Who are your customers?
In my 25 years of working in the advertising and marketing business, I have seen many different businesses use every kind of advertising medium including Television, Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, Direct Mail, Outdoor, Specialty, Internet, and more.“Advertising Doesn’t Work�
As I have talked with various business owners, I heard them say, “Radio advertising doesn’t work. I tried it.� Others would say, “Radio advertising is the best medium I’ve ever used.� Still other business owners would say, “I tried direct mail once and it was a waste of money.� Many businesses owners would also say,� newspaper advertising works well for us but it is too expensive.� At one time or another, I’ve heard a businesses owner say that this medium and that medium don’t work. The truth is all major forms of advertising works if used correctly.Who is your target audience?
The key is matching up your target customers with the kind of media they use. One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is they don’t really know who their target customer is. The owner may think he knows who his target customer is but does he really. You must know everything about your target customer if you want to choose the right advertising media to use. Is you target customer male, female, or both? What is the average age range of your customers? Where do your customers live? What media do they use? If it is radio, which are their top three stations? If it’s newspaper, which one is it and what sections do they read? Do they read the paper more on one day than the others? What TV shows do they watch? Etc. This kind of information is called demographic information. It will give you a pretty clear picture of who your customers are. Does it sound like a lot of extra work to gather this kind of information? Well it’s really not.Collecting Customer Information
If your customs come into your place of business to buy from you, get some small forms printed that have the questions you want to ask them. Get a box, decorate it up and have a contest. Customers fill out the forms and put them in the box in order to win a price. Make the prize a good one! It will be well worth the expense. (Maybe a DVD player, or an I-pod)
Be sure to transfer all this customer data onto some kind of spread sheet like and Excel, or others. As customers pay with checks, be sure to gather the names, phone numbers, addresses, etc. (not the account number) Put this information onto the spreadsheet also. After two months or so, you will have a great customer list with a pretty accurate profile. If you think about it, you can find other, more creative ways to gather information. I know the owner of a retail tire store who would turn on the car radio and record which stations were set on the buttons while the car was being worked on. This was a valuable guide to determine which radio stations on which to advertise. Which Kind of Advertising Works Best?
It depends! The answer is, “all of them.� But you have to choose the right one for your business and for your target customer. That’s where the problem is. The radio advertising salespeople say their station is the best. The specialty advertising salespeople say put your business name on mugs, and that will remind customers of your business, and so on. They all say they are the best and they can get results if you advertise with them. So what do you do?Henry Ford’s Dilemma
Henry Ford said, “I waste half of all the money I spend on advertising. The problem is I don’t know which half.� This is a common attitude among business owners that advertise. Which kind of advertising should you use? That’s impossible to say in an article like this because every situation and every business is different. I can give some guidelines that should help.
Newspaper – There are many different kinds of newspapers. There are the major morning and evening papers that dominate your market, and there are small specialty papers like business, local community, and the shoppers.Circulation vs. Readership- All publications will quote you their circulation and their readership. If they say their circulation is 50,000, that doesn’t mean 50,000 people read their publication. It means they print 50,000. Some go to subscribers, some are sold on news stands, some are given away etc. You should ask the salesperson how many readers the publication has not what the circulation is.You run an ad in the newspaper and you really can’t tell if the ad brought in customers, or was it passer bys that stopped in, or is it word of mouth. Yes you can put coupons in the paper and count how many of them are brought in, but there are also those customers that saw the ad and decided to go in but don’t bring a coupon etc. The problem is further complicated if you use more than one kind of media in you advertising You can’t really track which customers came in from the newspaper ad, or the radio ad. It’s a problem. Do you feel like Henry Ford?What then?
Now that you know who your customer is and all about him/her, it’s time to determine the best way to reach them with your advertising. More money is wasted by businesses buying the wrong kind of advertising than any other way. DON’T BUY THE CHEEPEST ADVERTISING YOU CAN! You get what you pay for. I’ve seen many businesses owners buy anything and everything that is cheep. (Ex. bus benches, pins, hats etc.) If you want hats and pins, buy them because you want them, not as advertising. How to Know How Many Customers You Will Reach With Your Advertising
Each of the media measures their market in different ways:
Television and Radio measure their audiences reach in ratings and shares. Newspapers, magazines, and other printed publications measure their audiences reach by the number of readers pre week, and by circulation.Yellow Pages also measure their audiences by customer’s exposures to the ads, and by circulation.
Outdoor Advertising (billboards) measures audiences by what is called a “showing,� the number of people that see the billboard per week or per month. Direct Mail measures its audience’s buy the number of house holds that receive their advertising, and how many of the ads are read. With all of these different ways to measure the media’s audiences, how do you choose which ones are best for you?Cost Per Thousand is the Key
The value of every form of advertising can be measured by their (CPM) Cost Per Thousand. This is what it costs you to reach one thousand people. The media sales people can tell you how many people they reach and a cost for ads. Divide the cost by the number of people reached, times one thousand, and you will have a cost per thousand.
Example:Â $1,000 spent divided by 5,000 people reached = .20 times 1,000 = $200/M per thousand. You can also look at it as .20 cents a person reached. Measuring Audiences Ratings/Shares/Cumes/CPM.Like any other business, TV and radio have their own language and terms. Ratings, Shares, and cumes are the audience measurements of how many people are watching. This can get complicated so will I give you the overview.Total population and total TV watchers:
The total population in any TV market is referred to as the “universe� of potential viewers. Ratings: ratings are the number of viewers in a universe (total population) expressed in percentages. For example, if the universe (total population) of a city is 500,000 people, and a television program has 50,000 viewers, then you have a .10 or a 10 rating. (50,000 divided by 500,000 = 10%).Share: Of all the viewers watching TV, you have a percent that are watching a particular program, like The West Wing. In the example above, in a universe of 500,000 viewers the number of viewers watching TV is 400,000 and of the 400,000 TV watchers The West Wing has50, 000 then you have a 12.5 share of the total TV audience. (Total viewers watching the West Wing is 50,000 divided by the total number of TV viewers in the market = the share percentage. Cumes: Cumes stands for cumulative. This number represents the total number of unduplicated views watching TV during a week. It is also referred to as “reach.� That means if you watch TV on Monday and Wednesday, you are counted as “one� not two. You watched TV at least once. A cume give you the total number of viewers during a week that watch the station not just a program.CPM: Stands for cost per thousand people reached by your advertisement or spot.The CPM is the measurement that is the common denominator of all media that tells you how much you are paying to reach one thousand viewers, or listeners, or readers. For example, if you run a spot on TV that cost $100 and 75,000 viewers view your spot, then you are paying $1.33 per thousand viewers reached with your spot.This gives you the basic overview of television advertising. There are many more aspects to TV advertising but they will be the topic of article lesson.
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