undergoing a similar transformation.  Plus ordering online has really taken off.  Last year I went inside to place an order for chicken and was told that I had to either use the app or drive thru.

Grocery stores and other retailers are relying on self serve check out lanes more than ever.  Now instead of a cashier ringing up one customer at a time, it’s common to see one employee overseeing 6 to 10 self serve checkouts.

I’ve got a third bonus tip for you that I almost forgot because I’ve been doing it for so long and our company has been doing it even longer, at least in the Fort Wayne division of Federated Media.  Flexible work life is what we call it, but here’s how it really works…

The advertising salespeople do not have a dedicated workspace at our office.  Instead, there are a couple of hours each week that they come to the office for meetings with their manager.  Where are they the rest of the time?  Working from home, client meetings, working from their favorite internet cafe a.k.a. coffee shop, who knows?  They might be running their kid to the dentist during the middle of the day, or grabbing lunch with a friend.

This sounds like the Covid inspired Work From Home business model, but we’ve been doing it this way for many, many years.  As a General Sales Manager, I have my own office at our Fort Wayne office that I work from nearly every day.  But those on my sales team are given the freedom to do what works best for them.  We have particular items that need done daily, weekly or monthly but the ultimate measure of their success is the revenue they are responsible for with their individual budgets.  Their success is not measured with punches on a time clock.

Yes we have guidelines and Key Performance Indicators that when followed will create individual successes, but reporting to the office just because it’s always been that way, 5 days a week… We abandoned that years ago to focus on productivity.  In other departments, there are similar flexible work arrangements too.  This has become an important part of our culture.

By the way, I am always looking for qualified candidates to join my advertising sales team at WOWO radio in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  We just hired a new team member and I have at least one more opening to fill.  However, I’m going to keep that position open until I find the person that fits us best.  Perhaps that is something you should do with your company too, be picky with who you hire to protect the culture you have in place.

And one last note, if you would like to learn more about the opening I have, here’s a link to the job posting. https://www.wowo.com/wanted-sales-hunter/

 

Should Your Business Advertise on the Radio?

Should Your Business Advertise on the Radio?

by | Sep 8, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

The question for today is:

Should your business advertise on the radio?

The answer is:

A qualified Yes.

Now that may not be the answer you were expecting from the General Sales Manager of the Most Listened to Radio Station in town, WOWO.

You thought I’d say:

Definitely Yes, every business needs to advertise on the radio.

I know that there are people in my position that would say that because they believe any dollar is a good dollar.

I take a different approach here at WOWO.  I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago when I said that the focus of me and my sales team is to get results for the businesses that advertise with WOWO.

We want to partner with you if it makes financial sense for your business.

We want to come up with an agreeable and reasonable Return On Investment formula before we agree to take your money and but you on the radio.

I admit, that’s not always possible.  One of my favorite radio advertising partners hates the idea of tracking and measuring the return on investment.  They simply want to believe it’s working and because of the style of advertising campaign I designed for them, our listeners are vocal enough to let their sales team and their service techs that they listen to WOWO.  That confirmation gets back to the owners and that’s why they believe in WOWO for their advertising.

Borrell Associates shared another survey last month that talked about business owners plans for using radio in the future and part of their report mentioned the value of having conversations with local advertising people:

How do they buy those ads? Three-quarters say via emailing with a sales rep compared to 55% who say they meet with salespeople in person or talk to them by phone. Nevertheless, Borrell says three in four said they like having the option of having a face-to-face meeting with sales reps.

That is more than just being sociable. The survey data suggests that local businesses have a lot more respect for local reps than those selling national advertising. Three quarters of those surveyed said they find local reps more knowledgeable and 70% said local reps are a good source of marketing intelligence.

“Local advertisers see local media reps as knowledgeable resources who care about their business,” says the report. “They may not always help advertisers save money but they bring value in other ways.”

Comparing specifically radio advertising sales people with others, here’s what business owners said:

And as earlier reported by Inside Radio, the perception of radio sellers as expert marketers is higher than it is for any other type of sales rep, and the perception of digital savvy of radio reps is now also the highest. When buyers were asked, which sales reps are considered savvy about marketing, radio  topped all other forms of traditional media.

Advertising sales reps who worked for broadcast TV,  cable TV, newspapers, and direct mail all ranked significantly lower.  Radio people are also at the top of the survey to be considered digitally savvy.

When I took over as the General Sales Manager at WOWO Radio last year, I had a couple of radio experts on my team and a couple of guys who had experience in advertising or sales but not broadcasting yet. Now, 20 months later, everyone is becoming an expert with coaching, mentoring and a true heart for doing what is best for the businesses we work with.

Want to know more, contact me: Scott@WOWO.com

Follow The Leader Off The Cliff

Follow The Leader Off The Cliff

by | Jul 7, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom

Are you a Follower?

Or are you a Leader?

A couple weeks ago I read a statistic about advertising spending that didn’t surprise me but kind of made me sad.

It’s estimated that this year, digital advertising will account for nearly 67% of all media spending.

That was the opening line in a story from Mediapost that actually advices that going all digital is dangerous to the health of your brand and company.  Their headline reads: 5 Reasons To Keep Traditional Media In The Mix.

Radio, TV, newspapers, they are considered traditional media compared to digital media when has been around for nearly two decades.

All media can have some value for advertisers but you have to understand the way people use them and have the right expectations for what you are wanting to do.

Coupled with the rise of digital, the media landscape is increasingly complicated. The best approach is an integrated one — utilizing both digital and traditional tactics.

The reason I titled this Follow The Leader Off The Cliff is I have seen too many business people abandon traditional and go all digital, only to suffer the consequences or wake up and return to radio, print and tv.  National companies like Proctor and Gamble did it, and I have a friend that was nearly put out of business when Facebook shut down his Facebook page.

Let’s dig in with the 5 reasons from Mediapost:

More real estate. Smart traditional media placements can complement your digital campaign, in many cases offering additional real estate for comprehensive storytelling. 

Added value. Traditional media offers far more opportunity for added value than digital. 

 

Content alignment. Traditional broadcast and print media offer more content alignment opportunities, allowing the message to complement what audiences are already seeing. Negotiating fixed positions adjacent to this content through sponsorships and specific placement can help brands avoid getting lost in the clutter.

 

Endorsement opportunities. Endorsements promote credibility, particularly for campaigns meant for diverse audiences. By leveraging endorsements with “original influencers,” from DJs to on-air broadcast personalities, messaging is delivered by people whom audiences already trust, allowing paid content to come across naturally.

 

Internal alignment. It’s normal to want to see a campaign in-market once it launches. However, clients and their internal teams may not always be the target audience for a digital campaign, therefore not ever seeing it. 

 

While digital media is a critical component of paid campaign strategies, traditional media tactics still have unique strengths. Depending on location, demographics and other key qualifiers, there can be an argument made to focus on one over the other. Integrating both digital and traditional together can expand reach and engagement, while also increasing impact.