Radio Advertising is the Real SEO

I offer both radio advertising services with WOWO radio in Fort Wayne, Indiana and digital marketing services via our Federated Digital Solutions division. But today, I’m going to break the hearts of my digital marketing friends with the declaration that: Radio Advertising is the Real SEO!

Every week I have someone tell me that they want to increase their Google rank, which means that they want to be at the top of the Search Engine Results Page when someone Googles their business category.

While that may be a worthy goal, I’m here to tell you, it’s kind of a stupid goal.  I’ve been around the advertising world to remember when the printed yellow pages were still being used by consumers.

The Yellow Pages was what our parents and grandparents would use to find a phone number for a business before the internet made it obsolete. This annual publication would list businesses that bought ads in each category and in alphabetical order.

For example let’s say you want to order a pizza.

If you don’t have the phone number memorized, ah yes, we used to memorize phone numbers, now I don’t even know my kids phone numbers.  Anyway, if you wanted a pizza you got out the phone book and if you were not sure which pizza place to call, you’d look in the Yellow Pages under the category Pizza.  That’s where all the pizza joints would be listed in alphabetical order, at least the ones that bought an ad in the phone book.

It was better to be named Acme Pizza than Zoli’s Pizza because Acme was in the front of the listings.  Sort of like looking up Pizza on Google, Acme would automatically rank number one on page one . That is until someone opened up Ace Pizza.  Because alphabetically Ace Pizza comes before Acme Pizza.

That’s how our parents would find the number or address to all kinds of places, the phone book, because they didn’t have the internet.

But you know what was even better than being found in the Yellow Pages with all the other Pizza shops?

Having your customers remember your pizza place so they could look in the white pages instead of the yellow pages.  The white pages of the phone book listed everyone in alphabetical order instead of by business category.   If my parents wanted a pizza from Zoli’s pizzeria, all they had to do was open the white pages of the phone book, flip to the Z’s and find Zoli’s.

How did businesses like Zoli’s become well known so that people would look for the number for Zoli’s Pizza and not any other pizza place?   They developed Top Of Mind Awareness.  Their customers knew that Zoli’s was where they wanted to order their pizza from and they did.

This Top Of Mind Awareness is a Human Relationship Principle that I talked about recently.  We develop preferences and those preferences are on our short list of consideration.  So when someone says, “let’s get a pizza!” we don’t have to wonder, “who can sell me a pizza? and start searching the yellow pages, or to move this scenario up to today, we don’t Google “Pizza”, we Google “Zoli’s”.

Top Of Mind Awareness can help set a business apart when we look online in other ways too.

Because sometimes we do Google “Pizza” and Google gives us about 10 results on the first page of results.  Let’s say Zoli’s is on that first page, but they are number 7 and the first 6 listings are for places we either don’t like, have never had, or never heard of before.  Top Of Mind Awareness will motivate us to call skip past those first 6 pizza joints and call Zoli’s because just like in the old phone book days, we know we are going to like a Zoli’s Pizza.

So back to that statement, Radio Advertising is the Real SEO? How does that work? Radio ads can create Top Of Mind Awareness.  Even when we are not thinking about pizza, when the radio station plays an ad for Zoli’s Pizza, we hear it and it reinforces the idea in our head, hearts and stomachs that the next time I want pizza, it’s going to be a Zoli’s Pizza.

I’m going to use a real life example, hamburgers. McDonald’s is the most recognized hamburger brand around the world because they continually advertise to keep that Top Of Mind Awareness going.  You can buy a better burger and spend more money than McDonald’s, heck you may never eat at McDonald’s but they certainly have Top Of Mind Awareness, right?

15 years ago when businesses were jumping on the “I gotta have a website for my business” bandwagon, I helped several companies be found online by promoting their website in their radio ads.  We still do it.  Because it works.

When a business owner tells me that he gets all his customers from Google, we dig a little deeper and discover if they actually had Top Of Mind Awareness when his customers went online or are they just one in a thousand in the search results.

I can help you become the preferred choice for your customers, want my help?  Let’s talk.