by Scott Howard | Nov 20, 2018 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo Sales Tips, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, Uncategorized, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
The Holi-daze are upon on and this is a weird and wonderful time of year. I’ve created a few items that you as a business person or marketing person, or what ever kind of person you are, you can take a look at and use to help you navigate the last few weeks of this year.
If this is make it or break it time for your retail business, it’s time to suck it up. Just because you are having to work long hours and cover for the employees that are sick or you just are short handed because all the good people have jobs elsewhere due, remember your customers.
The customers who actually drove to your store really want to buy something that you sell. Otherwise, we would have ordered it online. Just the other day, my wife was working on a project and after making a couple trips to the store, she asked me to order a tool online. It took me less than 10 minutes on a Saturday afternoon and it arrived at our house Monday. While that was convenient for my family, we are also a shop local family. Of the $200 we spent on this project, $185 went to a local store and $15 went to Amazon.
That’s because we are consciously looking to support our friends and neighbors. Locally owned coffee shops and restaurants get most of my food and beverage money every month.
The point is, the people who come to your store, have a choice to buy from you or someone else. Super-serve them and keep them coming back. Create a positive shopping experience for them and they will come back. Make it a bad experience, and you may have lost them forever.
Advertising is the part of marketing that functions as the invitation to your company. But advertising can’t fix problems that go on inside your company.
Last week I was meeting with someone who wanted to hire me to train his staff on how to upsell his customers in a manner that is not annoying, but instead is genuine.
Speaking of advertising, you really need to invite people to your store right now. People are spending for themselves and for others. They are overspending, maxing out credit cards this time of year. While I don’t believe that is a good thing to do, I’m not their mom and they are grown ups right?
Advertising this time of year might be challenging if you haven’t planned ahead.
Using television ads means you need to get a fresh ad produced and that takes time and money. Also the television viewing is different this time of year due to the holiday specials on TV and combined with the changes in TV viewing habits, I recommend you stay away from TV unless you already have it planned out.
Print ads might be available in the daily newspaper, but with the dwindling number of readers, just say no.
Social Media including Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest might work, but you better have a professional managing it, or else you can waste time and money.
I offer some online advertising options through the Federated Digital Solutions division of my company, but again, it’s kind of late to plan for this Holi-daze season. If you want to talk about it, let’s plan a campaign for the new year.
My suggestion is using radio advertising to capture customers right now for the Holi-daze season.
Within a couple of days, I can get your message in front of thousands of people right here in our city who are shopping. WOWO radio continues to be one of the most listened to radio stations in Fort Wayne and it’s a hot time right now. Our annual Penny Pitch drive is underway with money being raised for two local non-profits. Weekly events that you and your business can be associated with provide a feel-good connection.
I also can create room for advertising for a special event. Earlier this month, I put together a radio advertising campaign for an event that was less than a week away. I wrote the ads, we produced the campaign and in the 5 days leading up and including the sale days, over 50 ad invitations were heard by over 75,000 WOWO listeners.
If this is crunch time for you, let’s talk now.
Or if this is a slow time of the year for you because you are not part of the retail Holi-daze season, this is an excellent time to plan for the new year. I can make time to help you with your planning, reach out and we’ll get started.
By the way, I have a couple of ideas for retailers that you can do right now for this Holi-daze season:
- This first one was inspired by Amazon. I use Amazon to buy gifts for my relatives that are hundreds of miles away. I often spend a little extra to have Amazon gift wrap those presents. What if you offered to gift wrap purchases as an upsell to people who are in your store? Make it easy and just have a stock of gift bags and tissue paper, and charge them your cost plus an extra buck or two. You can even partner up with a local charity and give the proceeds to them.
- This other idea also was inspired by something Amazon does not do. Sometimes I buy a gift ahead of time and I don’t want it to arrive before hand. What if you offered a Santa’s Closet for people who want to buy presents now, but wait a few days or weeks to take them home?
- My last idea is something you need to start and continue forever. Collect email addresses and text numbers and offer a program to customers who sign up to be notified of special events. Most major retailers do this and you should too.
by Scott Howard | Sep 24, 2018 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Fort Wayne, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
Changing your logo won’t make you rich.
Advertising your brand might be worthless.
Instead, if growing your business is important, focus on Connections and Relationships.
I do a lot of reading and observing. I take pride in the fact that I have a pretty diverse circle of friends of all ages. Some are in their 70’s pushing 80 and others are just old enough to vote in the next election.
Personally, I have worked in show business and as an entry level material handler in a factory. I enjoy my relationships with millionaires and with people who are working multiple jobs to make ends meet.
What’s this have to do with branding, marketing and advertising your logo?
Let me tell you.
We the people of this United States value a few things over everything else:
- Trust
- Honesty
- Hope
I’ll go deeper.
We want to Trust that when ever we are going to spend money on something, that we are paying the right price, not getting ripped off with a bunch of hype and advertising promises that aren’t really true.
We crave Honesty in our business dealings. We understand that no one is perfect, but when something happens that needs fixed or corrected. don’t weasel your way out of it. Be honest. Do what you can to fix the problem. By the way, you will earn greater loyalty by fixing a problem for someone than if everything went smoothly the first time.
Also we want to be optimistic in this country of ours. No matter what we are buying, we want to have hope that the purchase we are making will improve our lives. This is the Hope I am talking about. The new car, and the box of cereal, both purchases are based on Hope to fill a need or desire.
Here’s a couple of ways to implement these three values:
First off, live them. Not just you, but everyone in your business. The front line clerks and staff that deal with the public, your customers everyday need to convey Trust, Honesty and Hope in their actions and attitude. You need to model it and live it so it can be passed down the line.
This is what builds relationships and relationships build your business.
I call this your Internal Marketing. It’s what you do to give your customers a good feeling about being your customer.
Your External Marketing is about making that initial connection outside of your business location. It’s about inviting people to check you out, inviting them to browse your place and look around. Doesn’t matter if it is online or in person, the same principle applies.
Your External Marketing includes your paid advertising. You need to be consistent in conveying Trust, Honesty, and Hope in your ads that reflect the customer experience that you have built in your company.
I’m going to tell you why I work in the radio industry and not some other form of media or advertising sales. It has a lot to do with what I have just said. And it is more true right now with where I work at WOWO Radio in Fort Wayne, Indiana compared to nearly any other place I have worked in media.
As a former radio personality, I experienced first hand the power of listeners making a connection with the voice on the other end. My first wife and mother of my kids, met me because I was on the radio.
When a radio personality does it correctly, he or she can create an intimacy with individual listeners that is as strong as a lot of in-person friendships.
Television personalities can do this too to a certain degree, but studies have shown that the bond isn’t as personal as radio personalities can create.
What about social media advertising? Billboard advertising? Newspaper, magazine, placemat, direct mail advertising? Those are just ads. There might be a bit of connecting, but certainly not relationship building.
The kind of relationship building via radio advertising with WOWO occurs on many levels. Long time listeners to the station consider WOWO as a trusted source of news and information as they have been a leader in providing that since before I was a kid and have continued the past couple of decades as a news and talk radio station. That trust in the station is also transferred to the businesses that advertise on WOWO.
A deeper level of trust is established when one of our personalities talks about your business, in either a short sponsorship message or as a personal endorsement or testimonial. Man, those types of ads are extremely powerful because they combine all the elements we’ve been talking about today. Trust, Honesty and Hope thru Connections and Relationships.
Want to know more? Let’s talk. Drop me a note to Scott @ScLoHo.net.
by Scott Howard | Aug 15, 2018 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, Really? The Personal ScLoHo, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, Uncategorized, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
Time to introduce myself, again for some of you that I’ve known for awhile, and perhaps for the first time if you are unfamiliar with this website and podcast.
This is episode 75 of the weekly podcast titled, The Genuine ScLoHo Media & Marketing Podcast.
Launched in early 2017 as a request from a couple of the managers at Federated Media in Fort Wayne, Indiana, they were asked to create a sales and marketing oriented podcast and they asked me if I would consider doing it.
See this ScLoHo thing has been around for quite awhile. On the ScottHoward.me website are over 13 hundred articles I have written, edited and published since 2011 and the Genuine ScLoHo Media & Marketing Podcast is simply an audio version of most of the articles I have created since March, 2017.
The history of ScLoHo however is much longer that that.
And before we dig into that history, I want to clear something up about what ScLoHo is.
ScLoHo began as an email address and grew into an online moniker, identity and nickname. I even registered a marketing company with the ScLoHo name. ScLoHo is a made up word that takes the first two letters of my first name, middle and last names and mashes them together. Scott Louis Howard becomes ScLoHo. Look for me on Twitter, Instagram and nearly any other social media site that I am on as ScLoHo. Before launching the ScottHoward.me website, I published over 10,000 articles on ScLoHo branded blogs starting around 2005.
So ScLoHo and Scott Howard, that’s me, are synonymous.
I began working in the media world as a teenager when my high school launched a radio station. After school, I landed my first full time job on the air in Marion, Indiana at WBAT, followed by WIOU in Kokomo, WMEE in Fort Wayne, WKSY in Columbia City, WZWZ in Kokomo, and WXIR in Indianapolis. At all of these stations, I worked on the air as a disc jockey and radio personality.
Life changed when I turned 26. I crossed over to the advertising side of the radio business. I was impressed by the philosophy that the Crawford Broadcasting Company had regarding the relationship between the listeners, the radio station and the advertisers. I moved my young family to work for WMUZ in Detroit, one of a dozen Crawford stations at the time. My job was to write and produce advertising campaigns.
I loved the challenge and learning that occurred during my 8 years at WMUZ. I also did fill-in work in the afternoon and spent about a year hosting WMUZ’s morning show in Detroit. My first venture as an advertising salesperson was also at WMUZ.
The philosophy that I learned related to the trust factor we as people have. WMUZ was and is a commercial Christian radio station that has a special bond with their thousands of weekly listeners. Listeners trust the WMUZ radio personalities. Those personalities often talk about their advertising partners and so that trust factor is passed along to the businesses that advertise. WMUZ listeners trust that the businesses that advertise on their station are trustworthy.
My job was not just to create effective advertising campaigns, but to screen out the bad businesses from the good. I carry this philosophy today as I consider which businesses I want to work with at WOWO radio in Fort Wayne.
In the mid 1990’s, we decided to leave Detroit and return to Indiana. I worked on the radio again in Fort Wayne at WBTU, WFWI, WGL and WAJI. Between 1995 and 2003, along with some part-time radio work and voice over production I was doing, I took a few blue collar jobs too in the printing business, the plastics industry and even automotive.
2003 was the year that I returned to media and marketing full-time in Fort Wayne when I joined a group of radio stations in the advertising sales side of the business. I spent 8 years rising as high as one could advance at that company before I was lured away to work for a website development company and later manage the social media for a $50 million dollar internet sales company.
Kevin, Ric and me. Picture snapped by my friend Ryan Recker.
I also served on the Board of Directors for the American Advertising Federation/Fort Wayne Chapter for 7 years. I taught personal branding seminars, guest lectured at a local university, was featured in some national publications including the Wall Street Journal, won a few awards and have had a lot of fun. I have consulted and coached businesses doing newspaper and magazine ads, billboard advertising, social media and all kinds of internet marketing, along with television and event marketing. More recently I was featured on an international podcast for broadcasters to share what it takes to be successful in broadcasting.
I only share all this with you because I want you to have confidence in the Scott Howard dude a.k.a. ScLoHo, that I’m not just hear to sell you stuff. I am here to help. I’m here to teach, to consult, to advise, to coach and even guide you through the process of marketing you and your business.
Human Relationship Principles are the heart of most successful marketing and advertising efforts and I can help you employ them with your business, organization, or event.
I have learned a lot from a lot of people and continue to learn more and more every week. If you have any marketing or advertising questions or answers, I’d love to talk with you.
by Scott Howard | Aug 1, 2018 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, Uncategorized, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
In my continuing informal series of information about advertising with the radio station I work for, WOWO, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I am going to share more research info that attempts to address the question some local business owners face:
Should I buy radio ads or television ads?
More specifically:
Should I use WOWO Radio or one of the Local TV stations?
I have access to local radio station ratings but not local TV station ratings, so I keep an eye out for research that fills in the gap of what I know.
Let’s start with WOWO Radio.
Overall, based on the population figures and the listenership numbers, I know that between 25 percent and 40 percent of the total Metro Fort Wayne population listens to WOWO every week. In the spring ratings report that was released, WOWO has the largest audience of all the Fort Wayne radio stations again.
As a news and talk radio station, WOWO’s audience is adults, or grown-ups as I like to say.
I also know that 80% of our 100,000 weekly listeners are age 45 and older.
Compare that to TV viewing.
Overall, screen-viewing has increased, but the way we watch and what we watch has changed dramatically in the past decade.
Cutting the cord, or not having a TV at all was the trend of Gen Z and it has been moving to older generations too.
My millennial kids don’t watch local TV. They get their news, weather, information and entertainment from a different kind of screen. Netflix is huge. So is YouTube. But local news? Nope.
Recently my wife and I were spending the evening with some older friends in their 60’s and they confessed the same thing. They watch more on their iPhones (including full length movies!) each week than they do live local television.
I don’t have the figures for local TV viewership like I do for local radio listenership, but I saw a report that shows that my antidotal observations are part of a trend that is not going away.
MarketingCharts.com reports that “Roughly Half of Households Headed by People Ages 55+ Stream Video”
Nearly 80% of 18 to 44 year olds watch streaming video, and while that is not surprising, the fact that older adults have moved to what I call “on-demand programming” has to be alarming to those in the television business. At least the local TV broadcasters.
So here’s what my assessment for businesses that are considering television advertising to invite Fort Wayne area consumers to do business with them….
Be very, very careful and cautious.
Local Newscasts and a few sporting events are about the only television programming that is exclusive to the TV stations. Everything else, we can time shift and watch on our own schedule. When I watch a show like NCIS after it originally was broadcast by my local CBS station, I don’t see your local TV ads.
Ask your television sales person, “How many people will see my TV ad?” Go deeper and ask them how they came up with that number.
If you want more help on deciding if an advertising campaign on TV is a good idea, contact me and I’ll gladly help you sort out the offer and teach you what to ask and look for.
Or better yet, let’s talk about inviting WOWO radio listeners to become your customers. We have 100,000 local listeners. How many do you want as your customers?
by Scott Howard | Jun 6, 2018 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
This article is for the business owner who is regularly being asked to buy advertising and really needs a little help deciding what to do. (Or perhaps a LOT of help.)
Today, we are going to talk about the pros and cons of advertising agencies, advertising sales people and marketing consultants and what you really need for your business. There was a story in Mediapost that touched on this topic and we’re going to get to the heart of the matter for you.
Should You Hire An Advertising Specialist or Generalist?
You see I’m a bit of both. I’m a big picture marketing guy who has expertise in several specialties.
Start with the basics:
Why advertise? To attract and retain customers. It’s that simple.
Then why is it hard to pick what kind of advertising you and your business should be involved with?
Because there are so many options and all these advertising salespeople who tell you their advertising is the best, whether it’s true or not.
So I sell advertising, what makes me, Scott Howard different? Let’s start with a quote from one of my online profiles:
This is the Big Picture of Marketing, Advertising, and Media, down to the tiniest detail.
Combining the tools of today with the timeless, proven methods of the past and creating ideas that rely on honest, trustworthy human relationship principles.
This Big Picture concept is what makes me an advertising generalist. That’s also the term you could apply to most of the advertising agencies that offer a variety of services. But I’m not an ad agency and I have a unique perspective that’s different than most advertising generalists.
That’s also where the ScLoHo persona comes in. This unique perspective is that all of your marketing and advertising needs to be based on Human Relationship Principles or if they are not, you better have a very good reason why not.
Human Relationship Principles are the natural, organic ways we communicate with one another that promotes trust, and good positive feelings. You incorporate that into a marketing campaign successfully and your business will grow beyond what you could ever do with coupons and gimmicks.
I know how to do this because I’ve been a student of this for a few decades and there are hundreds of businesses in Metro Fort Wayne and Metro Detroit that were my real-life laboratories.
Along the way I also gathered intensive insider knowledge and wisdom regarding what could be called Advertising Specialties. These include:
- Print including newspaper, magazine and direct mail.
- Outdoor including the big billboards, the smaller signage, even the ads we see on city buses. Which brings me to …
- Vehicle wraps, promotional materials and company branded attire.
- Television advertising including cable TV.
- Social Media.
- Website design and structure.
- Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.
- Email Marketing.
- Blogging, Vlogging and Podcasting
- and of course Radio Advertising.
Every one of these specialties I have direct experience in and have served on the board of directors for the local American Advertising Federation to enrich my knowledge and teach others. I have even taught branding at a local university, won awards from both my peers and from independent, impartial judging panels. I am not one to blow my own horn and say how great I am, that is out of character for me, but I really want you to know that since I made the transition from being a radio personality to an advertising and marketing specialist over 30 years ago, I have learned a bunch and am continuing to learn. All I want to do is help you with what I’ve learned.
Some of these Advertising Specialties I continue to do first hand and others I will either outsource, recommend others that I trust or at the very least serve as your marketing coach so that when someone tries to sell you their advertising specialty, you have an experienced professional that knows how it should be done and can help you in the process if it’s really something you should invest it. I, Scott Howard, work for WOWO Radio and we have a whole boatload of advertising and marketing solutions you can buy. The ScLoHo side of me helps you with the things I can’t sell you but can advise and guide you.
So back to my original question: Should You Hire An Advertising Specialist or Generalist? Why chose one or the other when you can have both in one person?
Let’s talk.
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