We all know that a single ad anywhere is useless. You might as well give the money away. Marketing folks will tell you that consistent, repeated "impressions" are what work. The goal is that your company becomes synonymous with a product or service. And that has to be done a little at a time. Bit by bit. One impression as a time.

What the radio folks want you to buy is ten ads per hour during the most expensive programs. These are usually drive time or talk radio at several hundred dollars per thirty seconds. It would be easy to buy $5,000 worth of ads per day.

This is not for you. That strategy works for specific businesses, but not for small consultants.

Setting Goals

Before you dig into radio advertising, you have to decide what you want out of it. We had a small budget and humble goals.

First, we wanted to look a bit bigger than we are. Having someone "hear us on the radio" makes us look a little bigger.

Second, and related, is that we can say we're advertising on the radio. Even if someone does not hear the ad, they have an impression of how big we are based on the fact that they know we advertise on the radio.

Third, we do want people to hear the ad and visit our site! We don't expect a huge increase in traffic, but a little here and there.

I can't claim these are great. Or particularly good. But here's a sample of what we came up with at KPEnterprises.

 -- Small Business Specialists

 -- Batteries / UPSs

 -- Network Documentation

 -- Faxing from the Server

 -- Spyware

 -- Old Servers

 -- Safe Browsing

 -- Managed Services

 -- Do Your Have a Real Server?

 -- Certified Professionals

 -- Share Point Services

 -- Service Agreements

All files are in MP3 format and are just under 1 MB.

Don't know how long it will be up, but our SBSC radio spot was featured on the Microsoft Small Biz Partner site. Check it out.

It's under "SBSC Partner Quotes & Testimonials."

The Strategy

Brad Smith, 2005 Sales and Marketing Partner of the Year - Small Business Solutions, spelled out this strategy to me at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. It's a little different, and very well suited to small business.

• We found a radio show that is appealing to our target audience (small business owners) and that has reasonably priced advertising ($75/minute).

• Then we bought one minute per week. That's it. We air at about the same time each week, and always on the same show. That way, regular listeners will eventually have it break through their consciousness.

• We do not give out a phone number. Brad suggested, and I agree, that phone numbers on the radio are just silly. Even though we have a simple phone number, it's new and people are driving or mowing the lawn.

• In our case, our web site wouldn't play well on the radio (kpenterprises.com). So we went looking for a nice, short domain name that would be easy to remember. We found (to our amazement) that I5PC.com was available. If you listen to the ads on the right you'll here that it's pretty easy to understand "I 5 P C dot com."

• So, we created a "landing site" at I5PC.com and pointed all the business related links to KPEnterprises.com. In addition to adding a bit of content, which is always good for the search engines, we had one more set of links to our main site, and those links also help with search engine results.

• Part of the strategy of the landing page is to promise something. So we publish some tip sheets in pdf format. Those sheets, as you can imagine, have our name and logo on them. We post a copyright notice that these sheets can be copied for our visitors' staff (only).

The Results

First, we had fun! Hey, if you can't do that, go do something else for a living.

Second, we had clients come to us and say "I heard your ad." So that meets one goal. It also suggests that others (not our clients) have heard the ad.

Third, we've had an uptick on our web site and a few phone calls. Nothing drastic, but you have to remember that our budget is about $300/month! If we get one good server install in the first six months, we'll we ahead for the money.

The I5PC.com web site was generating about 300 unique visitors a month after three months. Again, remember our budget. That's about $1 per hit. It's cheaper than Google ads!

The Next Strategy

After we got things ironed out, and we have several ads "in the can" we are added an additional 1 minute ad per week. So, one ad would be new and useful information and the second ad would be a repeat. We'll started with managed services as the repeated ad.

We went with two ads a weeks for two months. In July 2006 we went back to one a week. The overall goal is to put that little bug in someone's ear to increase name recognition. Plus (of course) I've got another scheme planned for these commercials.

-- karlp karlp@kpenterprises.com