Running advertisements for your business on the radio can be a very effective marketing tool - and one that is used by firms both big and small alike. It's also an advertising method that continues to be relevant even with the onset of Internet-based marketing campaigns. And what's more, it costs much, much less than equivalent television advertising, and, if done correctly, can have just as big an impact - if the ad is professionally produced and targeted at the intended audience the right way.
But the question arises: How well did a certain radio spot perform when it comes to getting listeners to check out your business? Though on the face of it this may seem to be a hard question to answer (aside from checking if there is a commensurate bump in sales after the ad runs) it isn't, and there are some widely used methods to check how well a spot did in grabbing attention.
Call tracking
This method is as simple as it is effective. Let's take a common example of a business wanting to check how well its advertising is doing. Say a small widget firm is trying to ratchet up sales and grow its customer base. To help things along on this front, the company decides to bring on a marketing production specialist such as the experts here at MJM Media to create a 30-second radio ad, complete with catchy jingle (we do those too).
The spot mentions the name and website URL of the company (which is also specially tailored for tracking - more on this in a second). But what the ad really needs is a unique metric to tell how successful it was.
Enter call tracking. This ad-effectiveness tool involves assigning a unique telephone number to each medium an ad campaign runs on. In our widgets example, a call tracking system can be utilized to monitor a special one-off number made just for the airing of the radio spot. This system can produce data showing how many people called, when and from where - essential details to assess whether the ad was a hit.
Vanity URLS
Riding shotgun to the call tracking method when it comes to monitoring the effectiveness of radio campaigns is the vanity URL. What is a vanity URL? Simply put, it's a unique website domain created just for a specific run of radio advertising.
So instead of splashing your company's regular URL, a special URL will instead be created (which should be relatively short and catchy - this is radio, after all - such as widgetspromo.ca for our made-up example). It's also not a bad idea to link the vanity URL to some sort of promotional campaign, which will maximum the possible follow-through rate with listeners. Just as with call tracking, a properly run vanity URL website will produce valuable and detail metrics about those who are punching it into their web browsers. Of course, for basic impact purposes it also provides one easy-to-understand tally: the number of visitors in the first place.
Lori J Sanders was born and raised in Toronto. She has been a proponent of business education, investing, a self-help author and a motivational speaker. She operates on her own blog and she speaks up on whatever that comes to her mind about finance, investment, mortgage renewals. She is very creative and she always comes up with some new ideas and thoughts about radio commercials. For more information, follow her on twitter.
