TV and Radio advertising has often been avoided by most small businesses becauase they saw it as a too-expensive alternative to cheaper, more traditional advertising like Yellow Pages and Circulars.

That’s All About to Change

Now that Google has rolled out their low-cost model to radio advertising that has been so successful in the online marketing world, it means that almost any business should be able to advertise on radio.

The ads were tested in the past year and the announcement from Google about the roll-out of the program came last December but there was a big announcement this week.

Google Partners with Clear Channel

Google announced this week that Clear Channel will be distributing the radio ads for Google. That’s important because Clear Channel will be broadcasting the commercials on over 675 radion stations. Anything that increases supply of the product (airtime in this case) will drive the price down and give advetisers more options of what type of radio station they advertise on, when they advertise, and where they advertise.

What Does this Mean for Small Businesses?

One of the advantages of advertising with Google is that there is no minimum as far as what you pay. This was the first time that a major medium in marketing allowed you to do that. The economics meant that anyone who wanted to advertise would have to pay a minimum amount to the advertising supplier (TV station, radio station, or newspaper).

That was still the case with radio advertising before Google got involved. While you could get good deals with radio advertisements on occasion, there was no easy way to do it. Often you had to buy multiple ads to get these discounts.

But with Google Radio Advertising, you set your budget. You determine how much you want to pay for advertisement and how many ads you want aired.

How to Profit with Radio Advertising

Google offers to match you up with a specialist to help produce your ad. Once you determine the message that you want to convey with your advertising, there are 2 things we suggest you to to effectively measure your advertisements:

1. Add a new web page like www.yourdomain.com/radio that you can direct prospects to in the add. Make sure this website or webpage is not accessible from your website. All you have to do measure the number of visitors to this page to determine the effectiveness of the advertisements.
2. Get a tracking number so that you can determine how many phone calls are generated from the ad. We use a service called Callture to get toll free numbers that forward to local numbers. It tracks every call that comes through that number with date, time, number called from, and the amount of time they were on the line.

Bonus Tip: Offer some sort of special information on your website like a report or coupon to drive traffic to your website.

If you enjoyed this post then make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed.