Learn how to use Radio Advertising to generate inbound phone calls to your pay per call campaigns.
Lesson Transcript
Hey Pay Per Callers, let's talk about Radio Advertising for Pay Per Call.
About Radio Advertising
Radio Advertising is absolutely massive. There's 11,000 radio stations in the United States alone and they all have varying coverage and syndication options. Some of those radio stations cover entire major metropolitan areas or even multiple metropolitan areas and some of them are really hyper-targeted and local and they syndicate all sorts of different shows and content between them all across the United States. Of course, they have radio stations in other countries as well but for the purposes of this lesson we're gonna focus on United States radio.
Radio doesn't just mean over the airwaves anymore. 61% of the U.S. population listens to online radio which is a really big percentage. There are some major players in radio that are digital like Spotify and Pandora and these type of platforms are pretty brand new. Their advertising systems are not fully refined yet and a ton of people are not advertising on them yet so they're amazing outlets and have a huge potential for success when it comes to performance based marketing.
Radio stations in America generated 15 billion dollars in 2017 revenue and all of that is from advertising. It's a major market that you can tap into that most performance marketers are not even thinking about and that's what's really exciting about radio advertising whether it's digital or over the airwaves because if a lot of performance marketers aren't thinking about it if you can find wins in radio you're gonna have essentially zero competition.
In fact, because of the way that radio is distributed it's not like someone can really go take a look at Los Angeles radio if they're sitting in New York City to try and find your advertisements and copy them so you can take over major and minor metropolitan areas for specific verticals without anyone even noticing and that to me is a really cool opportunity.
The biggest buyers of radio ads are T-Mobile, Comcast, Home Depot and AT&T. Out of the top four, three of them have Pay Per Call campaigns. Right there it shows you that it's very possible to create a campaign for radio that will get you a return on investment. There's three prospects right there that you can go get campaigns for and then run them on radio and they've already proven that this market works.
Home Depot is an interesting one as well because what is Home Depot? It's home services and what are some of the biggest Pay Per Call verticals in the entire space? Home services. There's the proof you need. The top four advertisers for the entire 15 billion dollar radio market are all Pay Per Call style advertisers. There you go. But I have yet to even hear a Pay Per Call campaign go on any radio station in my life where I live so that to me says, giant opportunity.
According to Nielsen, 57.8 million people listen to AM radio on a weekly basis. Now, AM radio, (coughs) excuse me, is an interesting animal. AM radio is like talk radio, news radio, sports and a lot of people when they think of radio don't even consider AM radio. Younger audiences typically do not listen to AM radio so that is an entirely huge untapped market for Pay Per Call that is underneath the normal train of thought when people think radio.
Now, normal FM radio has 235 million weekly listeners. The majority of the U.S. population listens to FM radio and that's a massive market. If you look at it combined, radio reaches more than 90% of the U.S. population every week. 90%, okay? Absolutely massive opportunity with endless ways to make money in it is what you need to think about when you wanna think about radio advertising especially for Pay Per Call.
Radio also has global reach and these statistics are fairly similar for every single country on Earth. So, what does that mean? It means that radio is perfect for internationalization. If you can make a campaign work here in the United States, all you need to do is find a call center that speaks multiple languages and then you can take these campaigns overseas. When you take 'em overseas it's a little bit different of an animal but all of that advertising space is going to be cheaper, less saturated and easier for you to win in once you understand how to internationalize. We're not gonna go into that in detail in this lesson but please check out our lesson on internationalization if you wanna take your campaigns overseas.
Essentially when it comes to radio advertising you have three different options. You have broadcast which is over the airwaves, normal radio like you listen to in your car. Digital which is internet, like Spotify, Pandora, SoundCloud and so on. And satellite radio like Sirius and XM radio that comes from a satellite and that's even more interesting because satellite radio listeners pay for that service so they're very loyal to it.
Radio Advertising Pros and Cons
Just like any other type of advertising, there are pros and cons. Some of the pros of advertising on radio is it’s massive reach, 90% of U.S. population. In fact, probably 90% of the global population in first world countries listen to radio. That statistic I'm just assuming but it's gotta be pretty close, right? There's less competition from direct response marketers for a few reasons. Mostly because it's a different animal. They're not thinking that way. Most direct response and digital marketers are not doing call campaigns and so they're probably not thinking about radio as an outlet. Radio is traditionally viewed as branding so people don't necessarily associate it with direct response. There's also a bunch of work that you have to do to get set up. You gotta produce a radio ad, you gotta split test multiple radio ads, you gotta negotiate with a human, god forbid right? Digital marketers at the radio stations. There's more work that goes into it and depending on how you buy your media there's more money that you have to put up up front to test. Now not a huge amount. You can get away with $500 or $1,000 or a couple $1,000 in radio spend to test it which really isn't that much money if you're running a direct response business but direct response marketers are like, "Eh, higher barrier of entry. I'll focus on Facebook ads or whatever". It's a great way to get in there and there's less competition.
Like I said before too, it's not easy to find and steal advertising campaigns 'cause you have to be physically located in the market that the person's advertising to to even hear the campaign in the first place and so that means that once you find some wins they're easily scalable 'cause the reach is there and less likely for people to steal your campaigns.
Just like television, the cool thing about radio is you can subconsciously program people which may seem a little scary but it's absolutely true. You can get in their heads and carve out a memory that you own in their brain which is crazy but cool and an awesome way to advertise and we're gonna touch on that a little bit later when we talk about what you have to do to produce a successful radio advertising campaign.
Like I said, there's less competition and that's because there's a higher barrier of entry and that to me is a competitive advantage. Anytime that it's harder to do something, especially if it requires a couple thousand dollars to do it, I'm excited about it because basically all the lazy and cheap people or people who don't have the funds can't even test and so that's exciting to me. When I used to do direct response advertising if I could find a barrier of entry that was $25,000 or $50,000 I would be all over that because it keeps everyone out. It keeps the people out who are gonna steal campaigns. People who have 25 or 50 grand in budget, they may hear your campaign and then they're not gonna steal it. They're gonna adapt it and create their own resources because they realized that they wanna build their own brand and so it's a different kind of competition. It's not the shitty, shady online advertising competition. It's effectively highly resourced competitors and they're gonna do it regardless of what I do and so they're not really a threat to me. They're not really a problem. They're not gonna race to the bottom and destroy a campaign.
Lastly, with the kind of reach that radio advertising has there's almost unlimited opportunity which is also a con technically because it means there's a lot to choose from and a lot you can lose money on but I wanna think about scalability. A lot of online marketers are like, "Oh, how can I create a campaign that makes a couple hundred bucks or a thousand bucks a day", and then they're pretty happy. When I think about marketing in general I'm thinking, okay how do I test and find something that can make some money and is the opportunity there to make seven figures a month in profit? If the opportunity is there to make seven figures a month in profit that's pretty exciting opportunity to me or at least was when I ran traffic 'cause I don't run traffic anymore, I build technology for people like you.
Unlimited opportunity means can I spend at least a million dollars a month and in radio, absolutely. If you can make stuff win, you can just pour gasoline on the fire and scale it pretty easily too and your return on investment as you scale with radio should go up because as you buy more in over periods of time with bigger contracts your cost actually goes down. That's the cool thing about radio advertising, you start spending a butt load of money, your cost is gonna come way down and then your profit just goes way up and so at first there's that barrier of entry and your ROI's gonna be lower but when you find wins your profit goes up as you scale.
Now, some of the cons. Targeting is not an exact science and we're gonna talk about targeting on radio. It's a little bit of an art combined with a little bit of statistics but you're never gonna get it perfect and so you have to be creative and that to me, is also a pro because it means that if you're not smart about this people can't win and so that to me is a good thing. There's also a higher cost than online advertising, right? You can't do a radio ad with 50 bucks. It's just not gonna happen. You're not gonna be able to do it so you're gonna need a couple thousand dollars realistically to get into radio. It may not be the perfect solution for you if you're just getting in to Pay Per Call. I think online marketing's the easiest way to start if you have a limited budget or no budget at all frankly, but as you grow and you start making money and you can afford to lose 2500 bucks, let's say, on taking a flyer or learning on radio then it's the right thing for you.
Now, like I said before, cost comes down drastically with scale. So starting as expensive and then when you start to win you're actually rewarded when you win because your budgets go up, your cost goes down and we'll talk about negotiation. Now, another con is if you're not creative and your ad isn't entertaining people they're gonna change the station and then you're not gonna get heard and so we're gonna talk about negotiating radio spots but whenever you negotiate a radio spot if you're gonna do advertising you should try and negotiate for permanent first run and what I mean by that is when it goes to an ad you want your ad to be heard first so someone else's crappy advertisement doesn't cause the listener to change the station. You're gonna have the highest return if you have a great advertising if you have that first spot before another ad is heard.
Of course, one of the cons is it's limited to audio so people have to remember who you are and how to reach you which is a complicated process but we're gonna talk about that. It requires a lot of creativity to win and immediate campaign pausing is typically not possible. You can't just email your ad rep and be like, "Pause this". They can pause it and stop distribution but it's gonna take a day or two so you can't immediately pause it or immediately change your creatives. There's a limited window to do so so you have to be thorough and you have to make sure there's no errors in your advertising and then you need to stay on top of your advertising reps and get proofs and get recordings of the ads when they were on the air and there's a lot of follow up and back and forth with this which is just more work but that's one of the cons. You have to do work to make this work.
How Radio Advertising Works
How do you actually do radio advertising? Simply put, in a short ten step process:
You're gonna determine your target audience. We're gonna think about what type of campaign are we running, who the listeners are, are they male and female and what demographic group are they in, where are they geographically located, and then once we understand who our target audience is and where they live then we're gonna reach out to radio stations. We have to do that first because we don't wanna call a Pittsburgh radio station if we're really looking for retirement homes in Florida. We want to call the radio stations and the salespeople that have coverage where our clients are.
Then, we talk to the ad reps. You're gonna have to find the ad reps at the radio station, get them on the phone most likely and then get a rate card, reach information, demographic information for their listeners. They're gonna have a whole package on this so the good thing about radio is you're not gonna ask them for this information and then they have to go figure it out. No, no, no. They're gonna have a standard rate card and standard demographic information for you so you can make your decisions and that's your upper bounds. You should never pay street rate which is what they give you on the rate card. You should negotiate it. We'll talk more about that.
Then we wanna determine our spot length and so that spot is either gonna be 30 seconds, 45 or 60 seconds and it's not necessarily better or cheaper to have a shorter spot so we really wanna think about that when we're producing our advertisements. We're gonna choose our placements, our time of day, where we want our spot to run and then we're gonna start the negotiating process with the advertising rep. We should never talk to just one radio station. We wanna talk to three or five radio stations, get all their rate cards and compare their rates for different times of day, their demographics and then pin them head to head against each other when we start negotiating. If these radio networks think that you're only talking to them you're not gonna get a lot of movement on the negotiating but if you're putting them against each other they're gonna try and win that business back and forth.
One of the things about radio is it's kinda declining. Ad revenue for radio is not going up, it's declining a little bit. Especially, airwave radio because a lot of it's going online to the digital radio stations and so the representatives are gonna be hungry and they're typically gonna be veterans especially at some of these local radio stations. They're gonna be people who've worked there a long time and they're seeing the decline in radio revenue and so you're gonna be able to push 'em if they know they're competing against stations that they may have a rivalry with.
I will even go out and say to the ad rep, "Who are your biggest competitors for my business?", and they're gonna groan. They're not gonna wanna tell me that. I'm just gonna be like, "Look, I'm gonna google it and call 'em anyway so why don't you just be cool about it? Tell me who they are.", and then they're gonna know you're serious and if they give me those names I'm gonna call 'em and if they don't give me those names I'm gonna google 'em right when I'm on the phone and confirm with them who they are and then contact them. I'm just gonna be fun about it. I'm gonna be like, "Look. I gotta comparison shop. You can't be mad at me for comparison shopping. I just want you to know that you have to give me a good deal. This isn't my first rodeo. I know what I'm doing. I'm gonna comparison shop you and so let's figure out a way we can build long term business together and I need some of that love up front so I can do my testing". That's how I'm gonna handle the situation and how I have when I've done radio advertising.
Next, I'm gonna create a radio advertisement. We'll go into that in detail. You have a few options but realistically it is not expensive and it is not hard to do. You don't need this incredible professional studio and voice actors and all this expensive stuff to create a radio advertisement. You really do not. I've run quite a few successful radio advertisements that I've produced for a hundred or two hundred bucks or even used my own voice. My business partner Harrison and I used to live together and when we did we actually were like, alright well how do we do radio ads one day and we got a kid, his name's Mark, hilarious kid and he brought a microphone over and he had a band and so we found a guy who had a band on craigslist and for literally nothing, it was like 20 dollars or nothing. I don't even know if we paid 'em. We might've gotten 'em lunch. We just created 30 or 40 advertisements with voice that ended up being really successful so it is not expensive to do this on the production side and I don't think you should spend a lot of money hiring an agency that does this to create your advertisement. You can find ways to do this relatively cheaply.
Now, then you're gonna give your advertisement to the station. They're gonna tell you what format and what length and all this other stuff and you give it to them in the proper format and then you must confirm your time slots because if you don't confirm your time slots they're gonna assume you don't care. If you just say, "Yeah run this radio ad", and you let the ad rep do it they're gonna put you in less preferable spots because some of their other advertisers are smart enough to ask for high quality slots and the premier slots and they can sell those for more money or use them as negotiating tactics and if you don't ask about 'em or confirm 'em your ad may not run during the desired time and so you want it to run during the desired time. In fact, even better off to get it in your contract with them that it's gonna run in the specific times and then you wanna follow up with them to make sure it actually does and then ask them for recordings of all of your ads and the actual times that they run.
Then, lastly, we review the results and that's real simple. If it's close to profitable we optimize. If it's way off we don't. We cut the spots that don't work and we keep the ones that do and scale.
Radio Advertising ROI by Sector
Radio advertising return on investment by sector. What I wanted to share with you here is statistics from an independent agency about how companies actually see their return on ad spent. For department stores that are advertising locally they compute a 17x return on their investment. If they spend a hundred dollars they're bringing in $1700 in revenue. Now, a mass merchandiser, very similar to a department store, same thing, 16x. Local businesses do really well with local radio but they can't scale it. They're stuck in their bucket but the reason they get such high return is because they play their ads over and over and over and over and over and over and over until it's ridiculously repetitive and you need that. When you run a radio advertisement if it plays once you shouldn't expect a lot of results. What you're looking for is to get people over and over and over again so that they remember and they use you when it's time.
Now with Pay Per Call someone may not be interested at that very moment but maybe they need it a week later. Maybe they need it two weeks later, whatever it is. Your radio ad spots are probably not gonna yield their highest return on investment the first time they run and you should be prepared for that so you really should be running a radio ad that has a multiple week flight or a multiple month flight to really see what it's gonna do for you. Now if you run a spot for two weeks, you don't get a single phone call, something is wrong but if you run a spot for two weeks and it's not producing a return on investment for you but it is generating calls give it some more time and see how it goes because this is a long term thing.
Now, telecommunications providers like some of the biggest radio advertisers in the country, they get a 14x return on their ad spend and they're mostly nationwide. They not only enjoy the scalability of radio but they're able to really take advantage of what radio can deliver and the good news is there's lots of telecommunications Pay Per Call campaigns and so you can start there and know that it's already working for these companies in some way, shape or form and just improve on what they're doing.
Next, home improvement has a 9x return on ad spend which is all the home services stuff. Those are two really high value sectors that are already winning nationwide in radio.
Next, a lot of quick service and fast food restaurants get a 3x return which is not great but they have to fight for their business in these local areas to really get people in there. They have a lot of competition but you guys on the other hand don't necessarily have any or a lot of competition and so that's why radio is a great opportunity.
Now I also wanna say here, if you're gonna do radio you should pick a couple target markets and consolidate your budget in a place where you can get the repeat spots over and over and over again instead of trying to go to a mass market audience at first so that you can see what your long time ROI is before you scale because your radio ad may not work if you play it twice in a week but if you play it every single day for three months you might literally train the market to call you and that's when you might start getting your massive return on investment like some of these return on ad spend numbers.
Types of Radio Ads
Now, there's three different types of radio ads essentially. There's pre recorded which means that you're gonna pre record a radio spot and you either have to produce that or sometimes radio stations that are desperate for advertising will make a simple ad for free and you can ask your rep but I don't recommend you do that. I recommend you get good at creating your own advertising spots so that you have control over it 'cause they may make you the first ad for free and if it sucks and doesn't produce you don't win.
They know that too but this is really for you to figure out and to design your ad for your audience. I don't recommend that you do that even if it means you fail a couple times or you have to learn how to make your own ad I still don't recommend that you do that because if you're a good marketer and you can learn how to make great ads that's gonna help you everywhere, not just in radio and so you need to learn how to do it. Like I said, it's not expensive and it's a lot of fun actually to make advertisements. I love making the ads. I think it's hilarious and a good time.
Next, is the deejay. If you don't wanna produce your own advertisement, the deejay will actually read your ad for you and throw a couple sound effects in there. You can do it but what happens with this is one of two things. They may record the first one the deejay does and so that may or may not be good for you or they may have every single deejay impromptu do the advertisement every single time which means you may not have consistency in the advertisement which means that sometimes it may work, sometimes it may not, one deejay may be worse than the other or better than the other and you're gonna run into that issue.
There are some reasons why this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's less intrusive because the radio stations have trained the listeners to listen to the deejays they like and so the people are listening for the deejays voice and they don't change the radio station and it also functions as a bit of an endorsement because the deejay is giving your ad in his voice it implies an endorsement of your product or service which is a good thing but like I said, poor execution can really diminish results and so it depends.
What you can do is you can have a deejay do it, ask for a recording of all the spots that the deejay did it in and then review them. Maybe one deejay's good, maybe one isn't, you figure it out and if one's really good you can just take the recording of that deejay and ask 'em to play that recording instead of having 'em do it impromptu and he could even play that recording during other deejay's shows so that they high quality recording is still there.
Then last we have public service announcements. These are a little bit trickier because you have to craft your message in a way that it offers something to the public that's beneficial but if you can do that the ad spot for a PSA is usually way cheaper and it kind of incentivizes the audience that the announcement is coming from an authoritative body which will get you results in different ways but you have to be really creative about it. You can win with any one of these three you just really need to figure out what's gonna be best for you and you're gonna wanna talk about your ad rep for it. I highly recommend that you try and do all three. If you're gonna make an investment in radio you gotta play with it. I would start with pre recorded. I would try and figure out if I could convert that into some type of public service announcement for some things it's probably not possible but for others, for major segments of the Pay Per Call space, I think you can create a public service announcement and then make it work and that may be really beneficial for you.
Then of course, depending on the deejay, it may be beneficial to have the deejay do it. If you get the top 40 deejay to give your ad and then record that you can then syndicate it across other shows and that might produce really great results because the deejay is known in that area and so you really have to think about, are the deejays in those local areas super popular, do people love them, and then get them to record an ad and then figure out exactly what's gonna produce the best results for you.
I understand that each one of these then has even more cost 'cause then not only are you split testing ads and public service announcements and deejays and all this stuff. It ads a lot of variables in there but just like any type of advertising the more testing you do the more pockets of gold you're gonna find.
Now, there's a bunch of different spot lengths. You got a 15 second, 30 second, some of them do 45 even, and then 60 second spots. Shorter is typically less expensive but not typically proportional so what radio stations have learned is that it's not the length of their advertisements that gets people to change the station it's the number of ads so regardless of whether you pick 30 seconds of 60 seconds the radio station is still probably only going to play three or four ad spots in each commercial segment. Let me cover that again just in case it didn't come through perfectly the first time.
Radio stations have segments of ads and typically those segments are gonna be three ad spots, maybe four ad spots, it all depends on the radio station and what that means is regardless of whether you choose 15 seconds or 60 seconds you're going in an ad spot or an ad segment at the radio station that has a limited number of spots in it and so they may discount a 30 second spot but it probably isn't going to be half the price of a 60 second spot. It may be 10% or 15% cheaper but not half.
You wanna look at that math and see if it's really worth it to take that discount because repetition is the key to success and if you repeat these phone numbers over and over again and have more time with the listener you may actually have a more successful ad campaign for only a little bit more money.
Radio stations don't typically limit by ad time but the number of ads per segment of ads so that's why they're not gonna give you a proportional discount for a shorter spot. In fact, I would be really surprised if any of you guys actually make a 15 second Pay Per Call campaign work on radio 'cause there's not enough time to repeat the phone number a few times so that the listeners can remember it.
How to Produce a Radio Ad
How do we produce a radio advertisement, Adam? Well, first and foremost you have to choose your spot length. You're gonna have to do that upfront before you make your radio spot. Longer spots are proven to work better because people can repeat their message more and have more engagement with the user and so by repeating your message more or having more time to tell a story you're gonna see a higher return on investment. Also, you're gonna need to repeat your number over and over again so that they can remember it.
Next we need to write our script and we need to focus our message on a single idea and then repeat that idea and phone number so that people can remember it. Now typically, they're not gonna remember a phone number if you just read it. Especially if it's a complicated phone number, not a vanity number, not a pattern and so the number one way to get people to remember your phone number is to sing it.
You've gotta put it in a song and that actually is gonna make the difference between success and failure and I have some examples for you about this but you really need to write a jingle and sing the song. Then you can reuse the jingle, portions of it in your IDR which is a great way for the customer to immediately know that they dialed the correct phone number. Now, you can also do this with short codes and texting and whatever you want but the key here is you have to create a song or a jingle for them to remember your phone number.
The likelihood that people are gonna remember it otherwise is almost zero and so this may seem complicated for you but it is not complicated to write a little jingle and then find someone to sing it for you. If you wanna do this yourself you can get a blue yeti microphone like I'm using right now and then what you need is some royalty free music or find a kid that's local that plays the guitar or makes music and he'll make you a little jingle. It's not that hard to make a jingle and there's a ton of people who absolutely love to make music and they'll do it for cheap and so you can find these people on craigslist, you can find 'em on fiber, you can buy royalty free music and then you can edit it yourself in audacity or if you find someone who's gonna play the jingle for you on their guitar, they probably edit too and so it's not gonna be that expensive.
It should only cost you maybe 50 or 100 bucks for the editing. If you're gonna use royalty free you're talking $15. For your voiceover or someone to sing the song you're probably talking 30 to 100 bucks depending and then if you want someone to actually write the music and record it for you and they're a hobbyist but they're good again, you can probably get it for as cheap as 20 bucks all the way up to, I don't know, $200, but either way all of this combined is just a couple hundred bucks. It's not that big of a deal to produce the advertisement.
The Importance of Memorable Phone Numbers
Now, I wanna talk to you guys about memorable phone numbers in radio ads. If you just choose a random phone number it's probably not gonna work. Unless you sing it or you get it in a song like numbers you hear in even some pop music, you remember 'em forever because they're in a song. Now vanity numbers are easy to remember and so are really strong phone numbers. I have some examples below here. So you want to get a vanity number or a strong number or a rhyming number because the best way to get someone to remember it again is to sing it so you need them to sing it, otherwise they're not gonna remember the song.
If some guy is like, "Call 855-323-3412. Call 855-322-3412". No. It's not happening. That's not how the brain works but if you're like, "Call 855 leaky sink" (singing), even in my terrible singing voice you're gonna remember that. You're like, "Oh my god, my sink is leaking. 855 leaky sink", right? You pull out your phone you hit it. Now, if I've gotta remember 855-323-3412 even if i sing that it's gonna be complicated. It's just not gonna work.
Now if you get a stronger number like 800-554-5000 it's easier to remember and you can put it in a song. Again, "Call now 800-554-5000" (singing), right? Make fun of me but that's what needs to happen for you to remember it. It needs to get in a song, it needs to have some music with it, it needs to be repeated, and it needs to be a simple phone number so either a really strong one or a vanity number to get the results you want. Now if you want really strong phone numbers like this top one. 800-554-5000. Ringba has a limited inventory of these. They're not cheap. You're gonna have to rent it because they're extremely expensive for us to acquire. I'm talking up to tens of thousands of dollars a phone number but we have 'em and they are available.
Vanity numbers, we also have those available and we can also help you find them. Talk to your rep. We have some interesting search tools and we can help you find vanity phone numbers. We can also help you acquire a vanity phone number somewhere else and figure that out with you but it's really important if you're gonna do radio that you have a memorable phone number otherwise you're in trouble and you must, must sing it to people. I would not do a radio ad with a phone number in it unless it were sang because I don't think it would have the propensity to work as one that doesn't and so if you disagree with me I'm up to have a conversation and a debate about that, show me the results but the most profitable radio campaigns that I've ever done were song with phone numbers in 'em so guys sing it.
Choosing Radio Markets
Once we have a general idea of who we're marketing to and where they are, we need to choose our market. First we need to do AM versus FM and that's gonna have a lot to do with our demographics 'cause AM is mostly talk radio or sports or something of that nature. If you're gonna listen to NPR you're a specific kind of person and we need to determine whether that's our audience or not. If it's not we're gonna look at FM 'cause there's a lot bigger audience there we can target, certain people by the traits of types of music that they listen to.
Before we do that though we need to understand where they live and we need to understand that because certain radio stations only reach certain geographic areas so do we need old, do we need young or whatever. We need to understand where our customers live and if there's a high concentration of our potential customers in a specific market we're gonna wanna focus our ad dollars on that market for a greater return on investment and I highly recommend that you do this. You pick one highly targeted market that has all of your potential customers in it and then focus your money there with repetition versus trying out a bunch of different markets and it's easy enough to figure out where your customers congregate and then once you do that focus. Now maybe there are a bunch of different places where they're at, a bunch of different cities. That's fine. I still recommend that you focus on one and then once you figure it out then go replicate it 'cause like I said, it may take six weeks of blasting these people every single day during their commute or whatever it is with the same ad before you really start seeing your ROI.
Now, you also need to understand what language they speak. In the United States, you really only have two options. English or Spanish but there are a lot of Spanish speaking radio stations and they have usually cheaper ad rates and can be amazing if your call center has bilingual capabilities and so that's an entirely untapped market that you need to pay attention to in Pay Per Call 'cause people who speak only Spanish still need things like home services and insurance and have financial issues. If you wanna take this to the next level you can also look at reaching those specific audiences and they're super easy because you just look for Spanish radio stations. Your work is already done for you.
Then we need to understand what type of music do our target audiences listen to and then we wanna go after the stations that predominantly play those types of music in our target audience. The good news is your demographics are pretty standard like most demographic groups listen to the same types of music and so typically what you'll find is a higher number of radio stations that play music that targets your demographic in areas where your demographic predominantly lives. Then we wanna think about, do they commute to work or are they retired? Are they male or female and are there any income levels that we're specifically looking for because they actually apply to music taste as well.
Types of Music vs Demographics
The good news is the radio stations have all the demographic information but what we have here on the screen is pretty industry standard.
Adult contemporary is women 35-44 and it's basically the top 40 hits over and over and over again with no rap music. Then we have adult standard and this is all 50 or 55 plus and it's like the nostalgia format which I think, Sinatra, older pop music. It's not hard rock. It's entirely geared towards older people. Then we have classic rock station that's usually men between 45 and 54 and it's old school classic rock but it is almost always men and so if you're advertising typically to men it's a great place to do it and that's a really targeted range.
Now, country music is the largest genre of music nationwide. It has the most listeners. Now, I was surprised actually, to hear this when I put this information together but I verified it and it's true. Their demographics are not really skewed male or female or an age range but they're skewed towards areas of low diversity. Country music, typically white people but it is a massive market and audience and they're very loyal to their country music and so it's consolidated in the center of the United States, mostly in the south but all over as well so especially in rural areas. That doesn't mean that it's not an incredible place to advertise. It's actually the biggest option you have but you really need to know your audience before you go with that.
The inverse to that would be just rap stations that only play rap It would be the opposite. It's mostly African American listeners but it's not nearly or even close to the size of any of these other segments up here. Next we have news or talk radio. That's men mostly 45-54 and sports, sports talk radio, is the fastest growing segment of radio content. If you wanna go after men that are 45-54 you'll know that your audience is growing if you advertise to sports radio.
Now, for religious, that's gonna be moms. So women but mostly moms 25-44 and that's only religious music and it's mostly light rock and uplifting and they're probably not gonna change the channel. That's a unique thing about these last two. Talk radio and religious. Talk radio, the ads are typically really geared towards those people and so they're not gonna change the station. People listening to Rush Limbaugh are not changing the station. They actually wanna listen to the ads. They don't leave their camp very often and so the people who listen to news, talk radio and sports probably are not changing that station so they're gonna listen to more of the ads all the way through. Religious channels even less likely to change the station because they're programmed to only listen to that content and I say programmed and I mean it. They're not changing the station. If you have something to sell to moms 25-44 you should be all over those religious channels because they are just gonna listen over and over and over to your ad. You can really get them to become loyal to your brand. With that, on the religious stations it's almost like getting an endorsement, from God. Let that sink in for a minute.
Next we have soft contemporary. That's women 35-54 and that's gonna be mostly ballads, easy listening, you could think Celine Dion. It'll put you to sleep but that's what they listen to and then if you wanna reach the millennial and younger demographic. Top 40 hits is men and woman, typically between 18 and 34 and that's gonna be all pop and rap music. Or poppy rap music, not Gucci Mane, but like Drake's biggest hit.
All of this is mostly accurate and it's not ever gonna be entirely accurate because there's no way to talk to every single person that listens to radio and what channels they listen to and then figure this all out. It's mostly based on statistics but they're pretty accurate at this point and I would use this a rule of thumb when doing my radio advertising. I would absolutely use this because these demographic groups are gonna be pretty close. Then I would also ask every radio station I'm talking to for all the demographics of their different programming so that I can match it up and find those sweet spots.
Then I would look at the age distribution of a geographic area using U.S. census data and then figure out where the people I wanna hit are actually physically located and then I would look at the radio station, the demographic groups of the content and the census data and I would find my target locations where I wanna hit and then I would look at how many listeners are in those areas, in the demographics that I wanna hit and then look at the cost versus listeners to find out if CPM rate, a cost per listener essentially, and then I would compare that between the different radio stations and then I would also see with census data if any of those geographic locations have higher levels of income because that means they'll probably buy more and then that's where I would start. Highest level of income, highest congregation of demographic group that I'm looking for with the radio coverage that has the lowest cost and I would just beat my message into the listeners heads over and over and over and over again and that's gonna have the highest propensity for success.
Best Times to Advertise on the Radio
Once we figure all that out we essentially already know who we're advertising to, we have our spot, we have all the details figured out, we're talking to the radio station. Now we have to think about the time we're gonna run it. Now if you do not request specific spots at specific times you're probably not gonna get 'em and that is a major mistake with radio advertising and let's talk about why.
6:00 AM to 10:00 AM you have your morning drive and that's in the local time zone of the radio station. The demand for that spot is high and that's because listeners are highly engaged and captive and they also have a 99% plus phone penetration so anyone that is driving to work, driving their own car or carpooling to work has a 99% chance that they have a phone in their pocket. For Pay Per Call that's pretty good.
I say they're highly engaged because it's the morning and they've woken up. They don't wanna sit in silence in their car, they're listening to the radio. They're on their way. Another reason why this is in extremely high demand is because if they're commuting on Monday they're probably commuting on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. People are creatures of habit and even more so when it comes to their morning commute because they have to be at work every day on time and most people work Monday through Friday and they have to be there at a specific time. If you run your spot during the morning drive time at the same time, at the same spot Monday through Friday what you're gonna do is guarantee repetition with the exact same audience so you can drill your message into their head and that's why the demand is high because smart marketers know this and they're gonna do it.
Next spot, and before I got on to the next ... These are slots not spots, excuse me. Before I go on to the next slot I want you to understand that each radio station may have a different consideration for when this is. Maybe it's 6:30 to 10:30 or 5:30 to 9:30, whatever but typically they're gonna have some semblance of these slots and they have a limited amount of advertising spots that they allow during these time slots and so there's gonna be competition for 'em and that's why you want contractual placements.
Next one's 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM. This is the midday slot. The demand on this is medium and depending on your target demographic this time slot may be ideal. Older age groups leave radio on at work as background noise. They're gonna be a lot less likely to pick up the phone and call because they're at work but when it's background noise if you can create a really cool jingle that's repeated over and over and over and over and over again and it's a home services product or an insurance product or whatever it is, you are gonna subconsciously get in these people's heads 'cause they're just gonna listen to it over and over and over again. The midday spot is gonna be less expensive than the morning drive or afternoon drive because there's less demand for it so you can get more repetition in there. You're gonna have to test it but same people every day leave the radio on at work and they leave it on all day.
Next we have the 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM. This is considered the afternoon drive, second rush hour of the day. Demand is high for the same reasons that the morning one is high. Food, entertainment and ads related to home or home services are gonna be most effective as people are likely to be interested in this at this time. They're gonna be hungry, they're going home, they wanna be entertained and if they gotta home maybe their wives gonna be nagging 'em about fixing something in the yard or whatever it is. They're gonna be thinking about these types of things so if you listen you'll notice that Home Depot and other home advertisers buy a lot of these spots during the afternoon drive 'cause people are headed to their home, they're thinking about their home, you can give 'em a message about their home. Again, there's a 99% plus phone penetration for this however, they're more likely to pick up the phone and call for something they have to deal with afterwards. If they got a plumbing issue maybe they'll pick up the phone and call a plumber on their way home from work so that they can have that guy come over. They're thinking that way and so you should think that way too.
Next up, we have the 7:00 PM to 12:00 AM. This is the evening or they'll call it some other things slot. It has low demand. It has a much smaller audience. People do not typically listen to the radio at home. It's gonna be skewed towards older audiences and it's gonna be lower engagement because they're not a captive audience. They can be doing whatever they want with the radio on in the background. You don't even know if they're sitting there listening.
Now the thing about the drive slots is you know they're listening 'cause they're in the car but in the evening slot they may have the radio on at home and maybe they went out to dinner. You don't actually know but these should be significantly less expensive for you and this is why you need to know about this because those ad reps at the radio stations, they're gonna try and figure out if you have any idea what you're doing and if you don't they're gonna bang you on these because they know what they're doing. Rates on these should be less expensive, significantly less expensive any way you slice it.
Then you have the overnight. 12:00 AM to 6:00 AM. There is very low demand for this because there's not a lot of people listening. It's gonna have the lowest possible prices but if you can get creative with this, get creative with the audience and the products that fit these audiences, you can do really well. It's like an overnight infomercial. Overnight infomercials crush it when they're done well but you run into similar issues with that on radio. Are the call centers open during these times? What type of volume can they handle? Do people even wanna buy your product this late at night? This is like remnant internet advertising. You gotta figure out and make your ad work for your audience.
Best Days to Advertise on the Radio
Now, again, on the best times to advertise. Maintenance tasks, things people need to get done, early in the week is when people are motivated. Monday through Wednesday mornings are the afternoon drive Monday through Wednesday, that's when you want to think about things like doctors, lawyers, home services, financial things. People are motivated on Mondays. Get stuff done. It's the beginning of their week and by the end of the week they don't care about life anymore again. They wanna party or do whatever people do. Netflix and chill. Typically, based on previous statistics, get stuff done type offers are gonna work well on Monday through Wednesday mornings or the Monday through Wednesday afternoon drives.
Now, shopping and activity related stuff, these are gonna work better later in the week. Thursday through the weekend when people have free time. Those are gonna be auto related, like new cars or car financing, furniture, retail, travel and vacation stuff, all that works better on weekends when people have free time and they're not thinking about getting stuff done.
Negotiating with Radio Stations
Now, once we figured out all the stuff that we discussed and we're talking to our ad reps, we gotta start negotiating for our ad spots.
The first thing I'm gonna do is ask for a rate card and demographic information. They're gonna have it ready and they're gonna give it to me. The reason I ask for this is so I know my upper boundary and then I'm gonna ask them for discounts based on volume of spots, repetition of spots and contractual lengths over time. What if I wanna run a spot every day for a week, that's a lot more spots, do I get a discount? What if I'm willing to commit for that same advertisement every day during the same spot for three weeks, a month, six weeks, eight weeks, 24 weeks, a year? Where are the discounts at? Then they're gonna give me all that and I have the upper bounds and their discount tiers for things going over time. And I'm gonna ask a lot of questions. I'm gonna make these ad reps work. I'm not gonna be concerned about their time. I'll be respectful of it but I'm gonna ask 'em all sorts of questions 'cause I wanna know and then I'm gonna ask the same questions to every single radio station I'm talking to. I'm gonna make 'em all work.
Then I'm gonna figure out what their viewer rate or listener rate is, excuse me, and then I'm gonna look apples to apples. I'm gonna compare the cost per listener between every radio station for the same type of inventory, so the same audience, the same type of radio station that has the same demographics and then I'm gonna see who's cheaper. Then I'm gonna ask 'em, alright do the rate card rates include specific placements or are they run on station ads, unscheduled? Then I'm gonna find out if I get discounts for running unscheduled during specific times or segmented times? Can I get unscheduled but first position during the morning drive and can you play my ad four or five times? I wanna know what all my options are.
Then when I'm gonna buy radio ads my budgets are gonna be a little bit bigger so this is gonna have to be tailored to you but I'm gonna wanna commit to some sort of schedule so I can get discounts. I'm gonna negotiate hard on those and then I'm gonna ask 'em for introductory rates for my first ads so I can test and then ask 'em if I can apply those introductory rates to my first contract so I can test and then get the benefit of the discounts. I'm gonna wanna make sure I do all of my scheduling during the same time, same show, see if I can build first position because what I'm trying to do here is build an audience.
I want the same people to hear my ad. Now that may seem different coming from direct response on the internet because you're like well I want someone to click and buy so I don't wanna show 'em. I wanna put a frequency cap on it. I don't wanna show the same ad to the same people every single time. That's just lost money. Well with radio you have to think about it differently. You have to build your audience. You want 'em to hear it over and over and over again because then you become their default option for when they need your product.
Then I'm gonna ask the rep where the deals are. Do you have good deals during different slots? What are you not selling that I can get creative with that you can give me an absolute killer deal on? They'll tell you ... Ask where the remnant is. They'll tell you and then I'll push 'em on that. Well what if I buy remnant for a bunch of spots and agree over a couple weeks, can you get even lower? They'll tell you and then I'm gonna ask them how's the market shift? Spring better? Winter better? Certain shows, whatever, and what I'm trying to figure out here is how to get a price on the absolute cheapest spot I could absolutely get so I have my lower bounds. If I have my upper bound rate card and my lower bound then I know I need to negotiate somewhere in that range and I wanna get as close to the lower boundary as reasonably possible because then I have a gauge to figure out if I've gotten the best deal.
Now, believe it or not some green advertisers show up radio stations, they're like oh that's the rate card. I'll take the rate card price. They don't know any of the information we're covering right now. Their add doesn't work and the ad reps, they want branding campaigns like that because people just spend money and they don't track it but you need to tell your ad rep that you're a direct response advertiser and you're tracking your results because then they know then that they have to give you preferential pricing or it's not gonna work for you. It's not the same as a brand.
Then you wanna let them know that you have a big budget. I don't care whether you have a big budget or not. If you're like, I have a $50,000 radio budget in Q1 and gotta do a lot of testing. I'm willing to allocated some of that to you but your station's a wild card for me. I gotta convince my boss to make this happen so give me a good introductory rate, give me a couple extra spots for free. Yeah, ask for free spots. Costs them nothing. If the advertisement space isn't sold, cost them nothing to run you ad so ask for freebies when you get started. Then you're gonna wanna build a great relationship with your ad rep so they can notify you when inventory's unsold. The best time to buy radio inventory is when it's unsold and they're not gonna run an ad during that spot.
You wanna call 'em and ask 'em. "You got any unsold spots this week that you can give me at a hell of a deal? I wanna make some money for you and me and I wanna convince my boss that your station is the station we're gonna do business with over the long term so work with me on this. I got a budget but I gotta prove it to this guy. He's a bit of a pain in the butt when it comes to money so work with me". You wanna make it collaborative with the account rep and anytime you need to go head to head with them and get pushy you need to blame your boss so that it doesn't harm your relationship. I don't care if you don't have a boss. If I'm gonna negotiate with radio stations and if I were doing this I would 'cause I love doing it, I would not be Adam the CEO. I would be an account manager at my company that has no decision making ability whatsoever and so no matter what I do it's someone else's fault and then I can just be friends with this person and try and work together.
Then over time they don't negotiate with you. When you spend a lot more money with these people over time you know the rules, they know the rules, there's no games anymore. You're just, hey last minute, great, super price, great, alright gotta pay a little bit more this time, fine. It's no more bullshit but at the beginning you gotta massage your way in to at least better than average pricing. That's my goal. Can I get better than average pricing because then I have a competitive advantage. You do that by showing up, by knowing your shit, by negotiating and talking to a lot of radio stations, and don't take the first offer. Whoever shows up the most prepared and the most knowledgeable to a negotiation typically wins it and for you that's gonna be harder because you're getting into radio ads. The ad rep's gonna know more than you and so you gotta do a lot of diligence up front so that you can negotiate harder. Now you get your costs down by 20, 30, 40, 50% on average, that absolutely can be the difference between a successful and a failed campaign and so when it comes to this type of advertising you need to get good at it, you need to push, you need to do your diligence because if you don't you have a much higher failure percentage.
Reviewing Results from Radio Ads
Once your ad spot runs, you did all this work and you're all excited about it, you need to make sure that you used a unique number for each region or spot or placement or whatever. I know that's gonna be complicated if you're gonna do a song and so theoretically, you need to have one for each region and audience type and then that means you're gonna have to have a song for each one. Means you're gonna need a bunch of vanity numbers or you're gonna need the guy to produce a bunch of different songs and that's just what happens.
The cool thing is if you have a few of these, you can use three of them for testing and then one of 'em for successes. So you do four songs and you use the three for testing, you run your spots over and over and over again and when they win you switch to the one that has the best vanity number and you just keep running that one and then you reuse the three testing numbers, give 'em a little time to cycle off, look at the call volume, it should mostly disappear when you stop running the ads and then you test again. Then you use your strong, best vanity number, your best strong number as your I already know this market works number so as you expand you're actually building a brand on your really good phone number but you can still split test your campaigns.
Obviously you're gonna look at how many qualified calls you received, you're gonna calculate the ROI and if you're running in multiple markets with your branded phone number a great way to do this is by area code. It is not a 100 percent accurate but if you're running a campaign in Phoenix you're gonna see a Phoenix area code, if you're running one in Kentucky you're gonna see a Kentucky area code and you can kind of look at your statistics that way. You calculate your return on investment and if it's positive or close you call the rep back, you expand your placements, you negotiate contractual rates down, it's just a math equation at that point. Even if it's close to even you go back to your ad rep and you're like, "Hey. I lost ten percent on this campaign. I need to get my cost down 30 points. How do we do that? How do we do that with a contract? How do we get it down 40 points? Do I buy a years worth of advertising? What do I do?", and if you get a years worth of advertising you wanna have a termination clause in there and you wanna have payment terms in there so you're paying on a monthly basis or something and then that way you can get out of your contract but still take advantage of those really low advertising rates you got from committing to a year.
Maybe they won't let you terminate until say, after three months. If they're like, no termination clause you come back and like, "Look. I understand but I need an out. What if this ad starts failing?", and so you get a termination clause after a specific dollar volume or specific period of time. You just find creative ways to do this. Now if it's largely negative you need to try another angle, create a new advertisement, find a new audience. Cancel it.
But anytime you do any type of advertising you should just expect to fail. You should not expect anything but failure 'cause you gotta test. Advertising and marketing is nothing but perpetual failure until you find a win and then you scale your wins. You should get comfortable with losing some money when you do this and that's why you need to set a budget and your first budget you should assume you're gonna lose it all. You should never do radio advertising unless you can afford to lose every dollar you invest in it. That's a tough thing for people to get over but if you can start at a budget that you can afford to lose 100% of and expect to lose the entire thing, if that happens you're fine. If that doesn't happen, well wait a second, you're starting to win but you should not bet your entire Pay Per Call career or your entire life savings on a single radio advertising campaign when you've done this before. You should expect to fail.
Radio Advertising Examples
Let's take a look at some radio advertisements and we can talk about what they are, how they work, all that good stuff.
Insurance PSA Radio Commercial
First we're gonna do a public service announcement:
That was obviously an insurance campaign. There's only so much you can say in a public service announcement and that was a branding campaign. I thought it was pretty creative but they didn't really get a call to action in there or get anyone to do anything. If you're gonna do this for Pay Per Call you need to frame it like they need to call you for something that they get for free and you're gonna have to negotiate with the radio station on what they consider a public service announcement so you're gonna wanna ask for those regulations.
1-800-94-JENNY
Now, this one is very old and I am a student of advertising history. I love advertising history. I think you should definitely look back at what campaigns worked in the past and you can modernize and copy them because if they worked then they'll work now. I'm gonna tell you 100% that the advertisement I'm gonna share with you right now would kill it if you modified it and moved it here today and it's from 1994:
The interesting thing about that ad is the fact that I remembered it for this class from 1994. I was like, oh I remember this radio ad I'm gonna look it up and see if I can find it and then use it in my class. It's 2019, I still remember it. That is an example of how you do a song in a radio ad with a vanity number with flawless execution and Jenny Craig made hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even billions. I don't know specifically but they crushed it on TV and radio. What did they do? They just created a song, a jingle, around their phone number. (starts singing) 1-800-94-JENNY! (stops singing) Everyone remembers it. You play it over and over and over again. It just kills it. That's why you have to sing the phone number to get it to work.
Auto Dealership Radio Commercial
Let's take a look at another one:
That one is not a Pay Per Call campaign but I wanted to include it in here to show you what a radio popup essentially sounds like. That's an example of interruption marketing. No one enjoyed listening to that. They will remember it, it will get in their head, it'll probably cause a lot of people to change the station. What they did is raise the general volume level of it so if the music is going along, then the advertisement and it's interruption marketing on the radio and a lot of companies do this. I think that in Pay Per Call if you do it depending, like you actually wanna scare someone you can get away with it, sure, but you need to be careful about that. I don't particularly like this ad other than the fact that I think radio popups are great. I just think it's funny but this wouldn't convince me to go down to that dealership but what it does do is when it starts it's like, bam.
It scares them. People might even get a jolt of adrenaline when it comes on 'cause they're driving a car and then they hear a car crash then turn into money so what they're trying to do is associate a visceral feeling with the advertisement and that in advertising is what you should do. It's what you wanna do but in this case I don't know if associating a car crash and an adrenaline rush burst with a Nissan dealership is necessarily going to be effective in getting people to come into their store. While the production quality of this was good, the interruption level of this was good, the thought process behind the noises and the car crashing they used was good. I don't know what the effects of this campaign are gonna actually be though the goal of getting people shocked and startled while they're driving is being achieved and so I like the ad. I just don't know if they made any money with it.
Legal Services Radio Commercial
The only mistake I think that my boy T Flowers made in his Memphis attorney radio commercial, which I have to say if you're gonna know your audience he knows his audience, is that they should've ended this song with the rapper saying the phone number not him. Cognitively what happened there is you're into the song and you're remembering the phone number and you're getting it down and he's like I'll solve all your felony, your drug conviction, whatever you idiots get in trouble with, I'll even give you a payment plan but then he was like, "Call me 555-5 whatever", I don't really remember the phone number. I do remember 1-800-94-JENNY though. That was a mistake in execution at the end. You need to end with the phone number in the jingle. You should never say the phone number outside of the jingle so that over time it gets in people's heads.
This one still probably got in people's heads. I think this would've still been profitable for him and I'm picking on a guy who went way out there and took a risk on some advertising and did a clever job so if you ever see this T Flowers, I want you to know that you did a kick ass job in your commercial and next time, give me a call. I'll help you round out the end of it for free. I won't even make you pay for it or finance it. This is a great example of a song and a jingle but you always want the song to be only in the jingle.
Healthcare Radio Commercial (411-PAIN)
Let's check out another one:
I mean, (clapping). Incredibly good. Couple reasons. The 800 number in the song wasn't repeated every time. They said 411-PAIN and that's really what they were driving home, is the 411-PAIN and they said it over and over and over and over and over and over and over. That was it. It was like I'm gonna rap this song and the song is the phone number and I'm just gonna say a little bit about getting hurt and a cracked windshield and this song people will not change the station on. It's got a catchy beat to it. It's a little bit more accessible. The attorney one he's going a little bit deeper into the culture that he's trying to find so it's a little bit more Gucci Mani while this is a little bit more Drake. This advertisement can run on the top 40 frankly, with rap in it. Every demographic group I would say, male or female 18 to 45 you can get away with this ad right here. This is an incredibly good example of how you do a song with a vanity number. They got an 800 number, they weave it in, they repeat it a lot. I'm sure they crushed it with this. This is an incredibly good example of how you do a Pay Per Call campaign on radio.
Home Services Radio Commercial (ServiceMaster)
Here's another:
Alright so that's a pretty good advertisement. They did a nice job with it. They're basically just telling people who they are and what they do and then trying to add a level of credibility to the song. They have a good vanity number so they can kinda get away with being sloppy about it. 866-EXPERTS, pretty good, I remember it.
They didn't sing it. It wasn't memorable or fun it just was a really good vanity number. So you can get away with that if you have a really good vanity number but my favorite is obviously putting it into a song. That's how you're gonna get the deepest penetration into people's heads because they remember a jingle and a song cognitively very differently than humans remember numbers and so I think they could've done a better job but their agency that did that probably is working with a client that pushed back.
I think that's one of the biggest issues you're gonna have if you're representing a brand is they're gonna push back. They want creative control but if you're doing a general Pay Per Call campaign you can make whatever songs you want and so you should make lots of songs, repeat the phone number in the song and people will remember it. Right? Good.
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Lesson Transcript
Hey Pay Per Callers, let's talk about Radio Advertising for Pay Per Call.
About Radio Advertising
Radio Advertising is absolutely massive. There's 11,000 radio stations in the United States alone and they all have varying coverage and syndication options. Some of those radio stations cover entire major metropolitan areas or even multiple metropolitan areas and some of them are really hyper-targeted and local and they syndicate all sorts of different shows and content between them all across the United States. Of course, they have radio stations in other countries as well but for the purposes of this lesson we're gonna focus on United States radio.
Radio doesn't just mean over the airwaves anymore. 61% of the U.S. population listens to online radio which is a really big percentage. There are some major players in radio that are digital like Spotify and Pandora and these type of platforms are pretty brand new. Their advertising systems are not fully refined yet and a ton of people are not advertising on them yet so they're amazing outlets and have a huge potential for success when it comes to performance based marketing.
Radio stations in America generated 15 billion dollars in 2017 revenue and all of that is from advertising. It's a major market that you can tap into that most performance marketers are not even thinking about and that's what's really exciting about radio advertising whether it's digital or over the airwaves because if a lot of performance marketers aren't thinking about it if you can find wins in radio you're gonna have essentially zero competition.
In fact, because of the way that radio is distributed it's not like someone can really go take a look at Los Angeles radio if they're sitting in New York City to try and find your advertisements and copy them so you can take over major and minor metropolitan areas for specific verticals without anyone even noticing and that to me is a really cool opportunity.
The biggest buyers of radio ads are T-Mobile, Comcast, Home Depot and AT&T. Out of the top four, three of them have Pay Per Call campaigns. Right there it shows you that it's very possible to create a campaign for radio that will get you a return on investment. There's three prospects right there that you can go get campaigns for and then run them on radio and they've already proven that this market works.
Home Depot is an interesting one as well because what is Home Depot? It's home services and what are some of the biggest Pay Per Call verticals in the entire space? Home services. There's the proof you need. The top four advertisers for the entire 15 billion dollar radio market are all Pay Per Call style advertisers. There you go. But I have yet to even hear a Pay Per Call campaign go on any radio station in my life where I live so that to me says, giant opportunity.
According to Nielsen, 57.8 million people listen to AM radio on a weekly basis. Now, AM radio, (coughs) excuse me, is an interesting animal. AM radio is like talk radio, news radio, sports and a lot of people when they think of radio don't even consider AM radio. Younger audiences typically do not listen to AM radio so that is an entirely huge untapped market for Pay Per Call that is underneath the normal train of thought when people think radio.
Now, normal FM radio has 235 million weekly listeners. The majority of the U.S. population listens to FM radio and that's a massive market. If you look at it combined, radio reaches more than 90% of the U.S. population every week. 90%, okay? Absolutely massive opportunity with endless ways to make money in it is what you need to think about when you wanna think about radio advertising especially for Pay Per Call.
Radio also has global reach and these statistics are fairly similar for every single country on Earth. So, what does that mean? It means that radio is perfect for internationalization. If you can make a campaign work here in the United States, all you need to do is find a call center that speaks multiple languages and then you can take these campaigns overseas. When you take 'em overseas it's a little bit different of an animal but all of that advertising space is going to be cheaper, less saturated and easier for you to win in once you understand how to internationalize. We're not gonna go into that in detail in this lesson but please check out our lesson on internationalization if you wanna take your campaigns overseas.
Essentially when it comes to radio advertising you have three different options. You have broadcast which is over the airwaves, normal radio like you listen to in your car. Digital which is internet, like Spotify, Pandora, SoundCloud and so on. And satellite radio like Sirius and XM radio that comes from a satellite and that's even more interesting because satellite radio listeners pay for that service so they're very loyal to it.
Radio Advertising Pros and Cons
Just like any other type of advertising, there are pros and cons. Some of the pros of advertising on radio is it’s massive reach, 90% of U.S. population. In fact, probably 90% of the global population in first world countries listen to radio. That statistic I'm just assuming but it's gotta be pretty close, right? There's less competition from direct response marketers for a few reasons. Mostly because it's a different animal. They're not thinking that way. Most direct response and digital marketers are not doing call campaigns and so they're probably not thinking about radio as an outlet. Radio is traditionally viewed as branding so people don't necessarily associate it with direct response. There's also a bunch of work that you have to do to get set up. You gotta produce a radio ad, you gotta split test multiple radio ads, you gotta negotiate with a human, god forbid right? Digital marketers at the radio stations. There's more work that goes into it and depending on how you buy your media there's more money that you have to put up up front to test. Now not a huge amount. You can get away with $500 or $1,000 or a couple $1,000 in radio spend to test it which really isn't that much money if you're running a direct response business but direct response marketers are like, "Eh, higher barrier of entry. I'll focus on Facebook ads or whatever". It's a great way to get in there and there's less competition.
Like I said before too, it's not easy to find and steal advertising campaigns 'cause you have to be physically located in the market that the person's advertising to to even hear the campaign in the first place and so that means that once you find some wins they're easily scalable 'cause the reach is there and less likely for people to steal your campaigns.
Just like television, the cool thing about radio is you can subconsciously program people which may seem a little scary but it's absolutely true. You can get in their heads and carve out a memory that you own in their brain which is crazy but cool and an awesome way to advertise and we're gonna touch on that a little bit later when we talk about what you have to do to produce a successful radio advertising campaign.
Like I said, there's less competition and that's because there's a higher barrier of entry and that to me is a competitive advantage. Anytime that it's harder to do something, especially if it requires a couple thousand dollars to do it, I'm excited about it because basically all the lazy and cheap people or people who don't have the funds can't even test and so that's exciting to me. When I used to do direct response advertising if I could find a barrier of entry that was $25,000 or $50,000 I would be all over that because it keeps everyone out. It keeps the people out who are gonna steal campaigns. People who have 25 or 50 grand in budget, they may hear your campaign and then they're not gonna steal it. They're gonna adapt it and create their own resources because they realized that they wanna build their own brand and so it's a different kind of competition. It's not the shitty, shady online advertising competition. It's effectively highly resourced competitors and they're gonna do it regardless of what I do and so they're not really a threat to me. They're not really a problem. They're not gonna race to the bottom and destroy a campaign.
Lastly, with the kind of reach that radio advertising has there's almost unlimited opportunity which is also a con technically because it means there's a lot to choose from and a lot you can lose money on but I wanna think about scalability. A lot of online marketers are like, "Oh, how can I create a campaign that makes a couple hundred bucks or a thousand bucks a day", and then they're pretty happy. When I think about marketing in general I'm thinking, okay how do I test and find something that can make some money and is the opportunity there to make seven figures a month in profit? If the opportunity is there to make seven figures a month in profit that's pretty exciting opportunity to me or at least was when I ran traffic 'cause I don't run traffic anymore, I build technology for people like you.
Unlimited opportunity means can I spend at least a million dollars a month and in radio, absolutely. If you can make stuff win, you can just pour gasoline on the fire and scale it pretty easily too and your return on investment as you scale with radio should go up because as you buy more in over periods of time with bigger contracts your cost actually goes down. That's the cool thing about radio advertising, you start spending a butt load of money, your cost is gonna come way down and then your profit just goes way up and so at first there's that barrier of entry and your ROI's gonna be lower but when you find wins your profit goes up as you scale.
Now, some of the cons. Targeting is not an exact science and we're gonna talk about targeting on radio. It's a little bit of an art combined with a little bit of statistics but you're never gonna get it perfect and so you have to be creative and that to me, is also a pro because it means that if you're not smart about this people can't win and so that to me is a good thing. There's also a higher cost than online advertising, right? You can't do a radio ad with 50 bucks. It's just not gonna happen. You're not gonna be able to do it so you're gonna need a couple thousand dollars realistically to get into radio. It may not be the perfect solution for you if you're just getting in to Pay Per Call. I think online marketing's the easiest way to start if you have a limited budget or no budget at all frankly, but as you grow and you start making money and you can afford to lose 2500 bucks, let's say, on taking a flyer or learning on radio then it's the right thing for you.
Now, like I said before, cost comes down drastically with scale. So starting as expensive and then when you start to win you're actually rewarded when you win because your budgets go up, your cost goes down and we'll talk about negotiation. Now, another con is if you're not creative and your ad isn't entertaining people they're gonna change the station and then you're not gonna get heard and so we're gonna talk about negotiating radio spots but whenever you negotiate a radio spot if you're gonna do advertising you should try and negotiate for permanent first run and what I mean by that is when it goes to an ad you want your ad to be heard first so someone else's crappy advertisement doesn't cause the listener to change the station. You're gonna have the highest return if you have a great advertising if you have that first spot before another ad is heard.
Of course, one of the cons is it's limited to audio so people have to remember who you are and how to reach you which is a complicated process but we're gonna talk about that. It requires a lot of creativity to win and immediate campaign pausing is typically not possible. You can't just email your ad rep and be like, "Pause this". They can pause it and stop distribution but it's gonna take a day or two so you can't immediately pause it or immediately change your creatives. There's a limited window to do so so you have to be thorough and you have to make sure there's no errors in your advertising and then you need to stay on top of your advertising reps and get proofs and get recordings of the ads when they were on the air and there's a lot of follow up and back and forth with this which is just more work but that's one of the cons. You have to do work to make this work.
How Radio Advertising Works
How do you actually do radio advertising? Simply put, in a short ten step process:
You're gonna determine your target audience. We're gonna think about what type of campaign are we running, who the listeners are, are they male and female and what demographic group are they in, where are they geographically located, and then once we understand who our target audience is and where they live then we're gonna reach out to radio stations. We have to do that first because we don't wanna call a Pittsburgh radio station if we're really looking for retirement homes in Florida. We want to call the radio stations and the salespeople that have coverage where our clients are.
Then, we talk to the ad reps. You're gonna have to find the ad reps at the radio station, get them on the phone most likely and then get a rate card, reach information, demographic information for their listeners. They're gonna have a whole package on this so the good thing about radio is you're not gonna ask them for this information and then they have to go figure it out. No, no, no. They're gonna have a standard rate card and standard demographic information for you so you can make your decisions and that's your upper bounds. You should never pay street rate which is what they give you on the rate card. You should negotiate it. We'll talk more about that.
Then we wanna determine our spot length and so that spot is either gonna be 30 seconds, 45 or 60 seconds and it's not necessarily better or cheaper to have a shorter spot so we really wanna think about that when we're producing our advertisements. We're gonna choose our placements, our time of day, where we want our spot to run and then we're gonna start the negotiating process with the advertising rep. We should never talk to just one radio station. We wanna talk to three or five radio stations, get all their rate cards and compare their rates for different times of day, their demographics and then pin them head to head against each other when we start negotiating. If these radio networks think that you're only talking to them you're not gonna get a lot of movement on the negotiating but if you're putting them against each other they're gonna try and win that business back and forth.
One of the things about radio is it's kinda declining. Ad revenue for radio is not going up, it's declining a little bit. Especially, airwave radio because a lot of it's going online to the digital radio stations and so the representatives are gonna be hungry and they're typically gonna be veterans especially at some of these local radio stations. They're gonna be people who've worked there a long time and they're seeing the decline in radio revenue and so you're gonna be able to push 'em if they know they're competing against stations that they may have a rivalry with.
I will even go out and say to the ad rep, "Who are your biggest competitors for my business?", and they're gonna groan. They're not gonna wanna tell me that. I'm just gonna be like, "Look, I'm gonna google it and call 'em anyway so why don't you just be cool about it? Tell me who they are.", and then they're gonna know you're serious and if they give me those names I'm gonna call 'em and if they don't give me those names I'm gonna google 'em right when I'm on the phone and confirm with them who they are and then contact them. I'm just gonna be fun about it. I'm gonna be like, "Look. I gotta comparison shop. You can't be mad at me for comparison shopping. I just want you to know that you have to give me a good deal. This isn't my first rodeo. I know what I'm doing. I'm gonna comparison shop you and so let's figure out a way we can build long term business together and I need some of that love up front so I can do my testing". That's how I'm gonna handle the situation and how I have when I've done radio advertising.
Next, I'm gonna create a radio advertisement. We'll go into that in detail. You have a few options but realistically it is not expensive and it is not hard to do. You don't need this incredible professional studio and voice actors and all this expensive stuff to create a radio advertisement. You really do not. I've run quite a few successful radio advertisements that I've produced for a hundred or two hundred bucks or even used my own voice. My business partner Harrison and I used to live together and when we did we actually were like, alright well how do we do radio ads one day and we got a kid, his name's Mark, hilarious kid and he brought a microphone over and he had a band and so we found a guy who had a band on craigslist and for literally nothing, it was like 20 dollars or nothing. I don't even know if we paid 'em. We might've gotten 'em lunch. We just created 30 or 40 advertisements with voice that ended up being really successful so it is not expensive to do this on the production side and I don't think you should spend a lot of money hiring an agency that does this to create your advertisement. You can find ways to do this relatively cheaply.
Now, then you're gonna give your advertisement to the station. They're gonna tell you what format and what length and all this other stuff and you give it to them in the proper format and then you must confirm your time slots because if you don't confirm your time slots they're gonna assume you don't care. If you just say, "Yeah run this radio ad", and you let the ad rep do it they're gonna put you in less preferable spots because some of their other advertisers are smart enough to ask for high quality slots and the premier slots and they can sell those for more money or use them as negotiating tactics and if you don't ask about 'em or confirm 'em your ad may not run during the desired time and so you want it to run during the desired time. In fact, even better off to get it in your contract with them that it's gonna run in the specific times and then you wanna follow up with them to make sure it actually does and then ask them for recordings of all of your ads and the actual times that they run.
Then, lastly, we review the results and that's real simple. If it's close to profitable we optimize. If it's way off we don't. We cut the spots that don't work and we keep the ones that do and scale.
Radio Advertising ROI by Sector
Radio advertising return on investment by sector. What I wanted to share with you here is statistics from an independent agency about how companies actually see their return on ad spent. For department stores that are advertising locally they compute a 17x return on their investment. If they spend a hundred dollars they're bringing in $1700 in revenue. Now, a mass merchandiser, very similar to a department store, same thing, 16x. Local businesses do really well with local radio but they can't scale it. They're stuck in their bucket but the reason they get such high return is because they play their ads over and over and over and over and over and over and over until it's ridiculously repetitive and you need that. When you run a radio advertisement if it plays once you shouldn't expect a lot of results. What you're looking for is to get people over and over and over again so that they remember and they use you when it's time.
Now with Pay Per Call someone may not be interested at that very moment but maybe they need it a week later. Maybe they need it two weeks later, whatever it is. Your radio ad spots are probably not gonna yield their highest return on investment the first time they run and you should be prepared for that so you really should be running a radio ad that has a multiple week flight or a multiple month flight to really see what it's gonna do for you. Now if you run a spot for two weeks, you don't get a single phone call, something is wrong but if you run a spot for two weeks and it's not producing a return on investment for you but it is generating calls give it some more time and see how it goes because this is a long term thing.
Now, telecommunications providers like some of the biggest radio advertisers in the country, they get a 14x return on their ad spend and they're mostly nationwide. They not only enjoy the scalability of radio but they're able to really take advantage of what radio can deliver and the good news is there's lots of telecommunications Pay Per Call campaigns and so you can start there and know that it's already working for these companies in some way, shape or form and just improve on what they're doing.
Next, home improvement has a 9x return on ad spend which is all the home services stuff. Those are two really high value sectors that are already winning nationwide in radio.
Next, a lot of quick service and fast food restaurants get a 3x return which is not great but they have to fight for their business in these local areas to really get people in there. They have a lot of competition but you guys on the other hand don't necessarily have any or a lot of competition and so that's why radio is a great opportunity.
Now I also wanna say here, if you're gonna do radio you should pick a couple target markets and consolidate your budget in a place where you can get the repeat spots over and over and over again instead of trying to go to a mass market audience at first so that you can see what your long time ROI is before you scale because your radio ad may not work if you play it twice in a week but if you play it every single day for three months you might literally train the market to call you and that's when you might start getting your massive return on investment like some of these return on ad spend numbers.
Types of Radio Ads
Now, there's three different types of radio ads essentially. There's pre recorded which means that you're gonna pre record a radio spot and you either have to produce that or sometimes radio stations that are desperate for advertising will make a simple ad for free and you can ask your rep but I don't recommend you do that. I recommend you get good at creating your own advertising spots so that you have control over it 'cause they may make you the first ad for free and if it sucks and doesn't produce you don't win.
They know that too but this is really for you to figure out and to design your ad for your audience. I don't recommend that you do that even if it means you fail a couple times or you have to learn how to make your own ad I still don't recommend that you do that because if you're a good marketer and you can learn how to make great ads that's gonna help you everywhere, not just in radio and so you need to learn how to do it. Like I said, it's not expensive and it's a lot of fun actually to make advertisements. I love making the ads. I think it's hilarious and a good time.
Next, is the deejay. If you don't wanna produce your own advertisement, the deejay will actually read your ad for you and throw a couple sound effects in there. You can do it but what happens with this is one of two things. They may record the first one the deejay does and so that may or may not be good for you or they may have every single deejay impromptu do the advertisement every single time which means you may not have consistency in the advertisement which means that sometimes it may work, sometimes it may not, one deejay may be worse than the other or better than the other and you're gonna run into that issue.
There are some reasons why this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's less intrusive because the radio stations have trained the listeners to listen to the deejays they like and so the people are listening for the deejays voice and they don't change the radio station and it also functions as a bit of an endorsement because the deejay is giving your ad in his voice it implies an endorsement of your product or service which is a good thing but like I said, poor execution can really diminish results and so it depends.
What you can do is you can have a deejay do it, ask for a recording of all the spots that the deejay did it in and then review them. Maybe one deejay's good, maybe one isn't, you figure it out and if one's really good you can just take the recording of that deejay and ask 'em to play that recording instead of having 'em do it impromptu and he could even play that recording during other deejay's shows so that they high quality recording is still there.
Then last we have public service announcements. These are a little bit trickier because you have to craft your message in a way that it offers something to the public that's beneficial but if you can do that the ad spot for a PSA is usually way cheaper and it kind of incentivizes the audience that the announcement is coming from an authoritative body which will get you results in different ways but you have to be really creative about it. You can win with any one of these three you just really need to figure out what's gonna be best for you and you're gonna wanna talk about your ad rep for it. I highly recommend that you try and do all three. If you're gonna make an investment in radio you gotta play with it. I would start with pre recorded. I would try and figure out if I could convert that into some type of public service announcement for some things it's probably not possible but for others, for major segments of the Pay Per Call space, I think you can create a public service announcement and then make it work and that may be really beneficial for you.
Then of course, depending on the deejay, it may be beneficial to have the deejay do it. If you get the top 40 deejay to give your ad and then record that you can then syndicate it across other shows and that might produce really great results because the deejay is known in that area and so you really have to think about, are the deejays in those local areas super popular, do people love them, and then get them to record an ad and then figure out exactly what's gonna produce the best results for you.
I understand that each one of these then has even more cost 'cause then not only are you split testing ads and public service announcements and deejays and all this stuff. It ads a lot of variables in there but just like any type of advertising the more testing you do the more pockets of gold you're gonna find.
Now, there's a bunch of different spot lengths. You got a 15 second, 30 second, some of them do 45 even, and then 60 second spots. Shorter is typically less expensive but not typically proportional so what radio stations have learned is that it's not the length of their advertisements that gets people to change the station it's the number of ads so regardless of whether you pick 30 seconds of 60 seconds the radio station is still probably only going to play three or four ad spots in each commercial segment. Let me cover that again just in case it didn't come through perfectly the first time.
Radio stations have segments of ads and typically those segments are gonna be three ad spots, maybe four ad spots, it all depends on the radio station and what that means is regardless of whether you choose 15 seconds or 60 seconds you're going in an ad spot or an ad segment at the radio station that has a limited number of spots in it and so they may discount a 30 second spot but it probably isn't going to be half the price of a 60 second spot. It may be 10% or 15% cheaper but not half.
You wanna look at that math and see if it's really worth it to take that discount because repetition is the key to success and if you repeat these phone numbers over and over again and have more time with the listener you may actually have a more successful ad campaign for only a little bit more money.
Radio stations don't typically limit by ad time but the number of ads per segment of ads so that's why they're not gonna give you a proportional discount for a shorter spot. In fact, I would be really surprised if any of you guys actually make a 15 second Pay Per Call campaign work on radio 'cause there's not enough time to repeat the phone number a few times so that the listeners can remember it.
How to Produce a Radio Ad
How do we produce a radio advertisement, Adam? Well, first and foremost you have to choose your spot length. You're gonna have to do that upfront before you make your radio spot. Longer spots are proven to work better because people can repeat their message more and have more engagement with the user and so by repeating your message more or having more time to tell a story you're gonna see a higher return on investment. Also, you're gonna need to repeat your number over and over again so that they can remember it.
Next we need to write our script and we need to focus our message on a single idea and then repeat that idea and phone number so that people can remember it. Now typically, they're not gonna remember a phone number if you just read it. Especially if it's a complicated phone number, not a vanity number, not a pattern and so the number one way to get people to remember your phone number is to sing it.
You've gotta put it in a song and that actually is gonna make the difference between success and failure and I have some examples for you about this but you really need to write a jingle and sing the song. Then you can reuse the jingle, portions of it in your IDR which is a great way for the customer to immediately know that they dialed the correct phone number. Now, you can also do this with short codes and texting and whatever you want but the key here is you have to create a song or a jingle for them to remember your phone number.
The likelihood that people are gonna remember it otherwise is almost zero and so this may seem complicated for you but it is not complicated to write a little jingle and then find someone to sing it for you. If you wanna do this yourself you can get a blue yeti microphone like I'm using right now and then what you need is some royalty free music or find a kid that's local that plays the guitar or makes music and he'll make you a little jingle. It's not that hard to make a jingle and there's a ton of people who absolutely love to make music and they'll do it for cheap and so you can find these people on craigslist, you can find 'em on fiber, you can buy royalty free music and then you can edit it yourself in audacity or if you find someone who's gonna play the jingle for you on their guitar, they probably edit too and so it's not gonna be that expensive.
It should only cost you maybe 50 or 100 bucks for the editing. If you're gonna use royalty free you're talking $15. For your voiceover or someone to sing the song you're probably talking 30 to 100 bucks depending and then if you want someone to actually write the music and record it for you and they're a hobbyist but they're good again, you can probably get it for as cheap as 20 bucks all the way up to, I don't know, $200, but either way all of this combined is just a couple hundred bucks. It's not that big of a deal to produce the advertisement.
The Importance of Memorable Phone Numbers
Now, I wanna talk to you guys about memorable phone numbers in radio ads. If you just choose a random phone number it's probably not gonna work. Unless you sing it or you get it in a song like numbers you hear in even some pop music, you remember 'em forever because they're in a song. Now vanity numbers are easy to remember and so are really strong phone numbers. I have some examples below here. So you want to get a vanity number or a strong number or a rhyming number because the best way to get someone to remember it again is to sing it so you need them to sing it, otherwise they're not gonna remember the song.
If some guy is like, "Call 855-323-3412. Call 855-322-3412". No. It's not happening. That's not how the brain works but if you're like, "Call 855 leaky sink" (singing), even in my terrible singing voice you're gonna remember that. You're like, "Oh my god, my sink is leaking. 855 leaky sink", right? You pull out your phone you hit it. Now, if I've gotta remember 855-323-3412 even if i sing that it's gonna be complicated. It's just not gonna work.
Now if you get a stronger number like 800-554-5000 it's easier to remember and you can put it in a song. Again, "Call now 800-554-5000" (singing), right? Make fun of me but that's what needs to happen for you to remember it. It needs to get in a song, it needs to have some music with it, it needs to be repeated, and it needs to be a simple phone number so either a really strong one or a vanity number to get the results you want. Now if you want really strong phone numbers like this top one. 800-554-5000. Ringba has a limited inventory of these. They're not cheap. You're gonna have to rent it because they're extremely expensive for us to acquire. I'm talking up to tens of thousands of dollars a phone number but we have 'em and they are available.
Vanity numbers, we also have those available and we can also help you find them. Talk to your rep. We have some interesting search tools and we can help you find vanity phone numbers. We can also help you acquire a vanity phone number somewhere else and figure that out with you but it's really important if you're gonna do radio that you have a memorable phone number otherwise you're in trouble and you must, must sing it to people. I would not do a radio ad with a phone number in it unless it were sang because I don't think it would have the propensity to work as one that doesn't and so if you disagree with me I'm up to have a conversation and a debate about that, show me the results but the most profitable radio campaigns that I've ever done were song with phone numbers in 'em so guys sing it.
Choosing Radio Markets
Once we have a general idea of who we're marketing to and where they are, we need to choose our market. First we need to do AM versus FM and that's gonna have a lot to do with our demographics 'cause AM is mostly talk radio or sports or something of that nature. If you're gonna listen to NPR you're a specific kind of person and we need to determine whether that's our audience or not. If it's not we're gonna look at FM 'cause there's a lot bigger audience there we can target, certain people by the traits of types of music that they listen to.
Before we do that though we need to understand where they live and we need to understand that because certain radio stations only reach certain geographic areas so do we need old, do we need young or whatever. We need to understand where our customers live and if there's a high concentration of our potential customers in a specific market we're gonna wanna focus our ad dollars on that market for a greater return on investment and I highly recommend that you do this. You pick one highly targeted market that has all of your potential customers in it and then focus your money there with repetition versus trying out a bunch of different markets and it's easy enough to figure out where your customers congregate and then once you do that focus. Now maybe there are a bunch of different places where they're at, a bunch of different cities. That's fine. I still recommend that you focus on one and then once you figure it out then go replicate it 'cause like I said, it may take six weeks of blasting these people every single day during their commute or whatever it is with the same ad before you really start seeing your ROI.
Now, you also need to understand what language they speak. In the United States, you really only have two options. English or Spanish but there are a lot of Spanish speaking radio stations and they have usually cheaper ad rates and can be amazing if your call center has bilingual capabilities and so that's an entirely untapped market that you need to pay attention to in Pay Per Call 'cause people who speak only Spanish still need things like home services and insurance and have financial issues. If you wanna take this to the next level you can also look at reaching those specific audiences and they're super easy because you just look for Spanish radio stations. Your work is already done for you.
Then we need to understand what type of music do our target audiences listen to and then we wanna go after the stations that predominantly play those types of music in our target audience. The good news is your demographics are pretty standard like most demographic groups listen to the same types of music and so typically what you'll find is a higher number of radio stations that play music that targets your demographic in areas where your demographic predominantly lives. Then we wanna think about, do they commute to work or are they retired? Are they male or female and are there any income levels that we're specifically looking for because they actually apply to music taste as well.
Types of Music vs Demographics
The good news is the radio stations have all the demographic information but what we have here on the screen is pretty industry standard.
Adult contemporary is women 35-44 and it's basically the top 40 hits over and over and over again with no rap music. Then we have adult standard and this is all 50 or 55 plus and it's like the nostalgia format which I think, Sinatra, older pop music. It's not hard rock. It's entirely geared towards older people. Then we have classic rock station that's usually men between 45 and 54 and it's old school classic rock but it is almost always men and so if you're advertising typically to men it's a great place to do it and that's a really targeted range.
Now, country music is the largest genre of music nationwide. It has the most listeners. Now, I was surprised actually, to hear this when I put this information together but I verified it and it's true. Their demographics are not really skewed male or female or an age range but they're skewed towards areas of low diversity. Country music, typically white people but it is a massive market and audience and they're very loyal to their country music and so it's consolidated in the center of the United States, mostly in the south but all over as well so especially in rural areas. That doesn't mean that it's not an incredible place to advertise. It's actually the biggest option you have but you really need to know your audience before you go with that.
The inverse to that would be just rap stations that only play rap It would be the opposite. It's mostly African American listeners but it's not nearly or even close to the size of any of these other segments up here. Next we have news or talk radio. That's men mostly 45-54 and sports, sports talk radio, is the fastest growing segment of radio content. If you wanna go after men that are 45-54 you'll know that your audience is growing if you advertise to sports radio.
Now, for religious, that's gonna be moms. So women but mostly moms 25-44 and that's only religious music and it's mostly light rock and uplifting and they're probably not gonna change the channel. That's a unique thing about these last two. Talk radio and religious. Talk radio, the ads are typically really geared towards those people and so they're not gonna change the station. People listening to Rush Limbaugh are not changing the station. They actually wanna listen to the ads. They don't leave their camp very often and so the people who listen to news, talk radio and sports probably are not changing that station so they're gonna listen to more of the ads all the way through. Religious channels even less likely to change the station because they're programmed to only listen to that content and I say programmed and I mean it. They're not changing the station. If you have something to sell to moms 25-44 you should be all over those religious channels because they are just gonna listen over and over and over to your ad. You can really get them to become loyal to your brand. With that, on the religious stations it's almost like getting an endorsement, from God. Let that sink in for a minute.
Next we have soft contemporary. That's women 35-54 and that's gonna be mostly ballads, easy listening, you could think Celine Dion. It'll put you to sleep but that's what they listen to and then if you wanna reach the millennial and younger demographic. Top 40 hits is men and woman, typically between 18 and 34 and that's gonna be all pop and rap music. Or poppy rap music, not Gucci Mane, but like Drake's biggest hit.
All of this is mostly accurate and it's not ever gonna be entirely accurate because there's no way to talk to every single person that listens to radio and what channels they listen to and then figure this all out. It's mostly based on statistics but they're pretty accurate at this point and I would use this a rule of thumb when doing my radio advertising. I would absolutely use this because these demographic groups are gonna be pretty close. Then I would also ask every radio station I'm talking to for all the demographics of their different programming so that I can match it up and find those sweet spots.
Then I would look at the age distribution of a geographic area using U.S. census data and then figure out where the people I wanna hit are actually physically located and then I would look at the radio station, the demographic groups of the content and the census data and I would find my target locations where I wanna hit and then I would look at how many listeners are in those areas, in the demographics that I wanna hit and then look at the cost versus listeners to find out if CPM rate, a cost per listener essentially, and then I would compare that between the different radio stations and then I would also see with census data if any of those geographic locations have higher levels of income because that means they'll probably buy more and then that's where I would start. Highest level of income, highest congregation of demographic group that I'm looking for with the radio coverage that has the lowest cost and I would just beat my message into the listeners heads over and over and over and over again and that's gonna have the highest propensity for success.
Best Times to Advertise on the Radio
Once we figure all that out we essentially already know who we're advertising to, we have our spot, we have all the details figured out, we're talking to the radio station. Now we have to think about the time we're gonna run it. Now if you do not request specific spots at specific times you're probably not gonna get 'em and that is a major mistake with radio advertising and let's talk about why.
6:00 AM to 10:00 AM you have your morning drive and that's in the local time zone of the radio station. The demand for that spot is high and that's because listeners are highly engaged and captive and they also have a 99% plus phone penetration so anyone that is driving to work, driving their own car or carpooling to work has a 99% chance that they have a phone in their pocket. For Pay Per Call that's pretty good.
I say they're highly engaged because it's the morning and they've woken up. They don't wanna sit in silence in their car, they're listening to the radio. They're on their way. Another reason why this is in extremely high demand is because if they're commuting on Monday they're probably commuting on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. People are creatures of habit and even more so when it comes to their morning commute because they have to be at work every day on time and most people work Monday through Friday and they have to be there at a specific time. If you run your spot during the morning drive time at the same time, at the same spot Monday through Friday what you're gonna do is guarantee repetition with the exact same audience so you can drill your message into their head and that's why the demand is high because smart marketers know this and they're gonna do it.
Next spot, and before I got on to the next ... These are slots not spots, excuse me. Before I go on to the next slot I want you to understand that each radio station may have a different consideration for when this is. Maybe it's 6:30 to 10:30 or 5:30 to 9:30, whatever but typically they're gonna have some semblance of these slots and they have a limited amount of advertising spots that they allow during these time slots and so there's gonna be competition for 'em and that's why you want contractual placements.
Next one's 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM. This is the midday slot. The demand on this is medium and depending on your target demographic this time slot may be ideal. Older age groups leave radio on at work as background noise. They're gonna be a lot less likely to pick up the phone and call because they're at work but when it's background noise if you can create a really cool jingle that's repeated over and over and over and over and over again and it's a home services product or an insurance product or whatever it is, you are gonna subconsciously get in these people's heads 'cause they're just gonna listen to it over and over and over again. The midday spot is gonna be less expensive than the morning drive or afternoon drive because there's less demand for it so you can get more repetition in there. You're gonna have to test it but same people every day leave the radio on at work and they leave it on all day.
Next we have the 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM. This is considered the afternoon drive, second rush hour of the day. Demand is high for the same reasons that the morning one is high. Food, entertainment and ads related to home or home services are gonna be most effective as people are likely to be interested in this at this time. They're gonna be hungry, they're going home, they wanna be entertained and if they gotta home maybe their wives gonna be nagging 'em about fixing something in the yard or whatever it is. They're gonna be thinking about these types of things so if you listen you'll notice that Home Depot and other home advertisers buy a lot of these spots during the afternoon drive 'cause people are headed to their home, they're thinking about their home, you can give 'em a message about their home. Again, there's a 99% plus phone penetration for this however, they're more likely to pick up the phone and call for something they have to deal with afterwards. If they got a plumbing issue maybe they'll pick up the phone and call a plumber on their way home from work so that they can have that guy come over. They're thinking that way and so you should think that way too.
Next up, we have the 7:00 PM to 12:00 AM. This is the evening or they'll call it some other things slot. It has low demand. It has a much smaller audience. People do not typically listen to the radio at home. It's gonna be skewed towards older audiences and it's gonna be lower engagement because they're not a captive audience. They can be doing whatever they want with the radio on in the background. You don't even know if they're sitting there listening.
Now the thing about the drive slots is you know they're listening 'cause they're in the car but in the evening slot they may have the radio on at home and maybe they went out to dinner. You don't actually know but these should be significantly less expensive for you and this is why you need to know about this because those ad reps at the radio stations, they're gonna try and figure out if you have any idea what you're doing and if you don't they're gonna bang you on these because they know what they're doing. Rates on these should be less expensive, significantly less expensive any way you slice it.
Then you have the overnight. 12:00 AM to 6:00 AM. There is very low demand for this because there's not a lot of people listening. It's gonna have the lowest possible prices but if you can get creative with this, get creative with the audience and the products that fit these audiences, you can do really well. It's like an overnight infomercial. Overnight infomercials crush it when they're done well but you run into similar issues with that on radio. Are the call centers open during these times? What type of volume can they handle? Do people even wanna buy your product this late at night? This is like remnant internet advertising. You gotta figure out and make your ad work for your audience.
Best Days to Advertise on the Radio
Now, again, on the best times to advertise. Maintenance tasks, things people need to get done, early in the week is when people are motivated. Monday through Wednesday mornings are the afternoon drive Monday through Wednesday, that's when you want to think about things like doctors, lawyers, home services, financial things. People are motivated on Mondays. Get stuff done. It's the beginning of their week and by the end of the week they don't care about life anymore again. They wanna party or do whatever people do. Netflix and chill. Typically, based on previous statistics, get stuff done type offers are gonna work well on Monday through Wednesday mornings or the Monday through Wednesday afternoon drives.
Now, shopping and activity related stuff, these are gonna work better later in the week. Thursday through the weekend when people have free time. Those are gonna be auto related, like new cars or car financing, furniture, retail, travel and vacation stuff, all that works better on weekends when people have free time and they're not thinking about getting stuff done.
Negotiating with Radio Stations
Now, once we figured out all the stuff that we discussed and we're talking to our ad reps, we gotta start negotiating for our ad spots.
The first thing I'm gonna do is ask for a rate card and demographic information. They're gonna have it ready and they're gonna give it to me. The reason I ask for this is so I know my upper boundary and then I'm gonna ask them for discounts based on volume of spots, repetition of spots and contractual lengths over time. What if I wanna run a spot every day for a week, that's a lot more spots, do I get a discount? What if I'm willing to commit for that same advertisement every day during the same spot for three weeks, a month, six weeks, eight weeks, 24 weeks, a year? Where are the discounts at? Then they're gonna give me all that and I have the upper bounds and their discount tiers for things going over time. And I'm gonna ask a lot of questions. I'm gonna make these ad reps work. I'm not gonna be concerned about their time. I'll be respectful of it but I'm gonna ask 'em all sorts of questions 'cause I wanna know and then I'm gonna ask the same questions to every single radio station I'm talking to. I'm gonna make 'em all work.
Then I'm gonna figure out what their viewer rate or listener rate is, excuse me, and then I'm gonna look apples to apples. I'm gonna compare the cost per listener between every radio station for the same type of inventory, so the same audience, the same type of radio station that has the same demographics and then I'm gonna see who's cheaper. Then I'm gonna ask 'em, alright do the rate card rates include specific placements or are they run on station ads, unscheduled? Then I'm gonna find out if I get discounts for running unscheduled during specific times or segmented times? Can I get unscheduled but first position during the morning drive and can you play my ad four or five times? I wanna know what all my options are.
Then when I'm gonna buy radio ads my budgets are gonna be a little bit bigger so this is gonna have to be tailored to you but I'm gonna wanna commit to some sort of schedule so I can get discounts. I'm gonna negotiate hard on those and then I'm gonna ask 'em for introductory rates for my first ads so I can test and then ask 'em if I can apply those introductory rates to my first contract so I can test and then get the benefit of the discounts. I'm gonna wanna make sure I do all of my scheduling during the same time, same show, see if I can build first position because what I'm trying to do here is build an audience.
I want the same people to hear my ad. Now that may seem different coming from direct response on the internet because you're like well I want someone to click and buy so I don't wanna show 'em. I wanna put a frequency cap on it. I don't wanna show the same ad to the same people every single time. That's just lost money. Well with radio you have to think about it differently. You have to build your audience. You want 'em to hear it over and over and over again because then you become their default option for when they need your product.
Then I'm gonna ask the rep where the deals are. Do you have good deals during different slots? What are you not selling that I can get creative with that you can give me an absolute killer deal on? They'll tell you ... Ask where the remnant is. They'll tell you and then I'll push 'em on that. Well what if I buy remnant for a bunch of spots and agree over a couple weeks, can you get even lower? They'll tell you and then I'm gonna ask them how's the market shift? Spring better? Winter better? Certain shows, whatever, and what I'm trying to figure out here is how to get a price on the absolute cheapest spot I could absolutely get so I have my lower bounds. If I have my upper bound rate card and my lower bound then I know I need to negotiate somewhere in that range and I wanna get as close to the lower boundary as reasonably possible because then I have a gauge to figure out if I've gotten the best deal.
Now, believe it or not some green advertisers show up radio stations, they're like oh that's the rate card. I'll take the rate card price. They don't know any of the information we're covering right now. Their add doesn't work and the ad reps, they want branding campaigns like that because people just spend money and they don't track it but you need to tell your ad rep that you're a direct response advertiser and you're tracking your results because then they know then that they have to give you preferential pricing or it's not gonna work for you. It's not the same as a brand.
Then you wanna let them know that you have a big budget. I don't care whether you have a big budget or not. If you're like, I have a $50,000 radio budget in Q1 and gotta do a lot of testing. I'm willing to allocated some of that to you but your station's a wild card for me. I gotta convince my boss to make this happen so give me a good introductory rate, give me a couple extra spots for free. Yeah, ask for free spots. Costs them nothing. If the advertisement space isn't sold, cost them nothing to run you ad so ask for freebies when you get started. Then you're gonna wanna build a great relationship with your ad rep so they can notify you when inventory's unsold. The best time to buy radio inventory is when it's unsold and they're not gonna run an ad during that spot.
You wanna call 'em and ask 'em. "You got any unsold spots this week that you can give me at a hell of a deal? I wanna make some money for you and me and I wanna convince my boss that your station is the station we're gonna do business with over the long term so work with me on this. I got a budget but I gotta prove it to this guy. He's a bit of a pain in the butt when it comes to money so work with me". You wanna make it collaborative with the account rep and anytime you need to go head to head with them and get pushy you need to blame your boss so that it doesn't harm your relationship. I don't care if you don't have a boss. If I'm gonna negotiate with radio stations and if I were doing this I would 'cause I love doing it, I would not be Adam the CEO. I would be an account manager at my company that has no decision making ability whatsoever and so no matter what I do it's someone else's fault and then I can just be friends with this person and try and work together.
Then over time they don't negotiate with you. When you spend a lot more money with these people over time you know the rules, they know the rules, there's no games anymore. You're just, hey last minute, great, super price, great, alright gotta pay a little bit more this time, fine. It's no more bullshit but at the beginning you gotta massage your way in to at least better than average pricing. That's my goal. Can I get better than average pricing because then I have a competitive advantage. You do that by showing up, by knowing your shit, by negotiating and talking to a lot of radio stations, and don't take the first offer. Whoever shows up the most prepared and the most knowledgeable to a negotiation typically wins it and for you that's gonna be harder because you're getting into radio ads. The ad rep's gonna know more than you and so you gotta do a lot of diligence up front so that you can negotiate harder. Now you get your costs down by 20, 30, 40, 50% on average, that absolutely can be the difference between a successful and a failed campaign and so when it comes to this type of advertising you need to get good at it, you need to push, you need to do your diligence because if you don't you have a much higher failure percentage.
Reviewing Results from Radio Ads
Once your ad spot runs, you did all this work and you're all excited about it, you need to make sure that you used a unique number for each region or spot or placement or whatever. I know that's gonna be complicated if you're gonna do a song and so theoretically, you need to have one for each region and audience type and then that means you're gonna have to have a song for each one. Means you're gonna need a bunch of vanity numbers or you're gonna need the guy to produce a bunch of different songs and that's just what happens.
The cool thing is if you have a few of these, you can use three of them for testing and then one of 'em for successes. So you do four songs and you use the three for testing, you run your spots over and over and over again and when they win you switch to the one that has the best vanity number and you just keep running that one and then you reuse the three testing numbers, give 'em a little time to cycle off, look at the call volume, it should mostly disappear when you stop running the ads and then you test again. Then you use your strong, best vanity number, your best strong number as your I already know this market works number so as you expand you're actually building a brand on your really good phone number but you can still split test your campaigns.
Obviously you're gonna look at how many qualified calls you received, you're gonna calculate the ROI and if you're running in multiple markets with your branded phone number a great way to do this is by area code. It is not a 100 percent accurate but if you're running a campaign in Phoenix you're gonna see a Phoenix area code, if you're running one in Kentucky you're gonna see a Kentucky area code and you can kind of look at your statistics that way. You calculate your return on investment and if it's positive or close you call the rep back, you expand your placements, you negotiate contractual rates down, it's just a math equation at that point. Even if it's close to even you go back to your ad rep and you're like, "Hey. I lost ten percent on this campaign. I need to get my cost down 30 points. How do we do that? How do we do that with a contract? How do we get it down 40 points? Do I buy a years worth of advertising? What do I do?", and if you get a years worth of advertising you wanna have a termination clause in there and you wanna have payment terms in there so you're paying on a monthly basis or something and then that way you can get out of your contract but still take advantage of those really low advertising rates you got from committing to a year.
Maybe they won't let you terminate until say, after three months. If they're like, no termination clause you come back and like, "Look. I understand but I need an out. What if this ad starts failing?", and so you get a termination clause after a specific dollar volume or specific period of time. You just find creative ways to do this. Now if it's largely negative you need to try another angle, create a new advertisement, find a new audience. Cancel it.
But anytime you do any type of advertising you should just expect to fail. You should not expect anything but failure 'cause you gotta test. Advertising and marketing is nothing but perpetual failure until you find a win and then you scale your wins. You should get comfortable with losing some money when you do this and that's why you need to set a budget and your first budget you should assume you're gonna lose it all. You should never do radio advertising unless you can afford to lose every dollar you invest in it. That's a tough thing for people to get over but if you can start at a budget that you can afford to lose 100% of and expect to lose the entire thing, if that happens you're fine. If that doesn't happen, well wait a second, you're starting to win but you should not bet your entire Pay Per Call career or your entire life savings on a single radio advertising campaign when you've done this before. You should expect to fail.
Radio Advertising Examples
Let's take a look at some radio advertisements and we can talk about what they are, how they work, all that good stuff.
Insurance PSA Radio Commercial
First we're gonna do a public service announcement:
That was obviously an insurance campaign. There's only so much you can say in a public service announcement and that was a branding campaign. I thought it was pretty creative but they didn't really get a call to action in there or get anyone to do anything. If you're gonna do this for Pay Per Call you need to frame it like they need to call you for something that they get for free and you're gonna have to negotiate with the radio station on what they consider a public service announcement so you're gonna wanna ask for those regulations.
1-800-94-JENNY
Now, this one is very old and I am a student of advertising history. I love advertising history. I think you should definitely look back at what campaigns worked in the past and you can modernize and copy them because if they worked then they'll work now. I'm gonna tell you 100% that the advertisement I'm gonna share with you right now would kill it if you modified it and moved it here today and it's from 1994:
The interesting thing about that ad is the fact that I remembered it for this class from 1994. I was like, oh I remember this radio ad I'm gonna look it up and see if I can find it and then use it in my class. It's 2019, I still remember it. That is an example of how you do a song in a radio ad with a vanity number with flawless execution and Jenny Craig made hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even billions. I don't know specifically but they crushed it on TV and radio. What did they do? They just created a song, a jingle, around their phone number. (starts singing) 1-800-94-JENNY! (stops singing) Everyone remembers it. You play it over and over and over again. It just kills it. That's why you have to sing the phone number to get it to work.
Auto Dealership Radio Commercial
Let's take a look at another one:
That one is not a Pay Per Call campaign but I wanted to include it in here to show you what a radio popup essentially sounds like. That's an example of interruption marketing. No one enjoyed listening to that. They will remember it, it will get in their head, it'll probably cause a lot of people to change the station. What they did is raise the general volume level of it so if the music is going along, then the advertisement and it's interruption marketing on the radio and a lot of companies do this. I think that in Pay Per Call if you do it depending, like you actually wanna scare someone you can get away with it, sure, but you need to be careful about that. I don't particularly like this ad other than the fact that I think radio popups are great. I just think it's funny but this wouldn't convince me to go down to that dealership but what it does do is when it starts it's like, bam.
It scares them. People might even get a jolt of adrenaline when it comes on 'cause they're driving a car and then they hear a car crash then turn into money so what they're trying to do is associate a visceral feeling with the advertisement and that in advertising is what you should do. It's what you wanna do but in this case I don't know if associating a car crash and an adrenaline rush burst with a Nissan dealership is necessarily going to be effective in getting people to come into their store. While the production quality of this was good, the interruption level of this was good, the thought process behind the noises and the car crashing they used was good. I don't know what the effects of this campaign are gonna actually be though the goal of getting people shocked and startled while they're driving is being achieved and so I like the ad. I just don't know if they made any money with it.
Legal Services Radio Commercial
The only mistake I think that my boy T Flowers made in his Memphis attorney radio commercial, which I have to say if you're gonna know your audience he knows his audience, is that they should've ended this song with the rapper saying the phone number not him. Cognitively what happened there is you're into the song and you're remembering the phone number and you're getting it down and he's like I'll solve all your felony, your drug conviction, whatever you idiots get in trouble with, I'll even give you a payment plan but then he was like, "Call me 555-5 whatever", I don't really remember the phone number. I do remember 1-800-94-JENNY though. That was a mistake in execution at the end. You need to end with the phone number in the jingle. You should never say the phone number outside of the jingle so that over time it gets in people's heads.
This one still probably got in people's heads. I think this would've still been profitable for him and I'm picking on a guy who went way out there and took a risk on some advertising and did a clever job so if you ever see this T Flowers, I want you to know that you did a kick ass job in your commercial and next time, give me a call. I'll help you round out the end of it for free. I won't even make you pay for it or finance it. This is a great example of a song and a jingle but you always want the song to be only in the jingle.
Healthcare Radio Commercial (411-PAIN)
Let's check out another one:
I mean, (clapping). Incredibly good. Couple reasons. The 800 number in the song wasn't repeated every time. They said 411-PAIN and that's really what they were driving home, is the 411-PAIN and they said it over and over and over and over and over and over and over. That was it. It was like I'm gonna rap this song and the song is the phone number and I'm just gonna say a little bit about getting hurt and a cracked windshield and this song people will not change the station on. It's got a catchy beat to it. It's a little bit more accessible. The attorney one he's going a little bit deeper into the culture that he's trying to find so it's a little bit more Gucci Mani while this is a little bit more Drake. This advertisement can run on the top 40 frankly, with rap in it. Every demographic group I would say, male or female 18 to 45 you can get away with this ad right here. This is an incredibly good example of how you do a song with a vanity number. They got an 800 number, they weave it in, they repeat it a lot. I'm sure they crushed it with this. This is an incredibly good example of how you do a Pay Per Call campaign on radio.
Home Services Radio Commercial (ServiceMaster)
Here's another:
Alright so that's a pretty good advertisement. They did a nice job with it. They're basically just telling people who they are and what they do and then trying to add a level of credibility to the song. They have a good vanity number so they can kinda get away with being sloppy about it. 866-EXPERTS, pretty good, I remember it.
They didn't sing it. It wasn't memorable or fun it just was a really good vanity number. So you can get away with that if you have a really good vanity number but my favorite is obviously putting it into a song. That's how you're gonna get the deepest penetration into people's heads because they remember a jingle and a song cognitively very differently than humans remember numbers and so I think they could've done a better job but their agency that did that probably is working with a client that pushed back.
I think that's one of the biggest issues you're gonna have if you're representing a brand is they're gonna push back. They want creative control but if you're doing a general Pay Per Call campaign you can make whatever songs you want and so you should make lots of songs, repeat the phone number in the song and people will remember it. Right? Good.
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