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13 Best Radio Marketing Ideas

Radio marketing is unique in the fact that instead of providing people with a visual representation of your goods or services, you’re allowing their imagination to create that picture for you. Just putting an advertisement together isn’t good enough. You’ve got to create an audio experience that will engage people rapidly, get your point across effectively, and be memorable enough that they’ll remember your business when they encounter it later on.

It all begins with effective repetition. Many people will hear a radio marketing campaign while they are in their vehicle, which means they need to memorize your contact information if they’re interested in interacting with your business. Repetition with the copywriting can help to accomplish this, but you’ll also need a phone number that’s easy to remember. For example: 1-800-EAT-FISH is a lot easier to remember for most people than 1-800-690-7528.

Creative Radio Marketing Ideas That Work

1. Focus Is the Key
Radio doesn’t give you a lot of time to be all over the place and still be effective. Focus on the key indicator that sets your goods and services apart from your competitors. What is it that you do better than anyone else can do? The answer to that question is what the focus of your radio marketing campaign should likely be.

2. Don’t Be Afraid of Special Effects
You need to paint a picture for your audience that will help them imagine your product in a way that will encourage a purchase. Sound effects help to create this imaginative environment like nothing else can! The best part about using special effects for this is that many of them can be included cheaply, at just the push of a button or two during the recording process, so you can create a quality audio environment while on a budget.

3. Be Flexible
Even though your radio marketing should work with your other marketing efforts, be flexible with your radio spots so you can create a good first impression. You’re communicating more of an idea right now through radio than a specific call to action that makes people want to run out and purchase your goods or services.

4. Make It Funny
The best radio spots are funny in their own unique way. People will remember the ads that made them laugh for years, but they won’t remember the radio spots that didn’t make an impression at all. Be appropriate with your humor, however, and avoid humor with subjects that may not be particularly funny to most people. A funeral home joking about death? That’s not a good idea in most circumstances.

5. Don’t Make It Confusing
People in a vehicle have a lot of distractions with which they must contend as it is. Your radio spot shouldn’t be just another distraction. When you put in sirens as a sound effect, you may just make someone believe that there is an emergency going on somewhere and this distraction means they’re looking for the vehicle with the siren instead of listening to your advertisement.

6. Keep the Language Simple
Every field of business has some sort of jargon that they use regularly to communicate with others about what is being offered. The only problem is that the average person will hear that jargon and it will be a foreign language to them! Keep the language simple and you’ll be able to engage with people on a personal level in a better way.

7. Avoid the Legalese
Those advertisements that need a lot of disclaimer language in them are more annoying than they are informative. If you need to put in a lot of qualifiers for people to understand what they are getting into, then maybe print marketing is more for you.

8. Don’t Be Too Repetitive
Some repetition is a good thing. 42 repetitions is not a good thing. Think about it this way. How would you react to someone coming up to you on the street, telling you the same thing 42 times in a row while you’re trying to get to your car after work? Three, maybe four mentions in a radio spot is enough for people to remember you if they want to remember you. When they get home, they’ll research you online to see if you’re really awesome.

9. Tell Your Story
People relate to stories more than they relate to anything else. If your story resonates well with someone, then this will form the foundation of a relationship that will eventually create either a sale or positive word-of-mouth marketing for you. Even if it doesn’t touch someone personally, it will at least be an engaging ad that someone might find interesting.

10. Be Believable
You must be authentic in order to be able to sell. That’s why Orson Welles was so effective with his “War of the Worlds” programming so many years ago. It was authentic and that made it believable. That’s what you’ve got to communicate when it comes to the message you offer about your goods or services too.

11. Be Specific
Listeners tend to remember specific aspects of an advertised product or service more than they remember generalities. If you set 5 inch flagstone in your patios, that will be remembered more that the fact you offer patio services with your landscaping packages.

12. Don’t Take Live Ads
Local radio announcers mean well, but they often destroy a radio campaign before it even begins. A solid narrator delivering a straight-forward script that is recorded to eliminate imperfection will always be a better delivery method. You can have your local radio personalities record the ad for a better result, of course, but the entire result still needs to come across as authentic.

13. Stay Calm
A rushed delivery is a radio disaster. Your copy needs to be short enough that the announcer or actors/actresses can read the text at a normal pace, but still be concise enough that the point is delivered effectively. If you rush through the words, content is going to be missed by a listener.

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