Combining your radio advertising with digital, or vice-versa, is an effective way to broaden the reach of your campaigns, while developing more recognition and trust with your target audience. Its impact goes beyond the fact that both mediums have the potential to reach different audiences and expand your potential customer pool. The key is to use the unique advertising benefits of each method to approach the overlapped consumers on each platform, producing massive results.
Here is how it can work:
Friendly Re-Introduction
Despite what people may think, radio is a thriving medium with a huge reach. People listen to it at home, in their cars, and stream it on their phones. It’s listened to everywhere and is a great opportunity for a business to place advertisements. But, the impact of radio commercials is only partly realized if it doesn’t branch itself into other mediums. In this case, that’s digital.
While radio provides a broad reach to multiple audiences, digital marketing allows you to capitalize on that reach by targeting an advertisement to your ideal customer’s digital presence. This way, you’re not coming in cold and unknown into your target audience’s social feed. You’re a known commodity. They can put a voice to you, a tagline, and a product specialty. When that banner ad shows up on their screen, they can be sure it isn’t a scam, because they just heard you earlier that day. Radio makes targeted digital ads considerably more influential.
Enhancing Information Retention
In a world where people are subjected to thousands of ads each day, combining both radio and digital ads appeals to more of the audience’s senses, hugely enhancing the amount of information they retain. They may not catch all concepts and details when they first hear an ad on the radio, but when they can put a visual to the same content, they understand everything more effectively. There’s a key relationship component to it, eliciting much warmer reactions from your audience when they have a much broader understanding of who you are.
Covering Your Bases
While this is the least significant benefit of combining your radio and digital, it is still a benefit. It’s to make sure that no potential customer falls through the cracks of your marketing efforts. A small portion of your audience could prove to be unreachable through either radio or digital, and doubling down on your marketing outreach ensures all potential customers are aware of your existence. Although they’ll only be touched by one of these methods, it’s still influential in their decision-making.
Tips to use Multi-Channel Marketing Effectively
- Focus on the Keywords
Pay close attention to what you have on air. The wording, the key points, certain phrases… these are all the touch points your audience will recognize you by. So, when they go to look you up online, make sure to be running PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns for these specific keywords/phrases. Make it easy on the client. Make yourself visible just in case they didn’t catch your company’s name on air.
- Language Consistency
The opportunity of branding and marketing yourself across multiple channels is to maximize the familiarity the audience has with you. To create and grow this relationship, the messaging needs to be consistent. Using the same tone and personality matters. Each ad and post needs to be completely in line with your campaign.
- Try Different Pairings
While in radio you’re restricted to audio as your sole mode of presentation to a potential customer, in digital, you are not. You have tons of options to maximize the impact of your campaigns, so make sure to find out which ones work for you. Here’s a list of the top-rated methods:
- Display Advertising
- Video Advertising
- Social Media
- Email Marketing
- SEM
Conclusion
There’s a huge amount of potential to be realized by pairing your radio and digital advertisements. It elicits a warmer response when you approach your target audience on their social feeds, Enhances consumer information retention, and in general, increases your reach. By focusing on the radio keywords you use, keeping your language consistent, and pairing different digital methods, you can drastically increase your sales.
For any help developing a multi-channel marketing plan, see our team at Brand One Digital Solutions. We’re founded by Blackburn Media Inc, who have decades in the radio business, composing a seamless relationship between our client’s digital and radio advertising initiatives.