If you’re going to promote your business website to a local audience, it can be helpful to spend your some of your promotional dollars on local radio. 

Without a great website, an email marketing strategy and regular targeted print promotion, local radio won’t be nearly as effective.  Additionally, I have found that local radio works best when it is connected to your content marketing efforts.

If you picture a train, it is one of the cars you should add close to the end of your marketing efforts.  It is a great add-on to a marketing strategy that is already successful.  Make sure you use a unique web address in the spot that you can track and then redirect that URL to your main site.  Radio is very hard to track, so this is one of the only ways to track the effectiveness of your campaign.

Radio gives you the advantage of talking to local people about the great work that you are doing in your business every day, the great offers on your website, and it can be an additional way of establishing your business as an authoritative source.

Local radio is good for your business and people in the community love listening to it!

Here are SEVEN reasons why local radio is a great choice for advertising dollars.

1) Local Radio Promotes Your Business RIGHT NOW

Our research shows that people who listen to adult contemporary, Christian radio, political talk radio, and oldies radio have discretionary income and they are often listening to the broadcast on their way to make their next purchase.

If you target audience is mostly older adults, then radio could be a good fit.  Radio gives front-of-mind recognition for your business at the moments when some older buyers are ready to invest their resources.

Here’s an article about identifying your target audience.

2) Local Radio Reaches People All Over Your Community… And Beyond!

Radio is a truly mobile medium. Radio is on in the car, at work, and at play.  Potential customers take the radio with them wherever they go.  Political and religious radio listeners are extremely loyal to their stations.

3) Local Radio Sells with Intimacy.

In your personal life, when you have something very important to communicate to someone, which would you prefer – to show them a picture, to write to them, or to talk with the intimacy and emotion of the human voice?

Local radio uses your voice to talk to your (potential) customers. It’s a great opportunity for some businesses who want to establish a personal connection with their clients so that they can draw them into the community that surrounds their business.

4) Local Radio Shines the Brightest in the Theater of the Mind.

Want a 100-piece symphony orchestra in your ad, an elephant, a chorus, a laughing child, a love song?  When you write a radio ad, you can use really descriptive language and good story-telling techniques.

With word pictures and emotion-evoking sounds, radio’s theater of the mind stimulates the most emotion-filled pictures the mind can comprehend.

5) Local Radio Eliminates Promotional Clutter.

Radio is the most uncluttered medium.  When your spot runs, it is the only spot that runs.  You have the listener’s undivided attention for 30 or 60 seconds at a time.  Radio is really good at cutting through the marketing and promotional noise in the marketplace right now.

6) Local Radio is a Cost-Effective Medium.

Email marketing is the most cost effective medium.  Social media ad buys don’t cost a lot either.  Writing content for your blog doesn’t cost really anything at all.  However, email, social media and blogging all take a lot of time!

It does not take nearly as much time to write a great radio spot, and the rates are far more affordable than newspaper or TV.

7) Local Radio is an Active Medium in an Active Society.

People don’t read as much as they used to, but they still listen to the radio while they are on the go.  Passive forms of promotion simply list merchandise or tell you where a product is available. Radio is an active medium capable of stirring emotion and creating tremendous interest for your product, service or organization.

Today’s hotly-competitive marketplace demands an active medium. For consumers over the age of 40, that medium is often local radio!