How To Build Instant Trust For Your Business

How To Build Instant Trust For Your Business

by | Aug 9, 2022 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

If there was only a way to get someone to trust you instantly…

Actually we were born that way.  We trust from the very start.  Then as we experience life, we discover that things aren’t always trustworthy.

Depending on a persons life experiences and outlook, we develop either an optimistic or pessimistic attitude.  Most of us are a blend of both depending on the situation.

As I’ve talked about in the past, Trust is one of the key foundations of our lives and this applies to everything.

I’m going to focus on the necessity of trust in business and marketing including your advertising.

I’m also going to share with you examples that you can use today to create “Instant Trust”.

Trust is an emotion first, and logic second. No matter what the data says, you have to win the heart, not just the mind.

Certain forms of media are trustworthy for different people.

A century ago, newspapers were the trusted source of information.

Half a century ago, TV was, especially CBS News Anchor Walter Cronkite who would end his nightly broadcasts with his signature sign-off, “And That’s The Way It Is”.

All of this was before the online world which gave anyone and everyone a voice.

The most trusted media people in my city are now the local radio and television personalities.

But they are not all equally trusted.

Particular stations and networks have their own brand and people put trust in that brand.  If your business advertises on a particular station that is trusted, there is a transfer of trust that spreads to your business.

In the TV world, we have newscasts on 4 stations and over the past couple of decades there has been a changing of the guard so-to-speak as some TV veterans retired and others took their place.  TV viewership has eroded as alternative sources of news and entertainment have continued to become available.  I no longer have to sit down at the appointed time to watch the evening news to see what happened while I was at the office.  I get news instantly from the apps on my phone, whenever I want. I have not watched a single local newscast from start to finish this year and I see no reason for that to change.

The radio world in Fort Wayne has nearly 2 dozen radio stations.  The oldest is WGL which I worked for a couple of times. Listenership is very small according to the rating data I have access to and the format has changed numerous times.  The next oldest is WOWO.

WOWO will be a century old in 2025 and for more than a quarter century has been a news and talk radio station.  In December I will have completed 9 years at WOWO with many more to come.  When I was a kid I listened to WOWO and it was the most listened to station with over 70% of all of the listeners tuning in each morning.  WOWO is still one of the few stations with over 100,000 weekly listeners.

Federated Media bought WOWO in the 1990’s and owns and operates other heritage stations in Fort Wayne including WMEE, which I once worked for a few decades ago. 98.9 The Bear and K-105 are the other two Fed Med stations that have huge audiences in Fort Wayne and have earned the trust of our listeners.

One of the things that makes WOWO unique however is the whole news/talk format and how listeners interact with WOWO.  When you listen to a music station, you pick the station that plays the music you enjoy listening to.  The radio personalities are there to complement the music and add to your listening pleasure. 70% or more of what your favorite music station plays is music.  Music is the main emotional connection.

With WOWO being a news and talk radio station, we don’t play music.  We talk instead. In the morning, it’s news, weather, sports, traffic, farm reports, and interviews. The rest of the day the newscasts are twice an hour with talk filling in the rest of the hour.  People listen to WOWO to hear people talk.  Big difference.

WOWO Listeners Trust the WOWO Brand.

WOWO Listeners are not annoyed by talking the way they can get annoyed by too much talk on a music station.

WOWO’s advertisers are trusted simply because those businesses are on WOWO.  There is an implied trust and emotional bond that businesses get that advertise on WOWO.    But that’s not all.

WOWO cranks it up two more levels for our advertising partners.

There is what I refer to as a Platinum Level for WOWO Advertisers.  We all know that the Gold Standard is the highest level of any business.  This is a step above the Gold Standard.

Platinum Level Sponsorship on WOWO is the personal endorsement or testimonial of one of either or afternoon host Pat Miller or morning host Kayla Blakeslee.  This is the trust factor on steroids that no other station in Fort Wayne offers.  A Pat or Kayla endorsement campaign means they will be your local spokesperson and do live 60 second ads for your business.

They receive a talent fee for this and WOWO charges a premium for that minute of airtime.   But it’s well worth it.  I’ll give you a couple of examples in a moment.

These live ads are exclusive for a business category.  For example, Pat Miller endorses Fairhaven Funeral Homes.  Fairhaven will be the only funeral service provider Pat will endorse.  Other funeral homes can advertise, but none will have Pat’s voice on them, endorsing them as long as Fairhaven continues.  Kayla Blakeslee endorses Shield Exterior Roofing and so while other roofers can advertise on WOWO, none will have Kayla as their spokesperson.

WOWO Listeners have an emotional bond with Pat and Kayla and they are trusted by their listeners.  When Pat and Kayla are talking about something political, you bet their listeners are emotionally invested.  That emotional trust carries over to our listeners when they also talk about the businesses they endorse.

A few years after I started at WOWO, before Kayla was hosting Fort Wayne’s Morning News, she was the news director and news anchor in the morning.  Charly Butcher was our Fort Wayne Morning News Host until he suddenly passed away 4 years ago this week.  I worked with a small specialty shop that was going to have a special open house on a Saturday and they bought a ton of radio ads on a music station and just 3 or 4 ads with Charly’s endorsement.  After the event, the owner continued with WOWO because he heard customer after customer tell him that Saturday they were at the open house because Charly told them to come.  The music station’s ads did nearly nothing apparently.

Before I wrap this up, I mentioned two levels of trust building beyond the regular ads on WOWO.  The 2nd one is something I started using a lot of when I came to WOWO and they create an implied endorsement of a business to our listeners.  We have news and weather sponsorships that are done live by the WOWO local newscasters.  We have local news 13 hours every weekday starting at 5am, so there are plenty of these “embedded” sponsorship mentions that are live 10 second messages.  This was my secret sauce for success for my advertising partners when I came to WOWO.

Instant Trust? Hmmm, not quite but pretty close.  Contact me for more details.

 

 

Word Of Mouth Advertising With A Bigger Mouth

Word Of Mouth Advertising With A Bigger Mouth

by | Jul 26, 2022 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

The very best form of marketing is what we call Word Of Mouth.

Why?

Because it is from the heart, from one person to another and it includes implicitly, the Human Relationship factor we all need: Trust.

Several years ago, I wrote about the Word Of Mouth advantage that my radio station has and you can read what I wrote in January 2018 here.

I found that article by Googling the term, “Word Of Mouth With A Bigger Mouth” and only a few articles popped up, both attributed to me.

I honestly don’t think I coined that term despite what the Google gods say.

Here’s the backstory:

From my teen years to age 26, I spent all of my radio life working on the radio.  I was an overnight radio disc jockey.  That’s how I met my first wife and mother of our three kids.

I also did other shifts on the radio and became the Program Director of one of the stations I worked for.  That meant I was the guy in charge of the music, the format, the air personalities, basically anything except for the advertising.

Most radio ads were forgettable.  The ones that I had to voice and produce were usually written by an advertising sales person and most were lousy, in my opinion.  So every once in awhile, I would use my creativity and write ads for local businesses that were different from the usual stuff I was told to read and record.

However in 1986, I moved from the on-air side of radio to the advertising side when I joined Crawford Broadcasting in Detroit as an advertising campaign Master Producer.  I worked hand in hand with a couple of WMUZ advertising sales people and created some pretty successful ad campaigns for our clients.

WMUZ also was very advertiser friendly.  When I was there for about eight years, our live radio hosts would give a 10 second endorsement for every local business on their show.  They were called Rolling Endorsements.  The way it worked is there would always be a 30 second or 1 minute recorded ad that was immediately followed by a brief live endorsement.  Robin Sullivan was one of the most popular afternoon radio hosts at the time I was there and when Robin endorsed Hilton Mortgage, her listeners took her recommendation as seriously as if their best friend had recommended Hilton Mortgage.

That’s because of the relationship Robin built with her audience on WMUZ, they trusted Robin as best friends trust each other.

That Trust Factor in both the radio station and the radio host is what becomes as powerful as Word Of Mouth Advertising.  Except with the size of the radio audience, it’s not just a one to one Word Of Mouth, but Word Of Mouth With A Bigger Mouth.

Fast forward to 2003.  I’m returning to radio in the advertising world but in a different city than I did it previously.  In the 80’s and 90’s I was in Detroit and now I was back in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Interestingly the Fort Wayne radio stations I joined two decades ago don’t exist anymore.  All have changed formats.  At the end of 2013 however I joined WOWO Radio which is nearly a century old and has been a news and talk station for more than a couple decades.

With the history of WOWO and the longevity of WOWO as a news and talk station with live and local radio hosts and news personalities, the Trust Factor is alive and thriving.

First off, WOWO itself is trusted by our core listeners.  Over 100,000 weekly listeners make it one of the most listened to stations in Fort Wayne.

Next is the implied endorsement that any local advertiser has simply by being on WOWO.

We can take it a step further with a couple of options that really fit the  “Word Of Mouth With A Bigger Mouth” model.  Similar to when I first learned it at WMUZ ind Detroit in the 80’s but unique to Fort Wayne.

We have live 10 second embedded sponsorship mentions read by the show hosts or newscasters available during live programming.  Since WOWO has live and local newscasts 13 hours daily, Monday thru Friday, twice an hour, that is one option.

The other is a step up from what I saw at WMUZ.  Live Testimonial Endorsement Ads with our morning show host, Kayla or our afternoon host Pat.  Instead of a recorded ad followed by a brief live endorsement, the entire ad by Kayla or Pat is live. This is our Platinum Level of Advertising that is also limited to only a few Trusted Businesses.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll divulge even more details about this Word Of Mouth With A Bigger Mouth on WOWO radio and how we use Human Relationship Marketing Principles to create the Trust Factor including the emotional connection that includes transfer of credibility.

Human Relationship Marketing in a Nutshell

Human Relationship Marketing in a Nutshell

by | Jul 19, 2022 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

All of us are exposed to a variety of advertising and marketing messages every single day.  But there is one method that trumps all the others combined and it’s built on what I refer to as Human Relationship Marketing.

Human Relationship Marketing is a different approach than most advertising professionals talk about, but the goal is similar.

Human Relationship Marketing and all the other approaches have the ultimate goal of selling stuff.  But how it’s done is what separates Human Relationship Marketing from the others.

As Humans we have a primary need to Trust.

For us to feel confident about anything, we need to Trust it.  

I Trust the chair I am sitting in to hold me.

I Trust the cook at the restaurant not to poison me.

I Trust the drivers heading towards me on the road at 40 miles per hour to stay on their side of the yellow line.

See how important Trust is to our Human activities?

This Trust Factor is essential to be our Human experience.

As a side note, it goes beyond humans.  Over the years my wife and I have had a cat or two. Our current feline is a little skittish compared to our previous critter who would sleep thru anything.  If you are also a pet owner, you understand the Trust Factor between pets and people too.

So how does this Trust Factor apply to Human Relationship Marketing and what is Human Relationship Marketing in a Nutshell?

It’s pretty simple.  

Human Relationship Marketing includes or mimics the Human Relationship Principles that build Trust and uses those as the foundation for the advertising and marketing.

I’ll give you two examples.

The first is for a car dealer in town that uses all kinds of gimmicks and cliches to sell cars. Every month it’s a new sale.  So far this year, they’ve had their Nickle Pickle sale; Hole In One sale; Swimming In Savings sale; and Shamrock Your Ride. These campaigns are filled with cute word plays and clever puns but do they build Trust?  Not with me or most other Humans I know.

The other example is from my own radio station where our afternoon talk show host talks about how he and his wife have bought or leased 8 cars from his favorite dealership.  Even before they were advertising on WOWO radio, Pat Miller and his wife were getting their cars from this dealership.  My friends, this is the very best form of Human Relationship Marketing using the Trust Factor.  It’s what I call Word of Mouth Advertising with a Bigger Mouth.

Speaking of which, next time I’ll give you my background story on that phrase, Word of Mouth Advertising with a Bigger Mouth.

Navigating The Economy & Making Money

Navigating The Economy & Making Money

by | Jun 28, 2022 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

If you are listening to, watching, or reading all the doom and gloom stories in the news right now…

Stop It.

My friends, instead of getting swallowed up in the bad news of rising prices, staffing and supply chain shortages and whatever else we have going on in the political world, take a look around.

People are still buying stuff.  It’s one of the reasons prices are going up. Not the only reason, but it’s the universal law of supply and demand.

I work in the media. Specifically as the General Sales Manager of the leading conservative talk radio station, I know our conservative talk show hosts point out how bad the liberals are and on TV at home I see the liberals talking about how bad the conservatives are.  It’s the nature of what political commentators do… point out the bad stuff the other side is doing and ignore the good anyone is doing.

However people are still spending money and your job is to adapt your business model to help them buy from you.

We did it a couple years ago in 2020 when we were told to shelter in place and stay home to stop the spread of Covid. Our country has lived thru other challenging times and come out stronger on the other side.  Wars, inflation, recessions, you name it, we’ve been thru it and those that adapt usually make it.

Here’s what I’m telling my advertising sales team to tell the businesses they work with…

You need to invite people to your business to spend money with you instead of pulling back and letting your competition scoop up all the customers.

Let’s put together an ad campaign and invite our listeners to spend with you.

It’s that simple.

 

No Short-Cuts

No Short-Cuts

by | Jun 21, 2022 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

There is a simple formula in advertising that seems to be accepted by nearly anyone that hears it:

The Right Message, presented to the Right People, the Right Number of Times = Results.

Yep, it take into consideration three “right” things and promises to work if you get those three “rights” right.

However, most businesses fail at at least one of those “right” things, and that diminishes the outcome.

Let’s say you are a financial planner and you want to grow your business.  The way most financial planners do this is by contacting all the friends and family they know and try and convince them to become their client.  Then as time passes, they get referrals from those clients and over time, they grow.

If there was only a short-cut to grow faster…

There is, and that is to expand the number of people you are inviting to do business with you at a faster pace than the organic model I just mentioned.

This is where some paid advertising and marketing come in.

I know of one financial planner that will buy a list of potential clients from a service that gathers this information and then mails them invitations to a lunch or dinner where the meal is free but you have to sit through some form of sales pitch presentation.  This used to work for some when it was introduced a couple of decades ago, but over time, the return on investment has been getting smaller.

The cost for one of these events is usually a few thousand dollars.  Between buying the list of prospects, doing the mailing, the cost for the dinner and all the assorted costs of the presentation, it ads up.  Then there is the follow up.  A small percent sign up at the meal, some might become your customer after a few follow ups, but financial planners are given a formula that tells them when to quit pursuing a potential client and move on.

This so-called short-cut has plenty of short-comings, let’s look at some of them.

The messaging in the invite is a thinly veiled “bait and switch” tactic.  The only reason it is legal is that the invite you recieve has plenty of disclosures printed on it and they do say you will learn about something financially related.

I wonder if this tactic is reaching the Right People?  Years ago, I worked for a couple of radio stations that did live remote broadcasts at car dealers and gave away free pizza or hot dogs to listeners that came by.  Most of those listeners were not able to afford the higher priced cars the dealers were trying to sell.

When you are giving away a steak dinner as an incentive for financial planning advice, who are you really going to attract?  My guess is people without a lot to invest, or those who are looking for free stuff instead of value.

At the very beginning of a financial planners career, they invite people who know them to become their clients and those that do are doing it because they TRUST the financial planner.

Trust is the missing ingredient at these financial planner dinner schemes.

Trust has to be earned.  There are no short-cuts.

How do you earn trust?

Let’s look at that formula again and this time the focus is on the Right Number of Times.

Assume you’ve got an appropriate message and a way to target it to the Right People that are your ideal clients and customers.

The Right Number of Times an individual person is exposed to your offer is essentially the number of times it takes for that individual to Trust you and your business enough to spend with you.

This month, we had a Financial Planner come to us at WOWO radio and he wants to grow a become as well known and successful as our most well-known Financial Planners.  We were upfront and told him that it could cost him well over $100,000 per year, maybe double that to rise to the ranks of those he mentioned.

Why so much money? To big in the big leagues, you need to compete with enough right messages to reach and those numbers are what is working.  We did offer another option which is closer to $25,000 per year to get started that is very specifically targeted.  

However, when we met again and he gave us a starting budget of under $5000 per year, we almost told him no.  

I can’t offer him what he wants for that small of an investment.  His proposal to us was to spread out his messages each month and try and reach different people all month long.  I’m not sure how he got that idea, but it is the exact opposite of what he needs to do.  I asked him if he is willing to wait a year for his first potential client to contact him. (Yes, he might get it sooner than 12 months, but that’s just being hopeful and I prefer a plan over hope.)

When we meet again, we will offer him the opportunity to spend the budget he has given us to work with, but to do it wisely with a plan that will help him establish name recognition and trust with a group of our WOWO listeners that listen “when it’s dark outside”.  If he accepts, his ads will air late at night and overnight where the price for ads is low enough for him to get the right number of messages every month, not just over a year or longer.

No short-cuts to success is a lesson we all need to learn for all areas of our lives.  Also, if your Plan A is impossible, look for a Plan B, or C. And finally, 

The Right Message, presented to the Right People, the Right Number of Times = Results is a good rule to start with.

 

You Can Only Coast Downhill

You Can Only Coast Downhill

by | Jun 14, 2022 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard

What are you doing to build your business right now?

It’s a question I ask when I am in front of a business owner.

Sadly, many don’t have a plan.

Or some are afraid of what the future might hold and they are behaving very cautiously.

Too cautious I dare to say.

“Oh, we’re going to take a few months off from advertising and see what happens”, is something I hear by many. 

Good luck with that I say.  Sometimes I say it to their face.  Sometimes I say it to myself and write them off.

We are going thru a time of uncertainty that some of you are experiencing for the very first time.  However there is plenty of history in the recent past that points to a positive outcome for those who are willing to step out instead of retreat.

About 14 years ago, in 2008 our economy was seeing economic collapse that created panic and downturns that were just as scary to the casual observer.  For years, lenders were taking us down a path that was going to create a crash, and basically in 2008, it all came crumbling down.  In a nutshell, lenders had been told to make it easier for people to buy a house.  Sub-prime loans were a part of this along with no-doc mortgages.

I saw first hand how the no-doc mortgage loan was abused.  I had a client that was running a mortgage company and we were supposed to meet about 1 o’clock one afternoon in 2008.  I got to his office before he returned from lunch and overheard one of his mortgage guys reviewing an application with a client over the phone.  As their customer told them their monthly income, the mortgage guy said, we’re going to bump that up so we can get you a lower interest rate. 

Afterward, I spoke to the owner of the mortgage company about what I heard and he told me that was common practice now since they didn’t need to provide any documentation to back up the figures they were putting on the loan applications.  Also they could get people into bigger, more expensive homes this way and the mortgage lender would make more money without risk because they were just a broker and these questionable loans were sold off and he had no liability as the mortgage broker.

I decided not to renew his advertising contract when it expired a few weeks later because I had a gut feeling that this was not right and I didn’t want my radio listeners to be taken advantage off by this company that was putting people’s finances in jeopardy in this manner.

When things took a crash in 2009, this guy’s mortgage company went out of business. That was a good thing.

There were other companies that went under back then but it wasn’t because they were crooked.  Many of them did what I see going on right now and they decided to be conservative and act like a scared turtle and hide in their shell, waiting for things to get better.

They decided to coast for awhile.

Problem is, you can only coast downhill.

Sure if you have enough momentum you will continue to be fine for a bit.

But if you stop inviting people to do business with you, eventually they will stop doing business with you.

And that’s all that advertising really is… a paid invitation from you and your company to potential customers to consider you when they are going to buy.

Some of your best customers will eventually decrease their spending or stop.  It may have nothing to do with you, just circumstances in their life.  For this reason alone, the average business will need to replace 20% of last years customers with brand new customers just to stay even.

That 20% number fluctuates greatly depending on the type of business you are in.

We have roofers advertising on my radio station that offer lifetime warranties.  That means they will never be able to sell that customer another roof until the customer moves to a new house.  Roofers like that have to replace nearly 100% of their customers every year!

Besides the business owners that say they are going to coast for awhile, there are others that are in the start-up or growth phase of their business plan and those are going to advertise.  They are going to earn the trust of your potential customers now and once a consumer buys from someone else, they are out of the market to buy from you.

I actually don’t mind the fact that some businesses are going to coast for now because it makes room for those that want to grow and those are the ones me and my team enjoy working with.

I’ll boil it down to this:

If you want to grow, contact me.

If you are considering coasting, contact me and we’ll continue this discussion.

If you have already made up your mind to pull back and coast, thank you for making it easier for your competition that I’ll be working with to take your place.