Maven Marketing with Brandon Welch

Do Radio Ads Still Work?

• Frank & Maven

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Radio advertising: dead relic of the past, or secret weapon hiding in plain sight?
We tested the hype, the hate, and the hard numbers, without picking a side.
This episode dives into what most marketers miss about audio, how to tell if your brand should even touch radio, and the one buying mistake that quietly kills campaigns.
In this episode:

  • The media metric that can flip your budget math
  • “Targeting” vs. being remembered
  • The brain quirk audio exploits (and how to script for it)
  • A simple station plan most reps won’t pitch you

Curious whether radio belongs in your mix, or how to make it pay back faster? Hit play.


For entrepreneurs wanting to grow without wasting money, join the Maven Marketing Mastermind → https://www.mavenmethodtraining.com
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/frank-and-maven/
Host: Brandon Welch
Co-Host: Caleb Agee
Executive Producer: Carter Breaux
Audio/Video Producer: Nate the Camera Guy
Do you have a marketing problem you'd like us to help solve? Send it to MavenMonday@FrankandMaven.com!
Get a copy of our Best-Selling Book, The Maven Marketer Here:
https://a.co/d/1clpm8a

Do you have a marketing problem you'd like us to help solve? Send it to MavenMonday@FrankandMaven.com!

Get a copy of our Best-Selling Book, The Maven Marketer Here: https://a.co/d/1clpm8a

Brandon Welch:

Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I'm your host, brandon Welch, and I am joined by Caleb. Do you listen to the radio AG?

Caleb Agee:

You know, I really don't, to be honest, not willingly, I should say Wow.

Brandon Welch:

Do you remember a time? Is there a nostalgic era? We did it in your life where you did listen to the radio?

Caleb Agee:

Yeah, my parents had the radio on every single day, and even when I first got a car, I listened to the radio all the time. I just don't anymore. I talk on the phone a lot in the car, though, in fairness, and then if I'm not, it's a talk on the phone a lot in the car though, in fairness, and then, if I'm not, it's a podcast.

Brandon Welch:

You have a pretty short drive time.

Caleb Agee:

I do. I live 10 minutes away from the office.

Brandon Welch:

Well, you saw the title. Today's episode is about radio advertising. And do they still work? Just as a reminder, we expect this title to be a little bit of a clickbait. So if this is your first time here, this is the place where we answer real-life marketing questions so you can grow your business and achieve the big dream. The big dream for us is all about small business America, companies doing zero to $100 million.

Brandon Welch:

We believe you are the salt. We believe you are literally the change that can happen in our universe. You reach more people, you employ more people than any other sector of the economy combined, and that's why we get just unreasonably excited about small business although there really is no such thing as small business because it's all big and we're just honored to be here with you and if this is your first episode, I hope that we can deliver some value. It is our goal in our heart that we help you grow, you help you get better and more out of the thing you're trying to build, and we do that with a number of ways. We talk about media, we talk about messaging, we talk about strategy and all of the modern things and also the things that haven't changed for hundreds of years with human communication and so this is being recorded.

Brandon Welch:

Inside Frank and Maven Studios, which is our agency. We help grow small businesses on a one-to-one level across the country and then at large we help thousands or hopefully hundreds of thousands of small business folks via this podcast, in our book, the Maven Marketer, and some courses and mastermind products that we have. So I didn't say all that because we hardly ever talk about that. We don't sell things on the show. This is 100% our best and free advice for you.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah, and the big question today it's maybe twofold. But people will say does anybody listen to the radio anymore? Does radio advertising still work? Yeah and uh, today we've done a ton of research. We debated internally in this office because, um, like I just said, I don't. I don't listen to the radio, and so we were looking at all the different sources inside and outside the media world. Yep, what the data shows. Um, I'll give you the short version of it. Yes, people are still listening to radio and we're going to talk about how many, and we have grown countless businesses with radio broadcast advertising.

Brandon Welch:

We know for sure, we have the case studies that multiples upon multiples of growth. But we're going to talk about who. That is why. That is how we do that. But, starting at the beginning, the question we get most often is does people even listen. Does people listen to the radio In Arkansas, where I was from? They do. Oh my gosh.

Caleb Agee:

Sorry, arkansas, all right.

Brandon Welch:

So first thing first, questions first. We dug in deeper to this, honestly, more than we even do to satisfy our own agendas for growing companies. Inside the radio industry there's a company called Nielsen. It used to be Arbitron, but you're probably familiar with Nielsen. They measure TV for all the years. Tv has been measured decades, if not a century, and what they have done historically is they send out. They used to send out paper diaries and they say hey, caleb, you're Arbitron household or you're Nielsen household, and we're going to pay you a little bit of money for the next four weeks to help us in a research study and you start tabulating.

Caleb Agee:

Log all the stuff you watch, listen to.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah, and so they took that statistical data and they put it through a bunch of nerds and they brought it back and they told media buyers like us for years, just with those paper diaries hey, statistically, this is how many people are listening to each station, and you've heard of terms like sweeps, or you've certainly heard of terms like ratings. What kind of ratings does it get? Mr Trump talks about ratings a lot.

Caleb Agee:

Yes, he likes to talk about those.

Brandon Welch:

He comes from the TV world as well, yeah, he is a TV star, president.

Brandon Welch:

If you ever have to question why he's saying what he's saying, just remember he's a reality TV star. Okay, yeah. So the thing that has changed in recent years is that in big markets, radio is not measured with just diaries, it's measured digitally to a more accurate level. They send out these little pager things that people, instead of just going off their memory, they put them on their side, hip or whatever, they just carry them around, and that C that device is listening for an encoded signal that basically every radio station in the market has, and so it digitally records, reduces the the um, the ability for people to essentially forget and or fudge what they're listening to.

Caleb Agee:

They do it consciously or unconsciously. And I think when you're in, sometimes you will be in a place where you're exposed to radio and you don't realize you're walking around the store or I'm hanging out with I'm in Brandon's car, he's listening to the radio and I took a drive with him. I wouldn't acknowledge or even know what station he had it tuned into, necessarily to log that in my book. And so this, these personal people meters, is what they're called. They're called it sounds like a purple people eaters is what it makes me think Purple people monster.

Caleb Agee:

But yeah, the personal people meters are actively measuring the frequency from the stations you are exposed to, and they just changed it this year from a five-minute listening time to count that, as you listened to three minutes, and so they're actually listening more on a granular scale, whether or not you're there.

Brandon Welch:

So that's the setup to say that's how ratings, that's the basics of how radio is measured. There are a lot of other independent things they do with some digital radio stuff now and just so you know, that's the technology and in smaller markets they're still using some paper diary type things.

Brandon Welch:

Big markets, though they tend to apply that as the trend, for that's how they kind of come up with the number we're about to share, which is really, according to Nielsen, 84 percent of US adults listen to radio weekly. That is more than social media or TV or podcast reach Real quick numbers. Social media on smartphones is 78 percent. Connected TV, like internet, I think, streaming on TV on the wall Smart TV, yep, yep, that's 70, or, sorry, 74%. And traditional TV actually comes in at 58%, with that same data and same reports.

Caleb Agee:

This one. This surprised me. Inside of that same data, Nielsen found that 55% of Gen Z is listening to the radio daily. Isn't that wild? Every single day, that actually blew my mind. I would probably argue with that if I hadn't seen the data myself.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah, well, we are going to actually argue with that data, because what a true skeptic could say is well, of course, the radio. People say that people are listening to radio. And, at the end of the day, I would contend that Nielsen has a huge regulatory obligation to subscribe to Like they command hundreds of millions of dollars of not just TV station and radio stations money but, like true third-party consultants such as us, and if we don't believe in the data, they don't have a business.

Brandon Welch:

So, they do have a huge obligation to do this to a statistical accuracy, yeah, but even so, there are other sources that are not really tied to the radio industry and have no real dog in that fight. Actually, some of these we pulled from probably would have a dog in a fight of, like, promoting new and digital media. And so there's a Pew survey that says 82% of people 12 years and older every week listen to the radio.

Caleb Agee:

That's crazy. Totally independent data, yeah, totally different methodologies. So we had 84 from Nielsen. We're hearing 82 from Pew.

Brandon Welch:

And then Edison did another phone and online survey that found 79% okay.

Caleb Agee:

That's on the weekly. And then Edison also found that 63% listen daily. So you talk about that tighter frequency. That's still a very high percentage of US adults that are listening every single day.

Brandon Welch:

Yes, and here's probably the biggest thing for me, keep in mind, it's not small local radio budgets that probably keep the whole thing alive, it is people with big money, with way bigger marketing departments than most people have, people with agencies our size and bigger. And here's the deal If we don't grow our clients, if they don't grow, we get fired. Right, that is true for every marketer across the world. Right, for every marketer across the world, right. So last thing I'll offer you is that radio still commands 64% of all the ad-supported audio time Ad-supported. This is not like NPR and all the nonprofit, maybe ministry-type driven stuff.

Caleb Agee:

This podcast is not ad-supported.

Brandon Welch:

We're not ad-supported. We are supported from viewers and hearts like you right Viewers like you, yeah, so 64% of all ad-supported time comes from adults 18 plus on radio. That's compared to 19% on podcasts. Wow, because a big. If we look around in our world and we just it's probably because we hang around so many smart people we would look like Carter the camera guy.

Caleb Agee:

They sound a lot like you, they look like you.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah, hey everybody. Carter is the camera guy this week. Can you tell them why? Real quick, huh. Can you tell everybody why Carter?

Caleb Agee:

is the camera guy.

Brandon Welch:

Oh, because Nate, the camera guy, is getting married. He's getting married.

Caleb Agee:

Congratulations. Is that his wedding? Yeah, today, like literally.

Brandon Welch:

Monday.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah, the day this episode is dropping. Nate is getting married this afternoon. Whatever, we drop a congratulations to Nate and Caitlin. Nate the camera guy, nate the camera guy is becoming Nate the married camera guy. That's right. So quickly I was just going to say I would say a lot of my friends listen to podcasts and so brings up an important point before we go on. Point before we go on. If you're talking about becoming a household name and becoming like what radio can do best it is, or any media, it's tempting to go well, what do I do? It is very unlikely that you are your own customer or represent in any way, shape or form the statistical average of your own customer. It's very unlikely. I will just say, as business owners, if you are a business owner or if you are living an entrepreneurial-driven lifestyle, you are probably the exception of the norm of routine, meaning there's a lot of extra noise in our lives. Even.

Brandon Welch:

Caleb is a business leader, right, there's a lot of extra noise in our lives. Even Caleb is a business leader, right, and so, um, that there's there's data on that. Um, I would just say that what we're probably trying to do, if we're a service based company, if we are a any sort of a local um commodity or trying to be that that household name, whether you're in Dallas or in you know, it's about what the averages are doing. Okay, and we rely on data, and we have four independent sources all verifying hey, radio has an audience. Okay, now, um, what does that mean? Should we? Is that the best media for us to use?

Caleb Agee:

And that's that's the thing I want to caveat real quick because, uh, here at Frankenmaven, we're not necessarily radio fans. Radio works. We've watched businesses grow because they've invested in radio, and we're going to talk about why that works, when it works. But we also have seen a lot of companies grow using television. They've grown because they've used Google ads. They've grown because they've used Facebook ads, and what this really comes down to is a strong marketing plan. It comes down to having a strong strategy, and we're going to talk about the reasons and the times that radio can actually work.

Brandon Welch:

Where we're putting radio, and real quick for new listeners. Or, in case you forgot, we have this book called the Maven Marketer, which is our playbook for growing small businesses into much bigger businesses over the last 15 years. This has our stories, this has what happened, this has how we do it and what we're talking about is the art of the tomorrow customer. There are three given customers in any category. I don't care what you're selling, there's a today customer who's out on the loose buying. They need you today. They need something you do or one of your competitors does today. Radio is not the best use for that generally, unless you're selling cheeseburgers or concert tickets or something that's really near to the purchase line.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah, the much, much, much bigger group of people type of customer we'll say is called the tomorrow customer. That's people who will one day buy, buy, and most categories have less than 1% on a monthly basis of the population who's even remotely interested in buying. It's usually more like a quarter of 1% if you're talking about any major service purchase. So the art of radio or any broadcast media is to become the one they think of long before and the one they prefer, the one that they come to know, like and trust long before they need you. And for that the name of the game is not targeting, it's not. Can I reach my perfect person? Because even in your entire town there's not enough of the perfect person.

Brandon Welch:

This hour or this week, really, or maybe even this month or quarter. What we become is we say everybody will one day be the right person if we just win them over now. And so the art of radio and TV, or the role it plays, is to reach a lot of people at once. And to measure that we talk about there's an efficiency metric, that's like it's called cost per thousand. How many dollars do I have to spend to reach for my ad to be seen 1,000 times? Okay, that's the gas mileage of media. We have an episode called what is CPM. You should go listen to that because it's regardless of who you are, what you're thinking and what you plan on doing. You need to know about CPM.

Caleb Agee:

It's the great equalizer.

Brandon Welch:

Great equalizer of all media, great equalizer, great equalizer of all media, and radio does a really good job of reaching a lot of people at one time for very little dollars, yep. So in most cases, radio is reaching people for $8 to $15 per thousand. If you compare that to most digital medias like Facebook or like streaming TV, it's like $30, $40, $50, sometimes $80 a thousand. Google Search, by the way, costs you between $500 and $1,500 per thousand, yep. And so if you're buying radio at $10, let's say, or even the high end $, you're buying it for a hundred times cheaper than a lot of these other medias to reach people. That's where it's magic is.

Caleb Agee:

Yes, and it's not because we're targeting a very specific person. It's because we're reaching the largest amount of people daily. And that's the great thing about radio as well is we just talked about that? 55% of Gen Z listens to the radio not weekly, but daily.

Caleb Agee:

That 80% we were talking about with Nielsen is they're listening every that. 80% listens weekly. The numbers for daily goes down a little bit. It's in the sixties, um, but that is still a very consistent audience. And even in all these digital medias that you could pursue, that might, might, be competitive. Um, brandon and Kyle are going to talk about YouTube ads next week. We'll little teaser here. And even in all these digital medias that you could pursue, that might be competitive. Brandon and Kyle are going to talk about YouTube ads next week. A little teaser here. Those might be competitive on the CPM basis, but do we know that they're coming back daily? Do we know that they're coming back weekly?

Brandon Welch:

Or is it a haphazard revelation, and is the platform capable of reaching them again? At the same time, same place.

Caleb Agee:

Because to form a relationship with me, for me to know you, I want to form a relationship with you. Caleb, you got to come to work every day. No, I'm just kidding.

Brandon Welch:

I don't know if I want it that bad.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah, we have to see each other every day or we have to be in each other's lives. The relationship comes from frequency, it comes from time. It comes from frequency, it comes from time, it comes from repetition. It doesn't come from haphazardness. That is not a relationship, and so that's where radio wins is. Not only is it efficient, effective, cheaper, it's also repetition, repetitious, can I say that?

Brandon Welch:

repetitive repetitive thank you, repetitive issues and the thing about um mass media. Even though it's old, even though we could say it's clunky, it's not sexy. It's like when you are in the daily routine, as most Americans are you drop the kids off to school, you wake up, you brush your teeth the same time every day, you drink your coffee the same time of day. You probably go to the same two or three restaurants you know, every handful of weeks. That's creatures of habit. And in between those pockets of either travel or sit down or leisure, or sometimes even background noise, we've got the same-ish TV and radio programs in the background. That's the magic, it sticks, and people are showing back up to that. Well, all right.

Caleb Agee:

So I'm going to hit another myth or another question. We get another objection we get for radio, which is I have a visual product, but how is radio going to help me sell this? Yeah, I, you can't see what I'm selling? How do I show people a fire pit? How do I show people a fire pit? How do I show people a beautiful house? How do I show them a new roof? How do I give them an experience when it's just a radio ad? I can't shine a camera on it.

Brandon Welch:

And this is what will make or break your campaign. If you go on any media, but especially radio, and you just start talking about information, this is not the platform for information. This is the platform for inspiration. We're going to use some magic that neuroscientists have long confirmed and that's when we use emotional, descriptive, unpredictable words. It triggers this mechanism in the brain, called Broca's area. It's the. This is the same area that when you're reading a Harry Potter book about a world that you've never seen, you can picture it vividly.

Brandon Welch:

This is what this is the mechanism that takes phenomes, sounds of words and instantly translates them into geographical languages of the mind. There's a sketch pad in the mind that, basically, as soon as you hear things like round, you just pictured something. Or oblong, you just pictured something. Or cotton, you just pictured something right. That is the same thing that happens when you use the right words in your radio ads, and you could do this a number of ways, and this episode is not about that. But what you need to know is that the brain, when you give it unpredictable or otherwise rich vocabulary, it is doing a better job of producing images than actually a TV screen can of producing images than actually a TV screen can, because those images become personal, because the brain itself created them, sometimes, very often worlds that never existed.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah, I would also argue, we have Carter the camera guys here in the room. There are some amazing adventures. We've been able to take people on in 30 seconds that we could show you something we could never have pulled off actually doing. With or without a million dollar tv production budget, we can.

Caleb Agee:

We can create, sometimes never then yeah, we can create scenes, we can create interesting things with your imagination. We call it, um, we call it theater of the mind. Yeah, and this is, this is a beautiful thing that we can do just with audio. I don't know if you ever listened to like old audio books, um, like fiction books, where they would have like sound effects and things going on, and they you can, you can sense it, you can be there, um, but whaton was talking about that, that broke his area. It's right next to the long-term memory portion of your brain and so when you can, um, surprise broca, you can get my attention that actually audio is right next to where long-term memory is stored visual, visual receptors. Where that processing is is like half a hemisphere away from where your brain actually keeps the long-term storage. Yes, so even let's say this isn't about TV, but even if you're doing a TV ad, you need to say something or you need to create some sort of audio impression, because if you want to be remembered, you have to do it.

Caleb Agee:

You can also say things with silence.

Brandon Welch:

Yes, you can.

Caleb Agee:

So we'll just point that out as well.

Brandon Welch:

I just said something with silence. What was he going to say next? Last thing this is getting really nerdy. It's the coolest thing. If you want to go research it At this hour, just punch it in a GPT and say why is audio more memorable than visual stimulus?

Brandon Welch:

But there is a thing that happens, and this is the reason you can hear a burglar in the middle of the night when you can't see them. This is the reason you can hear a burglar in the middle of the night when you can't see them. This is the reason you have learned statistically the words to hundreds of songs you never intended to learn, and you can sing them right now. And this is the reason that, at the scene of every accident, if there's 10 people that witnessed the car accident, all 10 people will have a different account of what had it, visually, at least by a little bit. Every single one will be able to tell you the sound they heard. And so this is it's called echoic retention, and it's just a physiological fact that things that stick in our brain, or sorry things we hear, take three or four seconds to expire in the brain, while things we see take less than one second. There's some fascinating research on that.

Caleb Agee:

That is fascinating. You think about those old statistics that we see over 5,000 advertisements a day and we don't remember most of them because they were unimpressive. I would argue that we don't remember a lot of them because they were visual only. Yeah.

Caleb Agee:

And we remember what we hear and we talked about this. I don't listen to lot of them because they were visual only. Yeah, and we remember what we hear. We talked about this. I don't listen to the radio hardly at all anymore, but there are radio ads that I remember from more than half my life ago. That's right, they're in there and they're stuck in there. Woody Justice for sure, we were talking about Woody this morning.

Brandon Welch:

Seth Godin, one of the most prolific marketers of the digital age, said we hear before we see. We respond to voice before we understand words. That's why radio has power. Julian Treasure says sound is the most powerful sense. It bypasses logic and goes straight to the soul.

Brandon Welch:

This is why music is a thing, guys, and this is why you need to make some sort of musicality or rhythm or pattern to your campaigns. We have other episodes about that. There's one, a couple episodes back, called how to Write Ads that People Thank you For. That's what we're talking about there. But go read the lyrics, the actual lyrics, to one of your favorite songs. They're the dumbest thing you've ever heard. Yeah, if you use logic, but when you sing them it works.

Brandon Welch:

And then probably my favorite one is that, uh, roy h williams, who was the king of radio. He made many, many, many, many millionaires and can and still continues to make many millionaires out of radio advertising, says that the ear is the doorway to the heart and the heart is the gateway to the wallet. People will justify in their mind what their heart has already decided. So there's not just a media reach here, there's a physicality and a neuroscience like hack, and frankly, a lot of advertisers don't even do that great of a job out of it. Like, if you can do this, even with a small budget, my goodness, will you become famous? Yep.

Brandon Welch:

And the one people want to do business with.

Caleb Agee:

My favorite line is you can close your eyes, but you can't close your ears. Yeah, how else? Would you know, there's a burglar in your house in the middle of the night.

Speaker 4:

That's right.

Brandon Welch:

So we've talked about the media. Still, in and of itself, by the numbers has play, it has mathematical sense. Research by four or five different angles proves to us people still regularly use radio. Neuroscientists prove that there's something special about the spoken word and our own experience can confirm that. If we just think about songs and books and things we have to read. Yep, but how in the world do we make it actually work?

Caleb Agee:

Yeah, because you can run radio and watch. Your business not grow. Yeah. You can absolutely do that if you do not follow the right process, and that's what we want to help you with. If you just heard all of that and you said okay, is it right for me and how should I pull it off, this is where we're going to get into the nitty gritty.

Brandon Welch:

So Caleb was talking about this earlier the. The magic of the media formula is that on all of these other digital forms, whether it's Facebook ads or YouTube ads or any digital form, you can turn it off or you can scroll past it, or you can even on TV, you're more likely to change the channel. Well, radio you don't tend to do that. It's usually a forced, intrusive, what we call impression. And so when you buy an ad for 30 seconds intrusive, what we call impression and so when you buy an ad for 30 seconds, by far the way big majority listens to that ad for 30 seconds Now, at any given time. There are a shorter amount of people. People listen to radio in a medium-sized city 15 to 20 minutes at a time. That's called TSL, time spent listening. And if you want to test the strength of your radio station, ask your radio rep for what's your TSL, what's your average quarterly? You can have average quarterly hour audience. And then what's your time spent listening? Talk radio formats.

Brandon Welch:

it's longer, it could be, as high as an hour, Teeny bopper formats, it's less. There's just less frequency. But right in the middle, your everyday hits your country, your rock stations 15 to 30 minutes, okay, Now. Now, what that means is the audience is cycling out all the time, which means you're going to have to have more spots on per day than if we were to do something like TV, where people watch for forced amounts of longer time. Our formula uh, this is what works really well for us is 30 spots per week between the hours of 6am to 7pm.

Brandon Welch:

That between the hours of 6 am to 7 pm, that's kind of a minimum schedule. Yep.

Caleb Agee:

That's called a. That's a day part. That's the daytime day part. Yes, Six, eight to seven P.

Brandon Welch:

Um so. So if you're talking about $30 spots and I'm, let's just say it's a medium sized city 30 times 30 is 900, and multiply that times 52 weeks you've got somewhere in the $45,000 a year schedule Okay, but you were probably for that money.

Brandon Welch:

Cumulatively, in a month you're reaching 50 to 75,000 people and my gosh like think about how many people out of 75,000 that if they were, if you're buying them for the day that they finally need you, could you ever serve 75,000 people in the lifetime of your company? Most service companies can't. Yeah.

Brandon Welch:

Or at least it's a really good foundation. Now that's if you have a what we would call more of a starter budget. You know four or five grand a month sort of thing. Bigger cities it's going to be more. Like you know, some of the radio campaigns we've run in Atlanta are more on the $100,000 to $150,000 for you know your medium-sized stations. But the point is you don't want to buy too many stations, you want to buy one station at a time, one station.

Brandon Welch:

Minimum 30 spots per week for 52 weeks a year. Multiply that out, get your budget. We can teach you about negotiating the best rate possible in another episode, but that's what you want, and only when you've satisfied that do you add another station.

Caleb Agee:

Okay. So I go to the radio station let's say I'm an entrepreneur or in-house marketer. I go to a radio station and say, hey, I'm considering radio. I hear pitches from three different stations. What do you expect them to pitch me? What are they going to sell me?

Brandon Welch:

So radio reps are often incentivized and often held to a standard of filling up all the buckets. Most radio reps don't rep one station. They rep like five Okay, or maybe like minimum three Okay. They're like station groups, Station groups, and so they've got their you know hit station and they have their country station and oldies, they might have a talk station and all that stuff. At any rate, they've got multiple things.

Caleb Agee:

And then now they also have budgets. They have to hit quotas. They have to hit to sell you some digital advertising, which would be like we want to run a little bit of online streaming and we want to run a little bit of display ads, and a lot of them are even selling TV and OTT know display ads on the website and a lot of them are even selling, you know, tv and OTT, and I would just caution against that.

Brandon Welch:

Not because the radio folks are trying to screw you or anything like that, and not even because any of those medias can't work. It's that the average salesperson is incentivized to fragment their buy and that is the last thing you want to do for media. Okay, so you want to do one station at a time, using that formula I just shared with you. That will that 30 spots a week will generally get you the average person hearing the ad four times per week, the average audience. How do you feel about weekends? I get them usually. You can get those as bonuses.

Caleb Agee:

Okay, this 30 spots should be weekdays.

Brandon Welch:

Monday through Friday, and I'm not against weekends, I just want to know that at least 30 of them fall Monday to Friday, because that's your most consistent predictable audience.

Caleb Agee:

People are in that mindset of habitual listenership.

Brandon Welch:

So love you radio reps and I want you to do well, but I want you to go put all the budget on one station, okay. What you'll probably get back is they'll have you know, either they'll they'll do one or two things. They'll have you 15 spots a week on one station, 15 another, and they'll give you like a demographic frequency, but that is not the same as a station frequency, okay, okay, frequency meaning how many times your ads are playing, or a lot of times what I see. They'll go two weeks on one station and two weeks on another station Also.

Caleb Agee:

We want to talk to the same yes, 20, 50, 100,000 people that are listening to the one station. Yes. If you pick country station, it's the country station every week for 52 weeks a year.

Brandon Welch:

If I were to violate this rule like if, if I had, if I had a committed mindset and I know, okay, five to 10 grand a month is just out of the cards I've got three that I can comfortably spend. Here's what I would do. The only time I'd violate my 30 spots per week rules I'd probably get on a slightly bigger station that had a good morning host or something.

Brandon Welch:

And I would, or maybe it's even a good afternoon program, but I would buy what they call a station within a station and I would anchor maybe 15 spots a week between 6 am and 10 am, like a day part a morning day part.

Brandon Welch:

Because then I'm gonna have three spots a day with an audience that tends to use the radio at that time of day and I can build my frequency With a much tighter window that time of day, and I can build my frequency With a much tighter window With a tighter window, but I would not buy 15 spots a week spread all over the place for a baby step in what I would rather you do. If you don't have the money, just don't start this venture. Wait, wait. Just like you waited to buy a house at one point, just like you waited to buy the car or the swimming pool or the whatever you did, like this is a future purchase for you, set aside the money in an imaginary account where you've got that 50 to 100 grand sitting there. We've had advertisers do that. Now they're thriving because they started with abundance not scarcity.

Caleb Agee:

How many months should I have in the piggy bank Minimum?

Brandon Welch:

for me six, okay, but I also don't want you to do that unless you're in six months, if you haven't earned a red cent, and you will. But you need to look at it like you haven't earned a red cent from the campaign, because this does take a while, because it moves at the speed of humanity of your client's needs, the buying cycle of your product, the buying cycle of your product.

Caleb Agee:

Right, more people are coming in each month, each week.

Brandon Welch:

People are not just going to suddenly start buying air conditioners because your radio ads. No, the exact same percentage of people that bought them yesterday will buy them tomorrow and next week and the same thing, so on and so forth.

Brandon Welch:

So we see the noticeable, like ooh, wow, I'm so glad I'm doing this. We see that start happening between months 6 and 18, minimum 6. If I've got somebody who their accountant is breathing down their neck and somebody who's like trying to tabulate every phone call and say how did you hear about us? Yeah, by the way, there's another episode that we'll talk about that. That's an inaccurate way of measuring marketing.

Caleb Agee:

But if you're going to have to account for your radio working in. Yeah, you see what I did there. I did there.

Brandon Welch:

In six months. Don't do it. Don't do it. This is not for you. You are not emotionally stable enough and I mean that in the spirit of love, yeah, they're. You're not emotionally stable enough to have a long-term campaign. It's.

Caleb Agee:

It requires a lot of patience and it will like done right, it work. If you get your message and your media buying strategy well done and you expect people not to buy next week because you ran a radio ad this week, you expect them to buy next year because they've been hearing you for a year. You will watch the compounding effects of this every single time. Yes, I promise you it will work. I'm saying a caveat of if you do it right, because you have to have good ads that are actually compelling and memorable. You have to have a good frequency that people make you memorable. Yes, but when that's not true, if you do that well, it will work.

Brandon Welch:

I've seen it happen hundreds of times In chapter 12 of the Maven Marketer it's just called the tomorrow customer there's a section called for the accountants, it's called preparing yourself for tomorrow, marketing, and I write to the accountants and I just talk about here's what you can measure, here's what you can't measure. I've done this thousands of times, guys. We have done this thousands of times. And there's also a section called the seven clues along the way. While statistically you won't be this is not a scientific method there are trends that you start looking for. We've done an episode on seven clues along the way but you start seeing things like increased direct website traffic. It will not come in the form of I heard your radio ad. I'm ready to do business.

Caleb Agee:

Every once in a while. Yeah, are you?

Brandon Welch:

a radio Now, eventually eventually like fast forward to that 18, 24 month that will actually happen. An amount of time that you're going, wow that is happening. I love your radio ads or I hate your radio ads, but I'm Watch the episode from a few weeks ago called how to Make People Thank you for your Ads. This is happening for our clients.

Caleb Agee:

It's golden.

Brandon Welch:

But you get other media start working well because people have heard about you. They like you. They build this personality, likeness to you. You see higher conversion rates on your website. You see competitors start trying to advertise on the same station. These are the clues that start proving to you it's working. These are the things we've seen in hindsight from campaigns that were like multimillion dollar differences. In businesses. There's higher and easy sales close ratios. Your salesmen will suddenly get better. It had nothing to do with them.

Brandon Welch:

It had to do with the company just became more trusted. And then the whole reason we're doing this is this all pedals out to. You're going to grow faster than you were, because people put you on their list even before they knew they were going to need you.

Caleb Agee:

Go back to that. Google ads cost per thousand. To catch somebody at that finish line, you will pay $1,000 per thousand people. To catch somebody long before to earn them before they're a customer, you will pay $10 per thousand people. To catch somebody long before to talk, to earn them before they're a customer, you will pay ten dollars per thousand people.

Brandon Welch:

I'm using round numbers you said youtube, which is the episode next week. Yep um, youtube actually has a decent cpm, but there's a reason. It's not apples to apples, it was google. Google is a thousand dollars at the finish line did I say youtube?

Caleb Agee:

you said youtube, google ads. That's what I meant. To correct you. I didn't mean to correct you, but I just I'll take it.

Brandon Welch:

That could cause confusion.

Caleb Agee:

Google ads is a very expensive CPM.

Brandon Welch:

It's very targeted but it's very expensive. The episode next week is have Google or have YouTube ads finally gotten better than TV ads? Wait to find out. Ooh.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah, okay. So, guys, we have some case studies. Just a few things we'll share. We have probably the smallest radio station in America, definitely the smallest one we've ever bought. In this little town in Arkansas, we ran a campaign we're going to show you, we're just going to show you three ads on the way out. We're going to talk a ton about them, but we're going to show you three ads. And these guys, they're very aware it's a commoditized internet service.

Brandon Welch:

They're very aware of what their averages should be in their market and they were like we've run out of customers, like everybody who can buy has bought.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah, we talk about market share. It's easy to earn that first bit. There's a hump once you get to a certain percentage.

Brandon Welch:

You know you're just not going to grow as fast as you used to, and their peers in the industry are going yeah, you're probably tapped out. It's time to slow down. You've gotten all the houses.

Caleb Agee:

They were saying that Marketing isn't really doing any good. At the end of last year, their annual projections for next year was that we'll retain our customers, but our new customer signup rate will go down next year in 2025.

Brandon Welch:

And they're beating that by double digits? I think so.

Caleb Agee:

Yeah.

Brandon Welch:

It's insane. They're getting more. I mean they're getting closer to like almost a hundred percent saturation. So that's just a fun study. With even a tiny radio station, we have an outdoor lifestyle type company who's been growing their business every year for 25 years on the back of radio.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah, in a category that kind of taps out like there's a very small amount of percentage of the population that buys that, we have a jeweler even earlier this year who had never done radio. Um did this and increased in a in a campaign. We did this in a pretty short window increased 400 new customers, uh, in the door uh, which is a big deal for a jewelry store.

Brandon Welch:

And so it does work. You can take it from us. We spend millions of dollars on basically every media you can think of and it does work. If you do it this way, it will especially work, and it doesn't mean it's the only best thing for you, but it is an option that is worthy as of September 18th 2025. And we'll be the first to tell you when it's not. It's not the 18th, oh Well. Well, today, not the 18th, oh Well.

Caleb Agee:

Well, today is September 18th, Monday is.

Brandon Welch:

We're going to leave that in there, because Caleb just called me out. We're going to leave that in there. He's going the episode's Monday. I knew that, I was calculating that. Okay, the 21st, the 18th, I bet it'll still be If it's not.

Brandon Welch:

Yeah, wasn't that fun. You got to see a non-cut Carter the camera guy don't cut that one. So, okay, we're going to play three ads for you and then we're just going to cut it there and say that do something like these ads that you just heard, and call us if you're confused about what to do. Yeah or not sure. We would love to hear your questions. We'd love to take them in the Maven Marketing Mastermind. You can join that at mavenmethodtrainingcom and we'll probably do a lot more work than we should at helping you make some awesome radio ads.

Speaker 5:

I can't handle the heat. You might as well string up a couple of tin cans and try to FaceTime your family with it. Quit fooding around and get yourself some real internet. I'm talking about Next High Speed Internet Speed, a light gigabyte, day or night, and you can get it right now at your house. Yes, even where you live. Wait, you live where Way out there, we don't care. No-transcript.

Speaker 4:

Mission Control. Come in. This is Songbird, requesting full aerial coverage. Aerial coverage confirmed. Initiating operation layback. We've got a possible IPA approaching 12 o'clock. Contact confirmed Tasty.

Caleb Agee:

What you doing there secret agent Goober Shh.

Speaker 4:

Bev, I'm undercover.

Speaker 6:

Oh, you mean you're drinking beer in the shade?

Speaker 4:

My missions are conducted in the shadows.

Caleb Agee:

Have fun saving the world.

Speaker 4:

Come on, Bev, I've got one for you too. Requesting backup.

Speaker 6:

Okay, fine.

Speaker 4:

Mission accomplished. All right, guys. The sun is hot, but that doesn't mean you have to stay inside. As long as you've got shade, you've got it made. We've got massive shade umbrellas, custom for your backyard, at Outdoor Home. Pick one up today, just off South Campbell on Tracker Road.

Speaker 6:

Where staying undercover is always in. So it's International Flowers Day, aka Valentine's, but there's only one problem expressing love through flowers they die. Well, you don't have to be so dramatic about it. Well, it's true, randy, you have a better idea, don't you? So?

Speaker 7:

here's what I would do instead Give her the flowers, but make sure there's something in the dozen that will never die. A 24 carat rose. That sounds fancy. Our artists take a perfectly grown rose, dip it in 24 carat gold and then airbrush it with vivid colors that glow like magic. It preserves the intricacies of nature and accentuates the expression of color. And, the best part of all, it never dies.

Speaker 7:

It never dies. We have a whole collection in a variety of mesmerizing colors, so you can match it to your favorite bouquet, lay it across a pillow, let us wrap it in gold fancy paper, or just show up to the door and hand it to her the old-fashioned way.

Speaker 6:

Pick her a one-of-a-kind 24-karat golden rose for just $99 at Mitchum Jewelers in Ozark your jeweler for life.

Caleb Agee:

If you have a specific question that you want to get answered on this podcast, you can email us at mavenmondayatfrankenmavencom and we would love to you know, answer it. If you have maybe questions about radio that we didn't answer today, we'd love to go a little bit deeper. If it's applicable to everybody, we'll cover it on the podcast. If not, we might shoot you a quick answer back. You might get some free advice, but isn't that what we're already?

Brandon Welch:

doing Just like you do every Monday Every Monday, free advice. Every Monday, we'll be back answering your real-life marketing questions, because marketers who can't teach you why are just a fancy lie. Have a great week.