On Friday 6 April I was delighted to join Melissa Gale on the Marlow FM Biz Buzz programme. This got me thinking, about the future of more traditional forms of media such as press advertising, TV, radio and outdoor eg: billboards and bus stops, etc.  When I first qualified with the CIM on my marketing diploma and started to work in marketing these were the media tools at our disposal, social media did not exist, online advertising was only just starting out and Google certainly did not have the influence it does today.

Radio was a key platform and one I still love to this day. It is a great way of connecting with your wider ideal client and with digital platforms now growing, it makes it even easier to be super targerted. I have always worked with radio as a platform, even in my corporate role, but wanted to explore a little further how it could work for a small business.

So how does radio fit into the marketing mix?  Well, as with any other project we need to start with the brief and define our objectives, who our ideal client is and our business brand.  Once we are clear on what we are trying to do and all of our harvest media activity is in place, we can then start to consider how to engage with our audiences via our website and direct channels. This is where radio comes into its own.

Radio as a media is unique, as it is generally consumed alongside another media eg: social media, whilst reading a newspaper or checking our emails.  If you have debate shows such as BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine, then it can also act as a good sounding board for new ideas and principles to gain general public support or opinions.

Whilst some of these other media maybe struggling RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) reported in Q4 2017 that 48.9m or 90% of the UK adult population tuned into their selected radio station each week.  This is up YOY by 178k adults. So in short as a media radio is still very much on the up and should be part of your consideration mix as a small business.

The key to using radio effectively is to have a commercial or ad which is memorable, ties into your brand values and if possible makes you laugh. The call to action has to be really simple and just a website ideally.  If you can then support it with other media eg: social or email then even better and where the two media work together it becomes very powerful.

I am a huge advocate of using radio as a media and would encourage any small business to think about how they could use this media to drive brand awareness.  If you would like some help in building your marketing strategy or building your next radio campaign please get in touch.