As this recession brings big impacts to most sectors of the economy, business owners continue to hear the steady drum beat of marketers and salespeople telling them “this is the worst time to cut back on advertising.” While this advice is sound, businesses in today’s environment need to significantly sharpen their media buying process in order to make every dollar count.
A good lesson in making your advertising dollars go the distance: don’t buy media from gut and personal habits. Rather, use numbers and science when making decisions to fully leverage your advertising resources.
As an example, don’t simply buy ads on a radio station because you like the programming and listen to it. Ask a radio station representative for an unfiltered, third-party ranking of its listenership like reports from Arbitron Ratings, the gold standard for radio station rankings and demographic characteristics. If that station performs well with your target customer in key demographics like age, gender, income level and geographic area, those numbers are powerful pieces of information to guide your media buying process.
I recently worked with a client who has a product with broad appeal and spends significant advertising dollars in heavy circulation, daily newspapers in cities like New York and Boston. The business owner felt that smaller, weekly newspapers would provide more value than the larger dailies. The numbers told a different story. In order to equal the number of readers the one large daily paper offered, six smaller newspapers were needed to match the reach. Should this business choose to utilize the six smaller newspapers, it would spend three times more to reach the same size audience. While the smaller newspapers have many positive aspects, the larger daily newspaper provided a significantly lower cost per thousand readers.
Be committed to repetition.
If you are going to make your advertising dollars count, spreading your advertising dollars around too thin is a costly mistake. How many times do you need to see an ad before you notice it? Typically, several times more than one time. Advertising works with repetition, and if you have your eggs in too many baskets when making media buys, you won’t achieve the critical frequency needed per media outlet to have an impact with their audience.
It was the January 30, 2000 Super Bowl when 17 dot-com companies came up with at least $2 million each to run ads during the big game. Do you recall some of these companies like KForce.com, Epidemic.com, LifeMinders.com, or how about OurBeginning.com, a company that spent $5 million on Super Bowl ads and was worth less than half of that amount. Even then, in the year 2000, these companies bought Super Bowl ads out of gut and ego rather than making effective use of their media budgets to create memorable brands. Clear advertising strategy failures, but a powerful lesson that advertising works with repetition.
Businesses that research and implement their advertising media buys effectively need to be committed to an on-going program that utilizes repetition to achieve measureable success.
