It is the exceptionally rare business out of the around 33 million small businesses in the U.S. that can get by without marketing and advertising. In fact, most businesses rely on multiple types of advertising and marketing.
Most small businesses do at least some digital marketing with websites, social media, and blogging. Of course, one area that a lot of businesses neglect is programmatic radio. Programmatic radio advertising lets you get your audio ad inserted into radio broadcasts, but also podcasts and other streaming audio content.
Not sure what you need to know or how to get started with programmatic radio ads? Keep reading for seven tips that will help you find your way.
1. Determine Your Goals in Advance
A good ad tries to do exactly one thing. Maybe you’re in a brand-building phase and you want to boost brand awareness. If that’s the goal, that’s the only thing an ad should try to accomplish for you.
If you’re trying to boost sales, your whole ad should focus on making your service or product sound like something the listener simply needs to have in their life. Nothing else.
Much like with people, asking your radio advertising to multitask doesn’t get you better results. It gets you worse results.
People who hear the ad often walk away from it confused about what it was trying to tell them. Confusion is the enemy no matter your goals.
Decide, in advance, what agenda every ad will serve for your business. Once you settle on it, stick with it.
2. Don’t Create Ads in a Vacuum
When you create a strategy for your business, it’s about a series of interconnected actions aimed at a goal, such as growth or boosting revenue. The strategy coordinates activities so that all of those actions lead to something better or greater. It’s not a set of disconnected tactics carried out at random.
Your ad should exist as a part of a bigger advertising and marketing strategy. When you coordinate your marketing efforts, they support and reinforce each other. That doesn’t mean you should toss advertising ideas that don’t fit the current campaign; just tuck them away for a more appropriate time.
3. Don’t Ignore the Call to Action
A lot of small businesses write really good ads and then, in the final moment, they hedge. Rather than telling the audience what the business wants them to do, the business just reiterates a previous point.
Calls to action persist in marketing and advertising because they’re a necessary element. People are busy. People are distracted.
Telling them what you want acts as a kind of spur to increase the odds of the desired behavior. So, how you do create a good call to action? You must:
- Keep it short
- Keep it simple
- Keep it specific
Don’t announce that you have a website. Say something like, “Visit our website today at www.buymygreatstuff.com.”
If you want people to call, say, “Call now at (insert number).”
For interested listeners or those hovering near interest, a short, simple, and specific CTA is often all they need.
4. Mind the Time
Most audio spots run in specific time increments. The most common increments are:
- 15 seconds
- 30 seconds
- 60 seconds
While 60 seconds might sound like a long time, it’s really not when you’re talking about the spoken word. You might get 120 to 150 words into a 60-second spot.
Good audio spots must keep things concise and to the point. While it’s better to write a 30-second spot if you really need one, it’s worse to pay for 30-second spots when a 15-second spot would get the job done for you.
5. Don’t Fall in Love with an Ad
Unlike digital and print ads that can run for quite a while, audio spots have a very short shelf-life. Yet, many businesses keep running them because the ads performed well at first.
While your exact mileage will vary from ad to ad, you should assume that any given ad has about three weeks to a month of usable life on any given platform. After that, audiences grow tired of hearing that ad and tune it out mentally.
That doesn’t mean the ad can’t work somewhere else, but it’ll stop yielding dividends if you keep it on the same radio station or same podcasts for too long.
6. Track Your Results
One of the nice things about programmatic advertising is that you get results pretty fast. You know more or less when your ads go out, so you can correlate that with results.
Are you seeing an uptick in traffic on your website after brand-building ads? Are you seeing more sales after you run ads aimed at pushing a product or service? If the answer is no, pull the ad.
If the ad doesn’t get the results you want, save your money and create a new ad that may do better.
7. Get Help
The world of programmatic radio ads can open up new options for you, but it can also prove deeply frustrating for the uninitiated. If programmatic advertising is a new world for you, you should look for a marketing agency that has experience with it.
Ideally, an experienced marketing company can help you identify good marketplaces for your content. After all, you don’t want your ad for a family brand showing up during a podcast that promotes values that aren’t consistent with yours.
The agency should also provide you assistance in crafting and even recording your ads for later distribution.
Programmatic Radio and You
Programmatic radio lets you approach potential customers in a new way. Rather than reading about your product or service, or seeing a picture, you can talk directly with future customers.
Programmatic ads can also let you reach customers that might otherwise not find you, such as podcast listeners. People who listen to podcasts are typically not searching the internet, where they might see your other marketing material.
Media Shark offers a wide range of digital marketing services to businesses, including programmatic advertising. For more information or to get started with us, contact Media Shark today.
