by Scott Howard | Jan 23, 2017 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
Three questions that apply to everyone and nearly everything:
Do you set goals?
Do you set up a plan to meet those goals?
Do you meet or exceed those goals? 
You can ask those same questions to a high school freshman, a college freshman, or a 50 year old and you will be able to determine the level of success they will achieve.
Everyone has goals, even if they don’t consider them goals. Each one of us has a goal of waking up, eating a couple of meals and going to sleep at the end of our day. But those goals can also be considered habits.
To really make some positive changes and improvements, setting goals is truly a first step. Not the only step, but you have to have a goal first.
Let’s jump into the business world since that’s my focus and sharpen that focus to advertising and marketing.
The goal oriented question I have for you is:
Do You Have A Marketing Measuring Stick?
Last year I launched several advertising and marketing programs for new advertising partners and some were more successful than others.
Not because some produced greater measurable results.
The real reason some were more successful than others has to do with setting goals and measuring the performance.
Some businesses were kind of fuzzy on their goals and so it was hard to determine if or when they met their goals.
Some businesses set goals but never fully put in place a method to track or measure the results.
Other businesses had unrealistic expectations and were not open to learning how to properly align their goals and expectations with the actions required.
On the flip side, I got to work with several advertising partners that were wildly successful and will likely be lifelong advertising partners.
What’s the difference?
It comes back to: Do You Have A Marketing Measuring Stick?
If you don’t then you are having to rely on assumptions and feelings which is a dangerous way to live your life and a business.
Let me tell you about the advertising partners that quit last year but shouldn’t have.
The first one was a dentist who I had worked with a few years ago and helped them build their practice from scratch. Then they cut expenses for awhile because they were expanding by buying another practice and wanted to show the bankers a more favorable cash flow.
Two years later, I meet with them again, but instead of meeting with the doctor and his wife whom I had worked with the first time, my meetings are with a staff person who has been assigned to handle his marketing. I give her credit. She is smart. But she also needs some guidance and mentoring to help them make smart marketing decisions.
Instead, this dentist office didn’t follow my recommendations to track response. Without this critical information, all they can do is go with feelings since they don’t have any data. In my final meeting with them, they said, yes, they did get an increase in the types of patients that we were advertising for on the radio. But no, they didn’t keep track and so it’s a wild guess as to how profitable they were.
The real problem with this dental practice is they cannot justify ANYTHING they are spending money on to bring in new patients, because they have no measuring stick or record keeping. I really feel worse for them than me because they are blindly spending money without any accountability. And unfortunately this is the way the majority of businesses make advertising decisions.
Ironically the other advertising partner was also a dentist and a competitor to the first dentist. Their offices were about two miles apart. With dentist #2, we had a measuring stick because our entire campaign was digital with no radio ads. The measuring stick I used was the reporting I got every month. The digital ads were responsible for 80% of the new visitors to their website. That’s more successful than any other digital campaign I have run!
So why did they quit? They went in with a short sighted mentality. They initially decided to give it a shot. I told them what our minimum time commitment was and they were reluctant but did it anyway. And despite evidence that we were building their practice, they decided to use a different measuring stick. They decided to stick with a budget no matter what the results were. I had a gut feeling about both of these dentists from the beginning, and I was right.
One more doctor story. This time a chiropractor with two offices. This doctor and I worked together starting last summer and just recently I tweaked his campaign. We were in agreement with how to measure and what to measure. 2017 is going to be a fantastic year for the chiropractor.
The dentists I worked with, I am going to use the information I did gather and find another dentist that can work hand in hand with me (including the “measuring stick” or tracking) and help them grow.
Do you have a marketing measuring stick? Do you know what to measure and how to measure it? Do you want help?
by Scott Howard | Sep 20, 2016 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Media, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
It’s a question that some people ask out loud and others may not ask me directly but they are thinking, “Why Does a Radio Guy Also Sell Digital Marketing Solutions?”
Excellent question.
Here’s the answer.
My background is in radio. From the time I was 16 until I was 26, I loved being on the air. Then I moved over to the business side creating ad campaigns in Detroit for my radio clients. I became a student and teacher of marketing, advertising, sales, persuasion, and something I call human relationship marketing.
Jump ahead to 2005 and I started using digital (the web) to market myself using the same concepts I had learned 15+ years earlier.
With me, Scott Howard aka ScLoHo, you get to work with an individual who understands both the traditional broadcast world and the newer digital world. I walked away from my paying jobs in radio twice in recent history to work full time in the digital world. The first time was in 2011, when I joined a website development firm. A couple years later, I joined a multi-million dollar e-commerce biz as their Social Media director.
Now I work for WOWO radio which is one of the stations owned by Federated Media. Federated Media also has a digital division, Federated Digital Solutions. 
Federated Media created Federated Digital Solutions because many of their radio advertising clients were also looking for ways to market themselves online. Federated Media decided to invest in creating another division of the company. During my three years, I have seen our digital division grow and we now have 20+ people working for Federated Digital Solutions.
Those 20+ people at Federated Digital Solutions (FDS) have a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. The goal was to find the best available talent in the country and create the FDS team.
But there’s more.
Several of the digital solutions use outside vendors that we have access to that you simply can’t buy on your own. We also have two layers of expertise working on all of these digital marketing campaigns. There’s the expertise of our vendors and the expertise of the FDS team.
With me, you actually get a 3rd layer of expertise. Me. Scott Howard aka ScLoHo.
Because of my background, experience and knowledge, I really do know more than most of my radio co-workers. No, I’m not a know-it-all, but I do know how to Google to get the answers on stuff that I don’t know.
Here’s something else that’s important.
I care more about my reputation than what I sell.
I care more about your success than what I sell.
When I started at WOWO, I sold next to nothing from the digital solutions offered by FDS. I wanted to see the results and I wasn’t willing to use my advertising partners as test subjects. But as I watched, observed and questioned, I saw that the performance of the Federated Digital Solutions team was top notch. I also got the opportunity to see what other companies were selling and through that comparison, I saw how we were superior to others.
I’ve seen what Nexstar Broadcast Group was trying to sell as digital solutions and it was crap.
I’ve seen the actual results of Dex Media and what they sold to come of my advertising clients and did digging and found a huge pile of manure.
There are a couple of local companies that are selling digital marketing solutions that are worthless. My friend Kevin, called it marketing malpractice when we were discussing what I was seeing, and Kevin is one smart dude when it comes to doing digital marketing correctly.
Advertising agencies, both local and national are understaffed and under-qualified to be doing the digital work they are selling.
This summer I found out one of my advertising partners bought a website for $27,000 from one of these advertising agencies and it’s really messed up. Sure it looks okay to the naked eye, but it is impossible to optimize for the search engines (SEO) due to the platform they built it on. We can rebuild it for less that 1/3 that cost.
One last item in answering the question, “Why Does a Radio Guy Also Sell Digital Marketing Solutions?”
There actually is a study that shows how broadcasting works best in driving people to your website. A couple lines from the article that caught my eye:
Here’s why radio and TV have the advantage: While print media requires hands, broadcast media leaves them free to do other things . . . like type in a URL, tweet something, or click “like.”
Want to talk? Let’s connect
by Scott Howard | Sep 8, 2016 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
I saw this quote a few times this year,
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
And I’ve also heard people react to the way they are being tracked and targeted by “Big Data”.
Big Data is simply the information that is gathered about us electronically and organized online.
Some of it is very specific, other is general.
We have been voluntarily providing this information for years.
Your first email account perhaps was a hotmail, yahoo or aol email address. Or if you are younger, maybe gmail was and is your email service of choice.
These free email accounts were collecting information about me and you and that was just the beginning.
Facebook and every single social media platform is gathering data about you.
Your phone with its built in GPS, knows and tracks where you go.
When I got a new phone last year, I added some apps for gas stations, grocery stores, restaurants and a few others to take advantage of “discounts”. You may have some on your phone too.
As the quote says, if you didn’t pay for any of these services, your data is what is being collected and sold to others.
We give our data freely. In return, we are targeted with ads and offers that are customized to what Big Data knows about us.
They even tell us when we absent-mindedly agree to the T.O.S. (Terms Of Service) agreements that we click on without reading when we sign up for the free stuff.
It’s not bad and it’s not good. Data collection is neutral. It’s like money. It can be used for good or evil.
In reality, none of us who do anything online can escape and we really don’t need to.
If you want to use this Big Data to locate and target your future customers, I can do that. 
My company has partnered with the best vendors to offer these online services, more than I can explain today. We call it Opt-In as part of the Federated Digital Solutions and radio divisions of our company. Contact me for details on how we can do this.
In the meantime remember,
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
and relax.
by Scott Howard | Mar 25, 2016 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
Wrapping up a three-parter on mass media and advertising with a smarter way to spend your marketing budget.
First we looked at the changes in mass media and then we explored the idea of mass media marketing today.
Today, I’ll show you how to pick the advertising mediums that make sense for you.
It’s all about targeting. 
If I am selling funeral insurance, I don’t want to spend my advertising money delivering my message to teenagers.
If I am selling orthodontics, I don’t want to spend my advertising money delivering my message to people with dentures.
Mass media has specific information about their individual audiences. I can tell you the age range of all of the Fort Wayne radio station audiences and the number of listeners to each station according to the latest data that I get twice a year. Mix that information with the other sources and I can give you recommendations for what stations to consider based on who you want to reach with your message.
There is one other way to target that is possible due to the advances in technology. I’m talking about online digital ads. Imagine if you could pinpoint your advertising to only be seen by people who are interested in what you have to sell? Would that be of value?
I see you’re nodding your head in agreement.
There are multiple ways I can do this that is independent of what I do with my radio stations, however, it may make sense to do both and have me handle the coordination of everything.
After all, you have a business to run. You have your area of expertise that people are paying you money to provide. I have mine too. My area of expertise is to help you target your advertising messages to invite people to spend their money with you. Contact me for help.
by Scott Howard | Mar 21, 2016 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Media, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
It’s a fascinating discussion when I ask people about their media habits in 2016. A lot has changed over the years with more options than ever and sometimes people ask me a variation of this question,
Is Mass Media Dead or Thriving?
It is actually thriving but in ways different than before.
Mass Media by definition is considered a form of media that is consumed by a large number of people. While that definition hasn’t changed in the past 100 years, the way that media is delivered and consumed has changed over the past 25 years.
For my purposes today, I’m going to address this from a marketing standpoint.
While we have seen the decline of newspapers and magazines, those that have survived have done so by reinventing themselves to appeal to a niche audience. It’s doubtful that we’ll ever have the dominance of a major print publication, even on the local level except where there are no other media options available. But then there’s the internet…
Television was dominated by ABC, CBS, NBC and then PBS and Fox came along to provide a few more viewing options. Unless you recorded a show on your own, you had to watch it live. This was an excellent way for advertisers to reach a bunch of people simultaneously with their commercials as we sat “glued to the tube”. Then with the expansion of networks and the ability to time shift and watch what ever we wanted, when ever we wanted, the simultaneous viewing of commercials began declining. But then there’s the internet…
Radio stations that play music have always had competition. As consumers we could buy the music and listen when ever we wanted to what ever we wanted. Music radio stations have always had competition for music listenership that went beyond other radio stations. Then with the expansion of choices including the internet…
Talk Radio stations have had a mix bag of competition. When I first started listening to WJR and WWJ in Detroit 30 years ago, I tuned it for information. Some talk stations don’t offer the information that listeners want and they have lost listeners because their are plenty of options including the internet…
As a side note, I looked at the listenership of the Fort Wayne radio stations and 4 of the top 5 stations have incredibly large audiences of over 100,000 weekly listeners. That’s 20% to 30% of the population, each of those stations reaches individually. WOWO, my station, and 3 of our sister stations that play music are in that top 5, out of over 25 stations in the Fort Wayne metro area.
The concept of Mass Media has changed. When there were fewer options, each option had more people reading/listening/viewing. Now we have the ability to personalize our media habits as consumers and as marketers.
I don’t need a newspaper subscription to read the local news. I can get the information online. I don’t need to watch CBS on Tuesday night at 8pm to see the latest episode of NCIS. I can watch it later On Demand with Comcast on my TV, laptop or smartphone. I don’t need many of the old medias on a daily basis the way my parents did.
Instead we get to choose. I can listen to the radio as I am driving to work to get the news, weather, sports and other information. A lot of people still do this. Even teens do this. Maybe not as many as their grandparents generation, but they still do.
For businesses that want to reach the masses, it’s do-able. We have plenty of options and we’ll look at those options next time.
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