Radio Advertising for Atlanta Businesses

Radio finds people in the car, at work and around the house, usually while their attention is on something else. That shapes everything about the medium. A listener cannot scroll back, read the fine print or look at a picture, so a radio message has to be simple enough to understand once, memorable enough to survive the next song and specific enough to prompt a next step. Radio is seldom where a sale closes. It is where a business gets noticed, remembered and looked up.

That is why radio pairs so naturally with a website, a listing and a phone line that are ready for the people it sends. Listeners often respond by searching for the business name on a phone within moments of hearing it, so the destination has to do the convincing that a short message on the air cannot.

Radio is also broader than a dial in the car. Stations broadcast over the air and stream online, and listeners also turn to streaming audio services and podcasts. A plan for the Atlanta market can draw on any of these, provided the message and the way people respond stay consistent across them.

Stations and formats

Each station's format draws a particular kind of listener, from news and talk to sports, country, hip-hop and rock. The right station is the one whose audience resembles your customers, not the one you listen to yourself. Audience estimates are published for stations, but they come from samples of listeners and are better read as guides than as exact counts.

Dayparts

Stations divide the broadcast day into morning drive, midday, afternoon drive, evening and overnight. Drive times attract the most competition and cost the most, but they also reach people as they travel toward a store, a restaurant or a service call. A business that depends on weekend traffic may do better concentrating its schedule late in the week than spreading it evenly across the calendar.

Spot length

A shorter spot lets the same budget buy more airings, which builds familiarity and suits one simple message. A longer spot has room for a brief story, a more involved offer or a reason to believe. The right length depends on how much a listener needs to hear before acting, and a campaign can mix lengths.

Frequency and reach

Hearing a message once is easy to forget. Hearing it repeatedly, on a station whose audience matches the customer, is how a name becomes familiar. With a modest budget, a focused schedule on one or two well-matched stations usually gives a message a better chance of sticking than a light scattering across many. Stations may also offer live reads by on-air hosts, sponsorships of traffic or weather reports and on-site promotions, which are worth considering when they fit the audience and the message. For more on making the schedule and the message work together, read how to get the most out of your radio advertising.

Radio follows a business's calendar closely. A restaurant may want its message in the hours when lunch or dinner is being decided. A retailer may concentrate spending in the days before a sale. A contractor whose work is seasonal may lean on the weeks when homeowners start planning projects. Stations can often adjust a schedule on short notice, which makes radio useful for timely offers, though any change should be confirmed in writing.

A heavy run over a short period suits events and promotions. A lighter, steady run suits a business that customers may need at any time and want to remember. Many advertisers keep a modest baseline on the air and add weight when the calendar calls for it, which keeps the name familiar between busy periods without paying for full weight all year.

Good radio copy is meant for the ear, not the eye. Read it aloud, because a sentence that looks fine on paper can be a tongue twister at speaking speed. Build the spot around one audience, one idea and one action, and drop anything that does not support them. A list of features is forgettable. A specific customer problem and a clear answer to it is not.

Say the business name early and repeat it, since a listener who forgets the name cannot act on the message. Give the next step in a form that is easy to remember when nobody is holding a pen: the business name to search for, a short web address or a phrase to mention. A long or awkward web address wastes the spot. Voice, music and sound effects do the work that pictures do in other media, so choose a voice that sounds like a real person talking to the listener, and use sound to set a scene quickly.

Consistency across a campaign matters too. Several spots that share a voice, a sound and a way of ending are easier to recognize than a series of unrelated messages. For help turning a message into finished spots, see radio commercial production.

Kirk Donovan's career began in radio, where he worked as an announcer and also as a sales representative, and early on he found that retail advertising exists to make people respond, while ratings, demographics and cute creative copy are not the point. That lesson applies to every schedule discussed on this page, since audience estimates and clever scripts matter only if listeners do something afterward. The firm Kirk started in 1984 offers radio advertising to Atlanta-area businesses, along with the media buying and radio commercial production that go with it.

Stations sell time through sales representatives, and the published rate for a spot is the beginning of a negotiation rather than the end. Rates move with supply and demand, so a spot in a crowded season costs more than the same spot in a quiet one. Stations also sell packages that bundle several dayparts or add extras, and longer commitments that fix a schedule for an extended period, often in exchange for better rates.

A sales representative works for the station, and every station has a great deal of commercial time to fill. That is not a flaw, but it means the proposal on the table reflects what the station wants to sell, which is not always what the advertiser needs. Compare proposals from more than one outlet. Before signing, confirm the stations, dayparts, dates and number of spots in writing. Ask what the station does when a spot misses its slot, and ask for proof that spots ran as scheduled, which stations can supply. An agency or consultant can add a second set of eyes to all of this, and media buying explains how planning, buying and analysis fit together.

Because radio listeners seldom respond on the spot, measurement has to be planned in advance. Offer a response route that can be told apart from every other: a web address used only on the air, a phone line reserved for the campaign, a phrase to mention at the counter or a question put to each new customer. Then set the dates of the responses beside the dates of the airings. More calls, visits or searches for the business name once spots begin, and fewer when they stop, is useful evidence.

Give a campaign enough time to show a pattern, because familiarity builds gradually, but do not wait indefinitely. Decide before the schedule starts what you will look at and when, then adjust stations, times or copy based on what you see. Web analytics and call records, which marketing analytics explains in more detail, make that review much easier.

• Too many stations. A thin schedule on many stations means no listener hears the message often enough.
• Too many messages. A spot that tries to cover every product and every benefit is remembered for none of them.
• No clear next step. Listeners who enjoy a spot but are never told what to do have no reason to act.
• A hard-to-say web address. If it cannot be repeated from memory after one hearing, it will not be used.
• A mismatch with the business. Running spots when you cannot handle the calls or visits they bring.
• Judging by personal taste. The owner's favorite format may not be where customers listen.
• Ignoring the website. Radio sends people to look you up, so a site that is slow or unclear on a phone undoes the work.
• Never changing the copy, or changing it constantly. A message needs time to build, but it also wears out.

Radio often carries the message that other media reinforce. Television adds the picture to a message listeners have already heard, and outdoor repeats the name near the point of purchase. The same phrase used across them helps each one do its job. If you are weighing radio against a picture-based medium, television advertising covers the other side of that decision, and more on radio advertising basics goes further into the fundamentals. More radio advertising articles are collected on the blog.