by Scott Howard | Jun 9, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
Recently I have been faced with a question regarding my work with radio station WOWO,,,
Is radio advertising appropriate for Business to Business marketing?
My simple answer is, “Why not?”
Seriously, let me walk you through this.
Businesses are run by people.
It’s the people who are in those businesses that are either decision makers or influencers that can make a difference.
With a few notable exceptions, most people get to work in an automobile or truck, or SUV or…
Those exceptions are cities that have public transportation so people don’t need a car. Like New York City, or maybe Chicago. But even those cities have plenty of people who use cars as their primary method of transportation.
Cars are radios on wheels.
Even with the introduction of satellite and internet radio services, local radio stations still dominate the in-vehicle listening. 91% of Americans listen at least weekly.
Besides traditional radio advertising, some of us can also offer additional ways to reach those business people. In my work at WOWO Radio in Fort Wayne, I have an entire collection of digital marketing solutions that I offer to radio advertisers and non-advertisers alike.
Some of these digital solutions include items that work hand in hand with WOWO radio, while others are completely independent. Contact me to learn more or you can wait as I unroll them out publicly in the weeks ahead.
by Scott Howard | May 26, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
It’s a curious purchasing decision. Advertising and marketing services.
Recently I was talking with a business owner about the success rate of ad campaigns that we do on WOWO Radio.
You see, I have been very presently surprised at the results some of our advertising partners report they receive. Compared to other radio stations in Fort Wayne, Indiana, WOWO often works better at producing results simply because of the size and quality of the audience.
I worked for stations in the past that had less than 30,000 listeners and we did everything we could to get a return on investment for those businesses. It was successful, sometimes.
The honest truth, and what I will tell you face to face is it is impossible to accurately measure the entire results from any advertising or marketing you spend money on. There are simply too many variables in tracking, which I’ll write about another day. 
What kind of Advertising Guarantee do we offer?
We will air the advertising schedule we agree to, or you won’t pay for the parts that didn’t air.
For example, if we are not able to get all 30 of your ads on this week and only 28 air, you will only pay for 28. That’s pretty straight forward. And it is rare that we can’t air all your ads, but stuff happens that is out of our control. Rarely, but that is the way it goes.
Hang on a second, you say. I don’t want to just pay for you to play some ads, I want to pay you to invite customers to spend their money with me. I understand. I want that too. We just can’t guarantee it. Too many variables.
A friend of mine once said buying ads is like buying a couple pounds of ground beef from the grocery store. You spend your money on the meat and the guarantee is that it is good when you buy it. There is no guarantee from the store that how you use that beef will result in the best burger or meatloaf or whatever you decide to do with it. Too many variables.
However, you do have my solemn pledge to do everything we can to reach our mutually agreed upon goals of success for your business. And right now I’m going to grab a bite to eat. That previous paragraph made me hungry.
Want to read more? Look at what Seth Godin wrote the other day here.
by Scott Howard | May 13, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
I have mentioned that most businesses don’t want to spend money on advertising, they just want the results from advertising.
Sometimes people are further along in their understanding of business basics when I meet with them, they know they need to spend money to advertise and they are shopping for a place to spend their money.
When I mention I am with WOWO Radio in Fort Wayne, nearly everyone over the age of 30 is aware of WOWO. After all, WOWO has been on the air for 90 years including more than 20 years as a news/talk radio station and consistently has more listeners than any other station in town by a large margin according to the radio rating services.
One of the first questions I ask people who says they are familiar with WOWO is, “What is your perception of WOWO and the audience?” I get a varied response, and while many of the answers are correct, they are not the full picture.
WOWO’s audience is massive. There are 25 year olds, 75 year olds, and all ages in between. Men listen, women listen, conservatives, liberals, independents, even people who don’t care about politics listen.
WOWO is brain food. You listen because you want information. Whether it’s weather reports, school delays, or farm reports and sports scores, WOWO has it every morning.
Afternoons on WOWO, we have another local talk show that has subject matter that people in our area care about. That’s why they listen. In between Fort Wayne’s Morning News and the Pat Miller Show in the afternoon, we have a couple of national politically based talk shows and more in the evening. It works at attracting a mammoth adult audience.
Advertising with WOWO adds credibility to your business. Recently I had a business want to form a “partnership with us” where we would give them all kinds of promotion, but they didn’t see the value of our endorsement of their business enough to pay us. Their view of the partnership was lopsided and not an accurate portrait of who had more value. They were struggling to build awareness in Fort Wayne of the existence of their business, but believed that they were “stronger” than us and if would benefit WOWO more than it would benefit them. Not to be conceded, but they were unable to convince me so I decided not to do business with them.
A quick side note… There are 21 other radio stations based in Fort Wayne. If I was with any of the 15 less listened to stations, they may have had a point and we could have worked out some type of partnership.
Advertising with WOWO can be very affordable. One of the lessons I learned was the power of connecting that WOWO has. This is an ideal environment for relationship marketing because our listeners form emotional ties and relationships with WOWO and our radio personalities. This means I have options to put together marketing plans that are different than I would if I was representing another radio station or any other advertising venue.
Besides the relationship that is built via our on air programming, WOWO has other touchpoints with our listeners via social media including our Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts that are updated continuously. There is also texting that is very popular and the ongoing updates to WOWO.com as news stories break daily.
But the core of what makes all of this possible is the 90 year heritage of WOWO as a radio station and I am privileged to work there.
by Scott Howard | May 8, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
Are you one of those fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants sort of people?
They’re the ones who start each day with a blank page and fill it in as the day progresses.
The other extreme is the person who knows exactly how many seconds it takes to brush their teeth after each meal and has their life planned down to the minute or second.
Most of us live in a world between these couple of examples.
There are some who live a life of wishful thinking. My radio station, WOWO has several financial planners that advertise a message of planning ahead for retirement. Some people do, others don’t.
Cars need care. Don’t take care of them and they won’t take care of you. Planning for regular maintenance including oil changes can prevent more expensive bills in the future. Same principle applies with our bodies. Health care including regular trips to the dentist, annual check ups, you get the picture.
Let’s take a moment and think about marketing and how this applies to your business. If you are a retailer and wondering how to advertise your Mothers Day specials, you might as well forget it. Too late.
Look at the calendar and plan now for Memorial Day, Father’s Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. Depending on what advertising mediums you want to use, there are different lead times.
A monthly magazine might need 90 days. A digital display ad campaign could take 1 to 4 weeks. Radio might be 2 days, but we prefer longer.
I had a conversation last week with a company that has been “delaying their yes”. We know that want to use WOWO but it has been 2 months since they said so and they have not yet set a start date to lock in the price. WOWO has a very straight forward pricing system based on inventory. Want to be on the radio this week? We are sold out and you will have to pay over $125 for a 60 second ad. Want to start in June or July? Sign up now and pay under $90.
If you are like this company I was talking to last week and you are waiting to see when you will be open, sign up anyway and lock in a price and I can work with you if we need to postpone for a week or two due to delays in construction. 
Don’t be like the dudes who are going to be at the drug store Sunday morning trying to find a decent Mother’s day card from the picked over supply at the very last minute. Plan ahead.
by Scott Howard | Apr 29, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
This month I have had a couple people ask me questions about the effectiveness of advertising on the radio. They asked specifically about advertising on WOWO Radio and traditional radio stations overall.
My answer was a qualified yes, advertising on the radio can still be very effective. 
The conversations were with potential advertising partners. One of them is using targeted business publications and is getting a decent response according to their marketing director.
Another conversation was centered on using radio versus social media. Someone else told me they were unhappy with the response from their television advertising and doubted that radio was the answer. And finally, I was asked about the impact of satellite radio and the likes of Spotify and Pandora which are alternatives to traditional broadcast radio.
Let’s set the stage. Not all radio advertising works. Anyone who tells you differently is a liar and you should not do business with them. What makes some radio advertising campaigns effective and others not so much?
It’s a combination of elements including:
- The radio station audience demographics
- The size of the radio station audience overall
- The actual number of people that your campaign will reach
- The number of times an ideal (target) person will hear your message (frequency)
- The message itself
- Share of voice, which is about how you stack up versus your competition on that radio station.
But one of the other elements that I mention is the mindset of the audience and their attitude towards commercials. WOWO Radio and our local ESPN Radio stations are part of the Federated Media stations in Fort Wayne. I sell ad campaigns on those two news/talk/sports stations. Our other Fort Wayne stations are music based.
When you or I tune into a music station, we do it to escape. If it’s background music or music to crank up as we are driving, it is the music we want to hear. When the music stops for commercials, we pay less attention to what is on the radio. Some people may even switch to another station during a commercial break on music based radio stations.
Radio stations that feature talk formats, either news talk like WOWO or sports talk like ESPN are less bothered by commercials. The listeners are not escaping, they are actively listening to every word. It’s like brain food. Commercials are less of an interruption because it is all talk anyway.
The other critical element that local broadcast radio stations need to do to keep local listeners and not lose them to satellite radio services or internet jukeboxes is provide local content. In this age of world wide everything, we can get news and music from nearly anywhere. But if you want to know what is going on in your town, you need a local source. That is why some of Federated Media’s radio stations including WOWO have consistently attracted large audiences, year after year after year.
What about the audience of the radio station versus a targeted publication? This came up in two conversations. You can target using radio stations too, in many cases. There are currently two stations in Fort Wayne with a weekly audience of over 100,000 people according to the Eastlan rating service. WOWO & WJFX. Huge difference is the make up of the audiences.
Adults age 25 and older make up 97 % of WOWO’s audience.
Adults age 25 and older make up less than 40% of the WJFK audience.
Want to reach business people? Go for the audience that is at least 25 years old, not younger than 25.
But not everyone who listens to WOWO is a business person so my ads are heard by people who are not my target, right?
Yes. But take a look at the number of people that you are reaching with your targeted publications and compare that with the number of people you want to target who listen to WOWO, and see how that measures up.
Regarding the social media factor…
Yes, social media should be a consideration, but even there, the rules have changed. For example, Facebook continues to make it more and more difficult to reach your targeted audience unless you pay. I saw this first hand a couple years ago when Facebook changed their algorithms to limit the exposure of business Facebook content. I managed the Facebook pages for a couple of multi-million dollar e-commerce businesses and saw the number of people who saw our posts drop by 75 to 90% unless I started paying Facebook to promote our posts.
I’m talking about the 200,000 people who already liked our pages and thought they would keep our posts in their Facebook feeds. Unless I paid Facebook real money, only a tiny fraction would see what we shared. And Facebook has continued to tweak this multiple times since then, all to get more money from you, the business owner.
Okay, what about television which has traditionally been a mass media to reach, well the masses? With the exception of the Superbowl, there has been a huge decline in real time viewership for multiple reasons. It’s hitting all generations.
The new standard for watching television is to watch on your own schedule. My wife and I do it as baby boomers as do my kids who are in the middle of raising their own young families.
Combine that with the ever multiplying number of viewing options, is it any wonder that businesses are less satisfied with their television ad campaigns effectiveness?
All is not lost. Some people are overcoming the obstacles and using TV, and print and Facebook and making money. But back to the original question, “Does Radio Advertising Work Anymore?” Now you know it can and why along with how to compare it to your other options.
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