How to design marketing communications for radio

A broadcast medium such as radio can be very effective in reaching a key demographic. Because most radio stations are limited to a particular genre of music – such as pop, classical, urban or country – their listeners often possess similar characteristics. In combination with accurate marketing research, a radio marketing campaign can communicate a promotional or marketing communications message to a target segment with a high degree of success.

Understand the Audience You’re Trying to Reach

While audience segmentation is important, you need to understand who you’re trying to reach. When your goal is finding and utilising the best time and radio space, it’s vital to understand when as well as how your audience is listening to the radio.

Do you understand when and how your audience will be listening? If it’s most likely that they will only be listening while driving, you may want to target drive times for your advertising. However, considering that these times are a great way to reach people in their cars, as an advertiser, you should be willing to pay more. You can also attempt to target listeners at work, utilising online radio platforms for your advertising.

Focus on your message before Hyper-Targeting segments

Once you’ve had the framework of when to advertise and on which formats, etc., you may think that this means that it’s time to get into your audience segments. Sadly, the segments aren’t going to matter if you don’t have a powerful, creative message.

As a brand, you need to be creating a relationship with your audience and determining the best way to say the correct things to the right people.

Integrate and Synchronise Your Marketing Efforts

The new consumer journey is a disjointed one which is split between any number of channels. Only using one channel for any particular campaign is condemning that campaign to negligible success. When integrating as well as combining advertising, businesses have seen a 21% increase when adding TV in addition to a 23% lift when you add online marketing.

However, there is a balance to strike among integration across channels and “spraying and praying.” Your marketing will not be as efficient as it can be if you’re spending a little bit in all places instead of concentrating and controlling select channels.

By establishing a multichannel campaign that mixes radio with efforts in digital, social media, outdoor, and print, it is possible for you to run a larger, even more, successful campaign. You can also synchronise your campaigns to amplify your brand message fully as well as individual campaign messages.

The Two Keys to Success

There are two keys to success with radio: frequency and consistency. Integration and synchronisation can only work if you have the right message going out at the right times consistently.

If you’re looking for ROI that’s a direct result of rate statistics, you aren’t going to find it. Repetition (i.e., frequency and consistency) is the only causal factor with a direct, noticeable effect on results. The goal is for each of the channels to successfully work together, and not against each other.

Remember that the client needs to have realistic expectations of what can be accomplished within a budget. The clients may not see the results they’re hoping for if the ads run very short.

When the Internet became a feasible marketing communications channel, it levelled the playing field for smaller organisations to compete in a much bigger market. We can now reach our ideal customers in a broader geography and more ways for a much-reduced cost.

However, selecting the correct marketing channel strategy to distribute your messages to your target audience – and create a stronger relationship with them – is now more complex. With all of these options, what’s important is to focus on choosing the correct media channels for your business, both online and offline.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Would you like to learn more about marketing communications? If you do, then you should check out our National Diploma in Copywriting and Digital Marketing. With a focus on digital marketing, you’ll get the edge in this always-on world that we are living in today.