When you're trying to build brand awareness, it's usually a good idea to use two or more marketing channels. One particularly effective pairing is radio, TV and streaming TV advertisements. Both reach a wide audience. Because consumers absorb them while engaged in different activities, combining the two in one campaign can make a more powerful impression on target consumers.
When you combine traditional broadcast advertising with over-the-top (OTT) advertising and pair it with radio, the benefits you'll receive will make you much more likely to hit your brand-building and sales goals.
Extended Reach of Audiences
Both TV and radio are ideal channels for reaching broad audiences. In today's digital era, television viewing is no longer concentrated after traditional working hours and on the weekends. More than ever, consumers are watching live television and streaming videos on mobile devices at all hours of the day, providing businesses ample opportunities to reach consumers and even target where they live.
Radio also offers businesses the ability to reach consumers in more extensive ways. You can still capture many listeners' ears during work commutes. But with smart speakers and radio available, you can capture listener attention while they're doing everything from working remotely.
Businesses can leverage OTT advertising, a term that covers ads that appear on any online video content you see with any device. Connected TV (CTV) devices refer to televisions that stream content. And when you purchase OTT or CTV ads, you get an abundance of data from subscribers and can publish and change as quickly as necessary.
Advanced Targeting
Radio and television were long viewed as bastions of mass-market advertising. Now, you can target consumer segments more narrowly than ever. There are many channels on both radio and TV, many of which cater to specific niches. With OTT, CTV, and radio, you can capture more information about viewers and listeners than ever before.
When you use both together, you can not only reach a broader selection of your target consumers. You can also target them by their activity. For example, you can target drivers through radio ads (as they cannot watch while driving). You can reach a broader base of them before and after rush hours through television when they are preparing for work or winding down.
Better Brand Recognition
In general, you can increase brand recall when you deploy an ad consistently and frequently across multiple channels. The more consumers see and hear it, the more likely they are to remember it. While this seems intuitively true, it's also rooted in what we understand about sensory memory, particularly iconic and echoic memory.
Iconic memory is a form of sensory memory that refers to how we receive and store visual information. Iconic memory typically preserves up to 9 items but lasts only one second. Echoic memory, which refers to auditory stimuli, only stores about five items in memory but stores them for up to 4 seconds. The combination of visual and auditory stimuli from TV and radio ads can help us retain more information about a brand longer. Pairing TV and radio ads can help push a brand or ad into our short-term or, ideally, long-term memory.
Further, pairing the two can help increase the effectiveness of radio's reach. Video has fragmented at a faster rate than radio. That means, in some cases, TV may be better at targeting specific niches. But it also means that radio may still reach a broader audience. For example, you may find the best channel for targeting fans of a particular sports team - your primary target audience - to be OTT ads on a streaming channel about that sports team. But you may find that you can reach your secondary and broader audience of local sports fans through a regional sports radio channel.
Elevated Frequency
Additionally, you can combine TV and radio ads cost-effectively to maximize ad frequency. The more your consumers see and hear your ads, the more likely they will recall them. Many businesses follow the "Frequency of Three" rule, which contends that brand recall is optimal when a consumer hears an ad at least three times a week. Combining TV and radio advertising is a surefire way to hit that mark and connect with consumers.
With more than eight in ten Americans aged 12 or older listening to the radio, radio ads are an inexpensive way to help build brand awareness. Pairing ads with targeted OTT/CTV ads or traditional broadcast network advertising can help you achieve the frequency you need to plant your ads in memory.
Pairing Television and Radio Ads for Business Growth
Crafting a television and radio advertising strategy is a great solution when you're looking to build greater brand awareness and attract consumers. You benefit from each channel's broad reach and ability to target consumers according to their interests, activities, and other key factors. And you can build powerful advertisements that you can air frequently, helping you achieve top-of-mind awareness among consumers.
Television and radio have undergone some extensive changes over the years. But one thing has remained the same. They remain two of the most powerful tools for marketing your business. They're even more effective when you use them together.
If you're thinking about this dual approach may benefit your business, contact a marketing service specialist at Mid-West Family Southwest Michigan.
