Most Contractors Have “Tried & Failed” On Radio Before… But I’d Like To Convince You To Try Again—This Time, The RIGHT WAY.

“But we’ve tried radio in the past… and it didn’t work!!!”

If I had the proverbial NICKEL for every contractor that’s told me that, I’d have thousands of nickels.

Usually, the bad radio experience goes something like this:

• Contractor contacts station and negotiates “great rates” on “popular” station.
• Contractor “writes awesome ads” and has them “professionally” produced.
• Ads run for a period of 2 weeks to 2 months and almost no calls come in.
• Contractor gets frustrated, proclaims “radio doesn’t work,” and spends marketing dollars elsewhere.
• Contractor gets hostile when I even bring up the topic of radio.

Which is approximately like this following:

• Guy goes and buys expensive golf clubs that are said to work great, even for novices.
• Guy chooses a beautiful golf course that’s reasonably priced near his home.
• Guy plays golf once a week for 2 weeks to 2 months and never breaks 130.
• Guy gets frustrated, proclaims “golf doesn’t work” and spends his time doing other things.
• Guy gets hostile when I even bring up the topic of golf.

Look—radio isn’t broke… just like golf isn’t broke.

Instead, look in the mirror: It’s the way you think about radio and the way you execute radio that’s broken.

And that’s why we’re here—to coach you to radio success. It can happen, but it’s going to take a change of heart and mind on your part.

The first thing you’ve got to understand is the difference between HUNTING and FARMING in contractor marketing:

There are two main types of advertising efforts: “direct response” and “branding.” Direct response means you place an ad and expect immediate responses that allow you to sell enough to make a profit on the ad. Branding means you place many ads over time with an expectation that prospects will hear you enough to know who you are and what you’re all about (your Identity) so they just “know” to call you when they need what you sell.

To make these concepts easier to understand, I call them HUNTING (direct response) and FARMING (branding).

Most contractors start their businesses with a HUNTING mindset—and it’s easy to see why. When you’re new in business, you’ve got to find ways to generate cash RIGHT NOW or else you starve to death and go out of business. In the old days (10 years ago), it was relatively easy to get all the business you could stand from HUNTING—show up at the home show, place ads in the newspaper or Clipper Magazine. 10 years ago even the radio worked pretty good for HUNTING.

But the internet totally changed the dynamic of direct response advertising. Now, because the internet is instantly available anywhere and everywhere (think: phone, tablet, laptop, etc.), people tend to look stuff up online the INSTANT they get the glimmer of a thought to buy something. Then by the time your ad appears in the Clipper Magazine $3,000 and 2 weeks later, that prospect has already taken action. They don’t need to see your ad—they’ve already done something. The “itch” has been “scratched.” This means fewer home improvement leads from the ads you do run.

This places an obvious importance on mastering internet marketing for contractors—something I have covered extensively elsewhere on this blog.

But does that cut out the need for advertising altogether? ABSOLUTELY NOT.

What it means is that your mindset has to change from HUNTING to FARMING.

The winners of the advertising wars now won’t be the guy who spends the most in the Clipper Magazine or in Val Pak. The winner will be the one who creates a LONG-TERM strategy to continuously indoctrinate prospects through advertising over the course of time. If you’ve tried a 2 week or 2 month run on radio in the past, it’s almost guaranteed it didn’t’ (and won’t) work. The setup is all wrong.

Radio is not the right place for direct response for contractors—but it’s a great place for farming. Contractors should be thinking in terms of reaching prospects OVER AND OVER AND OVER again so that prospects know exactly who to call when they have need of whatever it is you sell. It’s FARMING. Plant the seeds, nurture the ground, wait the requisite amount of time, then (and only then!) harvest your crops.

It’s not an endeavor for the impatient. Or the starving. But it’s the best long-term strategy for serious contractors who want to start nurturing NEXT YEAR’S sales RIGHT NOW. And sales for 2016, 2017, and beyond.

So why, specifically, radio? It holds a multitude of advantages over other media:

Reason #1: Radio Is An Excellent Way To Reach Prospects With Astonishing Consistency: People who listen to the radio do so with dumbfounding predictability and regularity. Humans are creatures of habit—they tend to get up at the same time every day. And shower at the same time every day. And drive to work at the same time every day. And eat lunch at the same time every day. Sure, sometimes their routines get out of whack—but on average, people are pretty darn predictable.

Radio takes advantage of this reliability in a way that no other media can—not even television (for my complete comparison of various media, see my next blog posting).

If you’re on board with FARMING, then you’ll realize that you have to nurture EVERY plant consistently from the time it’s planted until it’s time to harvest. If a given radio station has 5,000 listeners on weekday mornings between 7 and 8 am, there’s a good chance that the 5,000 people who are listening today will be pretty much the same 5,000 who listen tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day.

Yes, there will be some turnover—it won’t be the EXACT same 5,000 every single day. But over the course of a month… and a year… and several years… you will hit the same people over and over and over again with your message—which is exactly what you’re looking for.

By the end of one year—not to mention multiple years—you start to own the hearts and minds of those 5,000 listeners. If you create the right contractor marketing messaging (also covered in a future post), those people will know who you are, why you’re different and better, and what they can expect when doing business with you. When they finally have a need for (a new kitchen, replacement windows, a new HVAC unit, etc.) they will already firmly KNOW who to call—you. They won’t even have to go online to find you. They’ll already know you and WANT to do business with you.

As you think about that, consider why radio does NOT work for direct response. If you’ve been on the radio for 2 weeks, first of all, the listener probably has only heard your ad a couple times—if that. Second, even if they have heard you, they don’t have enough familiarity/exposure to you to form a positive opinion of your company. It’s just too early in the relationship. You need to give it time to blossom and develop. You know, like FARMING.

Reason #2: Radio Makes It Super Easy To Precisely Target Your Market: You know how everyone’s always talking about there being hundreds of TV stations? Well, it’s true. With cable & satellite, viewers (read: prospects) literally do have access to hundreds of choices, which makes it hard for you to choose where to spend your precious dollars. But radio is much more limited—on FM dial, the frequencies go from about 88 to 107, and only on odd decimal points (88.7, 89.1, 89.3, etc.) That’s it. In a major market, there might only be 25 to 35 stations of consequence, and perhaps HALF that in smaller markets.

If there are 30 stations in a major market, you can automatically ELIMINATE a huge percentage of them because they don’t cater to your target market.

See, young people tend to listen to young people stations. Hispanics tend to listen to Hispanic stations. Black people tend to listen to “Urban” stations. Men tend to listen to sports stations. Women tend to listen to light rock stations. And so forth.

Don’t cry “racist,” “sexist,” or any other “ist” to me. These are just the simple facts. Yes, some women listen to sports radio. And some white people listen to “Urban” or “Hispanic” stations. And I’m sure many Hispanics and Blacks listen to “Adult Contemporary” stations. But at the end of the day, we have to look at the statistics. And the statistics clearly show that YOUR target market (whoever it may be) are very likely to listen to 5 to 10 stations AT THE MOST. And an individual listener within that target market probably spends 90% of his or her time on 3 or fewer stations.

This makes it exceptionally easy to figure out where to spend your money. I’ll give you more details on this topic (choosing stations) on a future posting as well… but for now, just know that it’s really easy to target your market. If you want to reach affluent homeowners, you start your evaluation with adult contemporary, news talk, and news stations. If you want older affluent adults, then you look into oldies (note: there are multiple flavors of oldies these days). If you’re more interested in women, lean toward the AC. Men? News talk and sports generally deliver well.

To keep the FARMING analogy going, here’s the result: If you want to grow wheat, you can easily grow wheat. Same goes for peas, tomatoes, corn, or whatever else you want to cultivate. Radio is the king of self-selecting media. You might think the internet is better—but it introduces the problem of too much choice. Sure, there are THOUSANDS of sites that cater to young men… or to affluent women… or middle-class men. Which means your dollars have to spread thin (even thinner than TV) to reach them. But there are only a few stations that cater to any given crowd on the radio dial.

Reason #3: Radio Allows You To Speak With High Emotion: It’s hard to capture emotion and feeling in print. Why? Because you’re limited to font sizes & styles, colors, emphasis tools (bold, underline, ALL CAPS, italics) and punctuation to make the reader “hear” your voice.

On radio, on the other hand, the listener can “hear” your voice because you’re actually HEARING A VOICE! All the subtle changes in tone, pacing, pausing, volume, and timbre communicate TONS about what the meaning of a sentence is. Emotion comes through loud and clear. Prospect can judge how authentic the voice is. All of this is good—if it’s executed properly.

In future posts later this month, I’ll give you multiple examples of using emotion the right way… and example where it just doesn’t come through. But you’ll have to wait for that. For now…

Reason #4: Radio Commercials Are Cheap and Easy To Produce & Keep Fresh: Have you ever produced a TV commercial? It’s an exhausting, expensive, and time consuming endeavor. Print ads require pre-planning and careful reviews and revisions that can be a pain.

Radio commercials, on the other hand, can be produced quickly, easily, and inexpensively. We usually suggest that EITHER the company owner OR a professional voice talent be the voice of the company… and that 3 to 5 new commercials be cut every month for the first 12 months. After that you can start to reuse some old ads, but the idea is to keep the commercials fresh and new and interesting.

The average cost to produce a good, professional radio commercial is about $100 to $250, and it takes about 1 day, maybe 2 to turn them around. Easy & cheap!

Reason #5: Radio Is Extremely Inexpensive To Get Started On: I recommend that you allocate about 10% of your entire contractor marketing budget to radio to get started. If your budget is $5,000 a month, then commit $500. I’ll give you some strategies in a future post about how to negotiate and buy… but for now, just know this: it doesn’t matter how big or how small your budget is. Just get started.

But you have to keep in mind the concept of FARMING when you start. Remember, you’re hoping to generate some immediate leads—but your bigger concern is generating home improvement leads for 2015, 2016, and so on. That means that in the short term, you need to count on this 10% of your budget producing NOTHING. To emphasize: that doesn’t mean it will produce absolutely nothing in the short term—but you’d better plan that way just in case. I’ve seen dozens of campaigns killed off after 2 or 3 months when nervous business owners blink and quit. Just think if the farmer quit two months after planting!

As your sales grow and your marketing budget grows, then you can steadily grow your radio (and overall FARMING) budget to as much as 75% of your contractor marketing budget. It’s true—the big do get bigger, and the reason is that they are willing to INVEST their profits back into FARMING advertising activities that will produce even BIGGER PROFITS for them in the future.

If you’re unwilling to go this route, then next year and the year after that, you’ll still be turning over rocks looking for food. The smart move is to start FARMING right now. And the smartest place to start farming is the RADIO.

© 2014 – 2016, Rich Harshaw. All rights reserved.