Radio has long been a staple of successful marketing campaigns, but there are an ever-growing number of ways to reach audiences with your messaging through digital marketing. That raises the question, How should I allocate my marketing budget between radio and new digital channels? The short answer is that traditional marketing media, such as radio, works well with digital as part of a multi-channel marketing campaign. So, it's almost always best to use a blend. Below, we'll explain how best to balance radio and digital marketing.
Why Do Radio and Digital Marketing Work Together?
Radio and digital marketing both shine when used for appropriate marketing purposes. Typically, radio is best used for broad-reach marketing, while digital works best for targeted marketing. When used together, they offer your company's messaging to potential customers wherever they are in the buyer's funnel.
Broad-Reach Marketing
With broad-reach marketing, you want to stay big picture and emphasize your basic brand message. This approach involves reaching a large, general audience through mass media channels like radio. The goal is to get your message in front of as many people as possible to increase awareness about your business. For example, imagine that you run a pet supplies store. Your broad-reach radio campaign could focus on the lifestyles of pet owners and how your business helps keep the listener's pets happy and healthy.
Targeted Marketing Campaigns
This approach involves reaching a specific group most likely to be interested in the advertised product or service. Targeted marketing campaigns use data and analytics to identify key demographics, interests, and behaviors associated with the target audience. These campaigns are typically delivered through digital channels like social media, email, and search engines, allowing for precise user data targeting.
Circling back to our hypothetical pet supplies store, you would not want to dedicate a radio spot to advertising ferret supplies if there are proportionally few ferret owners among that general audience. But you still wish for ferret owners to know you have the products they need for ferret care. In that case, running ads on the Google search results page and targeting people searching ferret-related keywords would be ideal. Because you've been engaged in broad-reach marketing on the radio, the searcher will be familiar with your brand and be more likely to respond to your targeted digital advertising.
Finding the Balance Between Radio and Digital Marketing
Finding the right balance between radio and digital advertising can be challenging. Generally, the wider the appeal of your products and services, the higher the percentage of your marketing budget you should allocate to the radio. As a rule, you should apportion at least enough budget to radio to run your ads three times per day. Less than that, and people are unlikely to hear your radio advertising enough to remember it.
Once you've reached a dominant frequency of running radio ads 21 times a week, consider how much more to put into broad-reach marketing. You probably have already built good brand awareness, and focusing on closing sales with highly relevant audiences will pay off. Investing more in targeted digital marketing campaigns may make sense if your products and services appeal to smaller groups.
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