Portland, Maine Broadcast Radio Advertising

How Do You Create Great Radio advertising?

Radio can be used much like network TV advertising to reach the mass-market. The cost efficiency of radio is not as great as network TV. However, radio commercial production costs are lower and radio can be used effectively with a smaller budget. Radio commercials can be twice as long as standard TV spots (60 versus 30 seconds) and, therefore, can relay more information. Radio also is a very personal medium. However, it is also the most passive medium. Using radio and network TV simultaneously will increase frequency and can produce synergistic results.

Maine's Most Popular Radio Stations, by Market

As with TV, it usually pays to hire a professional to produce your radio commercial. The radio station will produce your commercial, but what you get will be an announcer with a great voice reading a script over some background music that will sound like scores of other commercials. Unless the announcer is a major personality, the spot won't ring the cash register. An effective radio commercial will create a mental picture for the listener. This might be accomplished by telling a story or creating a scenario that will cause the listener to picture himself and his needs and recognize the value of your service in meeting those needs.

There are three key ingredients for creating great radio advertising:

1. Make one point
2. Make it simply
3. Make it something worth listening to

Many people try to cram a lot of stuff into radio. Bad radio advertising is where you try to say three or four things in 60 seconds.  If you’ve got three points to make, do three spots.

Focus on the selling message. It has to be entertaining or informative or emotional - or something that jumps through.  Make sure that it works for the entire 60 seconds. Don't just tell a joke and then have 20 seconds of real hard-hitting copy.  

Some other key elements: 

1. Don't advertise blind - where you don't understand what the product is until the end of the commercial. With 60-second radio, you'd have people waiting to the end of the commercial to see what it is, and that's just not going to happen. Introduce the client/product from the top.
2. Radio, at its best, is a very visual medium. You hear something, or see a color, taste an orange, or smell a perfume. Your senses get aroused. You need to employ the senses of the listener. The listeners have to add their visual sense of it, their taste of it, their smell of it.  That’s successful radio advertising.

Radio's ability to tell a story is key to advertising. Treat the listener as an individual; hear them as an individual; see them as an individual.  Tell tales to them.

Contact us to get started with radio advertising that turns ideas into customers!