Four States Small Business Blog

Your company’s brand has market value, so creating a strong brand for your company can be one of the most effective ways to increase your sales. Branding helps distinguish your company, products, and services from your competitors. It’s a way to create a connection between your company and your consumers in a visual, emotional, and cultural way.

It’s easy to underestimate the power of audio in the way we feel, think, and even make decisions. Understanding this impact in radio can be traced back to the mid-1950s when the burgeoning television industry first posed a serious challenge. While it was uttered with regard to radio dramas, the phrase that best sums up this power is “Theater of the Mind.” Essentially, the reason why audio is powerful is because of all the mental images, associations, and emotions that it can evoke, especially through radio.

You know that your customers listen to local radio. You know that you want to advertise on radio to keep your business top of mind so when customers need your product or service, they think of your business first. But there’s just one question: How much should I be paying for radio advertising?

It’s savvy of business owners to constantly be on the lookout for ways to get the most out of their marketing and advertising efforts.

Radio advertising remains an effective and powerful tool for reaching your customers, but ensuring that your radio ad creative is conveying the right message — a message that will get listeners to buy — is essential. We’ve put together a list of five questions to ask your radio partner to ensure that they are creating quality ads for your company.

As a business owner, you might understand the effectiveness of radio advertising, but it's important to note that to ensure you're reaching and persuading your target audience, you need to choose the right radio station and the right frequency for your business. It’s important to consider audience demographics and station involvement in the community, as well as the frequency of your ads in the context of your advertising budget. In this post, we provide some tips for choosing the best radio station and frequency for your business’ advertising.

This may be the point in the year when you and your marketing team are taking a look back at the marketing efforts of 2016 and evaluating what exactly it cost your company. Or, if you’re a new business owner, you may be determining what kind of expenditure you’ll need to make to start advertising. Either way, there’s something important you need to remember to do: view marketing as an investment. Quite simply, marketing isn’t something that’s merely nice to have or a good idea that you can get to later, and the costs associated should never be considered without the ultimate impact it has on your bottom line.

Many cities and markets have groups of iconic radio stations that have stood the test of time. Whether it be news, music or sports, these “heritage” stations have deep ties to the local community and are institutions in people’s lives and daily routines.

Invariably, what decision makers are looking for when evaluating any spending is results, and it’s no different when considering a marketing budget. Results are the only thing that matter when you get to the bottom line. In today’s article, we’ll touch on why you should be planning your marketing budget to get results, as well as help you put those results into perspective so that your marketing budget doesn’t get wasted.

An essential part of any advertising campaign is consideration of the consumer buying process. Understanding and addressing the stages of the process at the top of the purchase funnel can influence whether the consumer buys from you or goes to one of your competitors. We’ve put together some tips for advertising aimed at the early stages of the consumer buying process.