Radio Listenership As The Pandemic Winds Down

by Scott Howard | Apr 7, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

What’s going on in the media and marketing world now that we’ve gone through the first year of a worldwide pandemic?

As an insider to information that you don’t have access to, I have some answers.

And let me preface this by stating, no the pandemic is not over, the virus did not disappear and the battle is still on. I lost a very good friend last month to complications that included Covid.

However, with the millions of vaccines being injected every week we are in a much better place than we were 6 months ago. Here in Indiana anyone age 16 and older is now eligible for the vaccine as long as the supplies are there.

Even before I dig into the media habits, a couple of observations regarding consumer habits.

My local stores no longer have shortages of toilet paper and disinfecting wipes. We have an abundance of hand sanitizer at my office, and the face mask business is preparing for a slow down, now that everyone has learned how to wear one, although too many people pretend they are just political statements or refuse to cover their nose.

What else?

I’ve got some quotes from Insider Radio to share:

One year after the coronavirus outbreak tuned the world upside down, the latest in an ongoing series of Nielsen Audio Consumer Sentiment surveys shows several key metrics are pointing in radio’s favor. Among them, 64% of Americans 18 and older said they agreed that it is safer than it was a month ago. .

That’s a comparison of March 2021 to February 2021. Here’s more:

Among the employed, two-thirds now work outside the home. That’s up nearly 70% since April. In addition, workers at home due to COVID-19 declined by more than half since April 2020.

There is the perception that most people are holed up, not going out, working out of their basement and it’s simply not true. And they are listening to their favorite radio stations.

The initial virus outbreak one year ago caused a rapid downturn in the number of people using public transportation. One year later Nielsen’s survey shows all groups are still using less public transportation due to COVID. What’s more, those spending an hour or more in vehicles shot up 150% since April, and heavy radio listeners are more likely to spend an hour or more in the car.

Yes, radio is still an effective way to reach people and invite them to spend money with your business.

Heavy radio listeners are more likely to make major purchases within a year, and are 18% more likely to purchase or lease a new or used vehicle, and 64% more likely to buy a new house.

My radio station, NewsTalk 1190 WOWO 107.5 continues to have the largest adult audience in our market of over 25 stations. We are one of two stations that consistently has well over 100,000 weekly listeners.

And I have a team of advertising and marketing specialists that can design and create the messaging and media campaign to help you convert our listeners to become your customers and clients. Contact me, Scott@WOWO.com and I’ll hook you up.

How Are Your Reviews?

by Scott Howard | Feb 16, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

People are talking about you.

You probably don’t know half the things they are saying.

Unless you are diligently monitoring online social media, review sites and chat rooms, you don’t know unless someone tells you what they saw.

How important are these reviews?

According to a consumer survey made public by MarketingCharts.com, 19 out of 20 people read reviews.

But, it’s not just reviews that consumers read — close to three-quarters also read the businesses’ responses to these reviews.

Nearly 80% of consumers trust online reviews, it’s the new Word-Of-Mouth that can make or break a business. The study also says over 90% of the readers of the reviews use them to make a buying decision. A review often determines the likelihood of a consumer using a local business. This can be seen with 94% of consumers agreeing that positive reviews make them more likely to use a business. Even more telling, 92% also said that negative reviews make them less likely to use a business.

What can you do as a business owner with this information?

Be proactive.

Ask your customers to review you on Google, Yelp and the other online review sites including Facebook which is still the king of social media.

Respond appropriately to the reviews online.

You can even use these online reviews in your advertising. I have a client that has been doing this for years, it’s the heart of their radio campaign on WOWO Radio.

Contact me for more ideas by dropping me a line to Scott@WOWO.com

Caring About Your Customers

by Scott Howard | Feb 10, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo

If you want to earn a consumers business this year, you have to appeal to what matters most to them.

That statement is true if you are selling Land Rovers or if you are running a dollar store.

It’s also been a truth that has been around forever, but now I have a fresh set of data to help you navigate 2021.

It comes from a survey just released last month on MarketingCharts.com.

Do you know what tops the list?

Convenience and Safety. I’m willing to bet that before our pandemic, those two items wouldn’t be linked together and be a the top of the list. Sure, we’ve been steadily looking for ways to make our lives easier forever, so convenience would be pretty high on the list anytime, but coupled with the repeated and continuous warnings about our health and safety due to the virus, this is a new category of consideration that we need to keep in mind for many more months to come.

The idea of getting your groceries delivered to your doorstep was an option very few people were willing to spend the money on. Even curbside pickup was a concept that was still in its infancy a year ago for grocery shopping.

Sure we’ve been having pizza’s delivered to our door for decades. That concept was expanded awhile ago locally by a company called Waiter on the Way that would take your order over the phone from dozens of restaurants and deliver to you for a small charge. Of course this concept has since expanded with national companies now providing this service.

Ordering online with delivery of nearly anything has become the mainstay of Amazon’s retail operations for years. As consumers we knew that we could order online and buy stuff that would be delivered to our homes, or our cars, but the pandemic created the increased need perceived by consumers who were previously not even considering these conveniences, but now do it for safety’s sake.

My question to you, is what have you done this past year and what will you be doing in the months and years ahead to adapt to this trend?

Also on the list is the word Empathy. How do consumers feel about your company and the way you care about them? How do you manage this internally and externally? If you have a customer that leaves a less than 5 star review online, how do you respond? Are your marketing and branding messages conveying empathy and do you live up to those expectations? Time to clean this area of your business up because this relates to another item on the list.

Losing loyal customers. With all the changes in buying habits and the disruptions caused by the pandemic, this has also accelerated in the past year and will continue in 2021.

Two more items on the list go hand in hand.

The acceleration of e-commerce and providing the best customer experience. The best way for a local company to compete with an online, out of town company is the customer experience angle. We want to shop local, make it easy for us to do that because there is an alternative. Better yet, have you added an e-commerce option for you local customers?

Looking for ideas on how to implement some of these ideas and concepts? Contact me and we can explore some options. Send an email to Scott@WOWO.com .

Is It Time To Fall Out Of Love With Digital Ads?

by Scott Howard | Jan 27, 2021 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

The whole magical world of digital advertising online.

For the past decade plus, I’ve seen study after study after study that talked about the shift in advertising from traditional ads to digital ads.

As a point of reference, traditional ads refer to radio and television broadcast ads, newspaper and any form of print including direct mail and phone books, also outdoor ads like roadside billboards and even in-store signage, etc. Digital ads are delivered digitally via the internet someway on webpages, apps, search engine marketing, you can even throw in search engine optimization.

Most of the predictions of double digit percentage increases in digital ad expenditures year over year have come true, just like the decrease in money spent on traditional ads have come true too.

But, has this shift in where companies advertise paid off?

According to a recent article in Forbes, the answer is either no, or not anymore, or no one knows.

There’s a lot of no’s in that last sentence. And that should concern you.

When Big Brands Stopped Spending On Digital Ads, Nothing Happened. Why?

That’s the tile and here are some of the details from Forbes:

Proctor and Gamble was spending $200 million on digital advertising and turned it off. Result = no change in business outcome.

Chase Bank was serving their ads on 400,000 sites and cut it 99% to just 5,000 and saw no negative impact.

Uber was spending $120 million and stopped and saw no change too.

The Forbes article lists other examples big and small of businesses that either stopped their paid digital ads completely or shrunk the budget significantly and actually improved their business. They mention Facebook ads and Google Adwords along with other digital marketing activity and I believe I know the reason for this.

There’s a phrase called the “Zero Moment of Truth”. It’s the time when a consumer decides to make the purchase. The digital world likes to say they deliver buyers at that Zero Moment. Maybe or maybe not.

What if you need to buy a new hot water heater? That’s a purchase most people don’t plan for but when you wake up and need one, you don’t wait for days or weeks to decide to buy. You are suddenly at the Zero Moment of Truth when you are in the ice cold shower.

Your brain is going to immediately start by telling you the names of companies that you already know that could be your problem solver. Then your heart will kick in and screen out the companies you know but don’t trust.

How does your heart and brain know these things? Ideally it’s because you have been exposed to advertising and marketing way before your hot water heater died. And this is where certain forms of traditional media shine.

I call it intrusive media. Over 90% of the American population still listen to the radio every week. For my wife and I, we listen to the radio every time we are in the car which is at least 5 to 7 days a week. The radio stations we listen to have ads. Our brains hear those ads thru our ears and that reputation of hearing about a local business builds trust so our hearts are also impacted.

My parents never picked up the phone book as part of their casual reading routine, it was the Zero Moment of Truth when they grabbed the phone book if they didn’t know who to call, they’d flip open the Yellow Pages to search by business classification and see the ads for water heaters. Or if they already knew who they wanted to call, they would open the White Pages which was the alphabetical listing of people and businesses and get the number that way.

The digital revolution has replaced the phone book in multiple ways, hasn’t it…

So why are the digital ads that I mentioned at the beginning of this article not needed anymore? It’s because the impact has diminished. The brands that are using digital to get the sale at the Zero Moment of Truth already have Top of Mind Awareness and consumers would buy from them anyway.

That Top of Mind Awareness came from traditional media over the years, and has continued as those brands keep showing up on TV and radio.

I’ve got one more quote from the Forbes piece:

Digital marketing works; but the vast majority of impressions and clicks are from bot activity currently.

I’ve worked in the digital world and I’ve done some deep dives into the Google Analytics and unfortunately, it’s true. I can make you a promise that when you are listening to my radio station, WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana and we share with you the number of weekly listeners, those are real live people, like you and me, not bots.

Contact me for more info. Scott@WOWO.com.

Long Term Losses Over Short Term Cuts

by Scott Howard | Oct 13, 2020 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom

You cut your advertising, you could lose a heck of a whole lot more than you realize.

Odds are against your business ever recovering.

There are multiple stories over the past 100 years of how during an economic downturn a business cut their advertising and ultimately lost their standing against their competition. During the Great Depression the Post Cereal company lost to Kellogg and never regained the top spot for breakfast cereal.

Here’s a quote from net360solutions.com of how it went down:

Post did the predictable thing: It reined in expenses and cut back on advertising. But Kellogg doubled its ad budget, moved aggressively into radio advertising, and heavily pushed its new cereal, Rice Krispies. (Snap, Crackle, and Pop first appeared in the 1930s.) By 1933, even as the economy cratered, Kellogg’s profits had risen almost 30 percent and it had become what it remains today: The industry’s dominant player.

Recently I read a story about a study from the Kantar Group that I need to share with you. Because the battle of consumers dollars is just as real today as it was last century.

A year ago there were no real warning signs of an economic downturn in the United States or around the world because we were unaware that a new pandemic would strike in 2020 and besides the health consequences, there would be economic consequences too.

I’m going to share quotes from the Inside Radio article that refer to the Kantar study.

Consumer packaged goods is a growing ad category for radio as major brand marketers like General Mills, Procter and Gamble and Coca Cola have made radio part of their media mix.

But what are the risks of stopping or cutting back on advertising during what is now the worst recession on record?

Based on media effectiveness studies conducted around the world, Kantar says that stopping or significantly reducing advertising could have impacts that take years to recover from.

The average short-term effect from advertising is an incremental 4.5% sales increase, and that usually occurs in the month after a typical eight-week campaign.

This is what you need to defend just to stand still, and what you stand to lose if you choose not to advertise.

In other words if you stopped advertising for what ever reason, you are coasting and you can only coast downhill. When you stop inviting people to spend money with you, you lose customers and their money.

When considering the impact of an advertising hiatus, it’s imperative to take into account the consumer penetration of the brand, Kantar says. Almost nine in 10 of the brands that grew in 2019 did so by increasing their penetration. A brand must replace 50% of its buyers each year just to defend its current position.

That 50% figure of course depends on the industry. For example if you are a roofer and you are selling roofs guaranteed for 20 years, it’s unlikely that you will retain any of your customers year after year. Other industry’s like mine for example, we average about at 85% retention rate year after year.

“It’s crucial to keep gaining new shoppers in order to secure the long-term health of the brand and build its potential for growth,” according to the study. Typically, in the short term, growth driven by penetration gains accounts for two thirds of the post campaign sales uplift. And because advertising also reminds and retains existing shoppers, it can take years to recover from the loss of heavy buyers.

Now listen up, because the loss of your brand in the mind of the consumer is not just a small loss. And if you are only counting the dollars saved that you would have spent advertising, you are missing the big, long term picture.

My wife and I’s favorite restaurant closed down a couple of years ago. The owner lost the lease and it was weeks before a new restaurant took over that retail space. What did my wife and I do on Saturday nights when they closed? If you think we just stayed home feeling hungry, you’re wrong. We started checking out other places. If you stop inviting people to do business with you, not only do you lose, your competition wins! And just because you start advertising two months later, it doesn’t mean your former customers are coming back. They’re created new habits, new places to spend their money and it’s all your fault. You lost momentum and it will take time to recover.

If a brand loses share, it’s 70% likely that its share will still be lower five years later, a study found. And brand share winners have a two-thirds probability of still having a higher share after five years.

Let this be a word of warning if you have considered cutting your advertising. And likewise, this is a time of opportunity for others, maybe you to increase your advertising to invite people to become your customers to fill the void.

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Why WOWO is the Best Choice for Advertising (Part Two)

by Scott Howard | Sep 29, 2020 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

I was reading a blog post last week from the Radio Advertising Bureau that includes several facts and figures I am going to share with you in this 2nd part of an ongoing series as to why WOWO radio is your best choice for advertising.

But first, a little comparison of the changes that are occurring in the media and advertising world.

Television viewership continues to drop like a rock.

This month the television awards show that celebrates the very best on TV, the Emmy Awards was hosted by one of the Jimmies. Kimmel or Fallon, most people don’t know who is who since they both host late night talk shows. Let’s see, the Emmys were on ABC, so it was the ABC Jimmy.

US viewership crashed according one headline, to 6.1 million this year. You would think that with all the stay at home orders, it would be up this year. Last year it dipped below 7 million for the first time. This is a trend that has been going on for the past 2 decades. Ten years ago 13. 5 million watched and back in the year 2000, nearly 22 million watched the Emmy Awards.

I just reviewed the list of winners and there were just two winners that I saw from the 100+ awards. The Superbowl halftime show and The Last Dance special series.

I have no intention of watching more TV in the future, there are a few shows that my wife and I will view when they return later this fall, but mostly on our own schedule. Primetime TV viewership is a thing of the past in my family.

Advertising on TV is getting diminishing results.. I’ve had some of my advertising partners complain about this. Sounds like the kind of stories I used to hear from people who relied on newspapers and phone books in the past.

So what about radio? This article from RAB points out that radio listenership remains steady but it also takes a deep dive into the audience that makes up a significant portion of the WOWO radio audience. Baby Boomers.

Have you ever heard of Sutton’s Law? It’s based on the principle that when diagnosing something, you should first consider the most obvious. It is based on bank robber “Slick” Willie Sutton’s response to a reporter’s question: “Why do you rob banks?” His response? “Because that’s where the money is!” This same response could be applied to the question; “Why boomers?” According to Deloitte, boomers will be the wealthiest generation in America through 2030. As of 2019, boomers were among the most affluent households, yet this group is not highly targeted. In fact, only 10% of marketing budgets is set aside to boomers, despite them outspending every other generation by $400B annually.

As a Boomer myself, I know that this is the time of my life that I have been the most financially stable with the ability to make purchases without as much hesitation as I was doing even 10 years ago. It’s a combination of where most Boomers are in their personal life cycle and the fact that there are just so many of us, that will keep Baby Boomers a highly desirable consumer for the next decade.

Born between 1946 -1964, they don’t easily fit into a traditional ad-buying demo, so for the purposes of this analysis, let’s look at one segment – 55-64.

Radio reaches 91% of these adults weekly. When they tune in, they listen for 15.4 hours every week – greater than the adults’ average of 12.8. They are an engaged audience. When it comes to radio listeners in this age group, they are more likely to:

Spend $1,000-$2,000 in home improvements (32% more likely)

Spend $7,500 or more on remodeling (54%)

Spend $120-$149 every week on groceries (22%)

Purchase or lease a $40K-$50K vehicle (26%)

Own a vacation home, farm or investment property (46%)

Despite the pandemic, boomers are still financially stable. Based on a Gfk-MRI survey (August), 59% believe they are in the same shape financially as they were a year ago despite the pandemic. Advertisers should take note to continue to target this group as they are brand loyalists. Based on this same survey, 77% plan on returning to their favorite brands.

When my company temporarily reduced wages by 20% for everyone for a few months this year, the effect on my family was minimal. And as far as brand loyalty, we have done both, stuck with or returned to many of our favorites, but also added a few more options when we are spending money.

Here’s the rest of the article from RAB:

These radio listeners are also ready to go once the pandemic is over. When it comes to purchases, they are ready to return to physical brick-and-mortar locations:

32% more likely to purchase shoes

30% to purchase clothing

23% to purchase groceries

16% to purchase home improvement supplies

15% to purchase furniture

When it comes to boomers, “Slick” Willie Sutton would say the same thing to advertisers as he did to a reporter about why he robbed banks. The key is here is to just simply target them. With reach and high tune-in time, radio is the medium to do just that. It’s obvious. It’s Sutton’s Law.

Every month, I receive updated rating data on local radio station listenership and WOWO radio, with our News/Talk format continues to dominate with the absolute largest audience of grown-ups in our area. Want to invite them to be your customers? Contact me.