A recent conversation highlighted how important it is that you understand the advertising media you use and how easy it can be to waste a lot of money if you don’t think carefully about the basics:

your message
your target audience
the cost effectiveness of the advertising medium

Let me explain…

Every week I visit a local beauty therapist for a relaxation massage, in an attempt to keep my dodgy back flexible and sooth away the stresses of running my own business. The week before last the therapist told me she’d decided to advertise on the local radio station having attended one of their free presentations a few weeks earlier.

This particular beauty therapist is a highly qualified professional, she works 6 days a week, including some evenings, from her home based studio and most of her clients are local, travelling no more than a few miles for their treatments.

Not being able to resist my usual business questions I asked why she was advertising and why she’d chosen to use the radio. Her responses were interesting in that they echoed the answers I often get from prospective clients when I first start working with them.

She’d decided to advertise because she has capacity, especially during the daytime when sometimes she could have 3 or 4 hour gaps between clients. When we talked further I also found out that she’d decided she wanted a higher income from her business and that certain work (massages for example where material costs were a few pence for massage oil) were more lucrative than other services (ie facials, where material costs can be up to a third of the amount the client is charged).

Her reason for choosing radio was purely circumstantial. She’d been sent an invite to a presentation being organised by a local radio station with an offer designed to appeal to small businesses. The local station was one she listened to and was therefore familiar with and they were offering ‘prime time’ ad slots. Using their expertise they would help her to write an advert and they’d record it professionally. Then all she’d have to do is pay the agreed amount by direct debit, monthly for 12 months, totalling over £4,000, and she’d have an advertising campaign for the whole year. The problem was radio was completely the wrong medium for this particular business.

Let’s revisit the facts…

Radio can certainly help to get a message out. It gives the opportunity to expose that message to large numbers of people, although how many will hear it and notice it will be dependent on a number of factors including the frequency and timing of your ad as well as the relevance of your message.

The beauty therapist’s message however hadn’t yet been clearly defined. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to promote a special offer on some or all...

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