Article Purse

When you advertise on the radio, you have a minute or less to, with audio only, sell yourself, your company, and your reliability to a listening audience that has little patience. You must do it right, or you may as well not do it at all.

Start with a central theme. You need to know exactly what makes your company different from the competition and better than they are. Can you, in one sentence, communicate your business’s purpose, ethic, and meaning? ‘Kapiolani Day Care lovingly prepares children for their future’ and ours. ‘Ham’s Transmission Service specializes in repairing older
American cars at a price that’s right for their owners. ‘Paul’s Pest Control hates your roaches as much as you do.’ - something like that. This encapsulates who you are and why your customers should buy from you.

Second, put everything in sensible order, and keep in mind that most of your audience does not have a pencil handy. Introduce your business, sell it, introduce it again (for those who were not listening), and then give your address and contact information. Why this order? Because you need to tell the audience who you are, and then tell them why they should care, before they’re going to pay attention to a series of numbers and data. You want to get to the end of that commercial with your potential customers scrambling for a scrap of paper and a pen.

Now the sales pitch. In that one minute, you are not going to be able to tell your customer everything about your business. Of course you’re excited about it, but you need to tease your customer in, cast out one line with one call to action and let your business sell itself when your customer comes through the doors. The lengthy, detailed sales pitch should be saved for the Internet and word-of-mouth advertising.

So the call to action - what do you say? You tell them to call you for the best transmission service price in town, or it’s free. Or you tell them to come to your website for a special offer: free appetizers when you buy drinks at Happy Hour. Just one thing. And not one thing per commercial, it has to be in a certain time period for your commercials.

The transmission-service-free offer, for instance, for one month can be swapped out for free tire rotation with oil change next month, but not before.

Why? Because people are distracted. They don’t want to think, they want to be told what to do. If you give them a choice while they’re just barely on your hook, soup or salad? - they’re going to turn away and listen to the next thing. Just give them one single item to keep in their heads, and keep repeating it until they get it.

So you still want to tell them all about your business, you’re dying to talk about your awards, and you think that if they know all fifty-eight delicious flavors they’ll be bursting through your doors? Fine. Go ahead, but not on the radio. Put it online with an easy-to-remember website address (dot-com only, not dot-net or any of the others), and make visiting your website a call to action. You may not have as much response to your advertisement this way, but you will get more visitors, more hits, and a longer more intense opportunity to sell your customers on your business.

Andrew Long writes advertising related articles for publications and his own series of websites. Go to http://www.myadbase.com/cgi-bin/guide.cgi?page=radio_advertising and
to view specific information about advertising sales
go to http://www.selling-advertising.com/Advertising-Revenue-Centre