Targeting your advertising

If you were going to spend $200 for advertising, which one of these is a better deal?

A 1/8 page ad in a newspaper with 100,000 circulation

10 radio commercials on a station with 300,000 listeners

A 1/8 page in a magazine with 38,000 circulation

A page for a year, on a website that gets 20,000 hits a month

Printing and distributing 3,000 flyers

Just looking at the numbers, you might be inclined to say the radio station, because they have 300,000 listeners. However, this may or may not be the case at all. For example, let's say that your business sells hearing aids (which generally targets an older customer), and is located in Douglas County, and the radio station is a Hip-Hop station in downtown Atlanta. Most of the listeners are not going to be a prospect for your business. And maybe the newspaper with 100,000 circulation is distributed throughout the entire metro area, and only 5,000 are distributed near your business, and it's a paper not many people read. If the 3,000 flyers were going to be distributed in newsletters in retirement communities, this would be a much better way to spend your money.

The point is, with this very limited information, any one of these 5 possibilities could be the best place to advertise your business. You have to go beyond the numbers and find out who is actually going to see your advertising.

Generally radio advertising is not that effective at targeting a geographic area, because the signal covers a wide range. So, if a station covers the entire metro area and has 300,000 listeners, there may only be a very small percentage that are in the geographic area around your business that you need to reach. This is especially true if you have a business like a beauty salon which tends to draw most of their customers from within 5 miles or so of their business. Most of the money you would be spending in this instance is being paid to reach people who are probably not going to drive to your business because there are tons of similar businesses that are in their own neighborhood. In the case of radio advertising, 10 commercials may not be enough either because someone that you are trying to reach has to actually be listening to that station, and paying attention, at the very time your ad is aired. Let me be clear that the purpose of the above example is not meant to bash radio advertising, which can be a good way to advertise for some businesses when used effectively.

The most ideal form of advertising is going to be one that reaches a lot of people that are near your business. When you speak with a company that is selling advertising, look past the number of copies or listeners and ask how many of these are in your target area. Also, be sure that the type of thing that you are advertising in is they type of publication that your target market will be interested in reading or listening to (in the case of a radio station). If it is a publication, can you see people actually reading it? Is it something that will be read once and thrown away, or does it have a shelf life? The important thing is that your goal is to try to reach the maximum number of potential customers with your ad.