DON’T Buy TV & Radio ads Until You Listen to This

Brandon Welch 0:00
When you have a fragmented media plan and you’re not hammering that same person over and over and over again, it’s like starting over every single time your message plays, and not any one person gets enough time or reminder of that thing you’re trying to bring to life. This is why you need to do fewer things, but do them better. We call it filling one glass at a time. You you. Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. This is the place where we help you eliminate waste in advertising, grow your business and achieve the big dream. I’m joined today by my return guest. You know her. You love her. Megan, the media mogul, Ellis,

Megan Ellis 0:39
thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I

Brandon Welch 0:41
love being here. Been too long. Yeah? Like, one of our most watched episodes early on was actually kind of on the similar topic. It was how to get the best deal on TV and radio advertising. But today we’re going to talk about the basics of growing your business through the masses, getting famous, getting known, liked and trusted, so the people choose you over your competitors, skip the search engines and really just think of you first. That’s

Megan Ellis 1:06
really my favorite part of marketing. Yes, just being that person that people think about. You know, before they go searching, you’re you’re the one.

Brandon Welch 1:15
You are a legend at it. By now, you’ve built a legendary business, as we say inside the business of TV and radio, we’ve been doing that together for a lot of years, helping people become famous. Yes, like, interested 10 years,

Megan Ellis 1:28
at least. Well, I guess 10 years here, but then, yes, this, is this a good time for me to tell people about how I first met Brandon?

Brandon Welch 1:38
Well, yeah, we met it on the other side of this we met in the broadcast sales world. Yes,

Megan Ellis 1:43
we did. We did. And one of my favorite memories of Brandon like he said, we’ve known each other for years, over a decade, but he’s always been an old soul, and he’s always been a strategy minded businessman. And I remember the first time I met him, he kind of went on a tangent, a rant, rather, about how annoying it was for people to use Groupon or to use, oh yeah, these coupons that people would buy that were severely discounted. Because, I don’t know if you remember this, but the reason why you were so mad about it is because you were like, that is a race to the bottom. If they will use you for a cheap discount, they will leave you for one too. And so I have always loved how loyal you were and how just business minded and focused you’ve been. That’s that’s

Brandon Welch 2:35
a good juxtaposition to the topic today, because the thought about marketing is that we put $1 in and we get a customer out. And as we talked about on last week’s episode, you can do that, but you just have to make concessions on price and availability and your style of delivery to make that happen, because people won’t just act because you ask them to. And so Groupon to use that as an example. And if you need any more proof that I’m right, ask yourself, was the last time I heard about Groupon?

Megan Ellis 3:02
Yeah, that was about 15 years ago. So it was very it was a hot commodity then. So

Brandon Welch 3:06
they, they had large amounts of advertising to push people coming into your business fast. The only problem was, you had to give it, it like 30% of what you should have been charging. And so back in my early days of that, of that rant. I just come out of small business, and I’m like, that’ll never work. And the problem is similar to the problem we’re talking about today, is a lot of times we focus on the media and not the strategy and the method behind it. And so you don’t want to give away stuff for cheap or for free. What you want to do is earn a reputation and earn a likeness about you and earn a quality about you that makes people desire you and specifically the way you do business, long before they ever go looking for your category. And believe it or not, as of August of 2024 good old fashioned TV and radio is still one of the most effective ways to do that, probably the most effective way to do that for local and regional businesses. If you serve a specific area, specific geography, a town or a county or a DMA or maybe even a state, the efficiency you gain and the amount of people you can reach with broad audiences, believe it or not, and I’m the Digital guy like Megan. Can tell you, when we met, I was the digital guru, right?

Megan Ellis 4:31
Yep, I was selling television at that station. You were selling digital products. And so you were the one I love that you’re talking about how it’s still in August, 2024 this is still the best way to buy because, as you know, so many people are saying, Well, does anyone even watch TV anymore? Does anyone even listen to the radio? So there

Brandon Welch 4:50
is an answer to that, and it’s it’s less, but not in certain types of programming, and certainly not for I’ll say this the demographic that has the most. Money and that wants to buy your local service and wants to pay you a little more for it, wants to feel good about the quality, and wants to improve their home and have higher end medical and legal services and the stuff that most of the people listening are actually selling. They’re the ones that have the most money, and yes, they are still tuning into good old fashioned TV and radio, absolutely. And before you say, I’m not doing that, so nobody else is. We’ll do another episode on how that’s measured. Trust me, the ratings and the methods for measuring that are more accurate than they’ve ever been. And there’s still 10s, if not hundreds of 1000s of people watching at any given time. There absolutely are, yeah, local news and radio, and we have companies that have been growing, you know, by double digits, multiple multiple, double digits every year, still using that as the core method. So that was a lot to say. Why we’re doing this episode, and what we want to review with you, and what we want you to leave with are some tools that if you’re going to use this method of growing your business, your business, that you align it in a certain way that gets you the most amount of psychological impact, and align the media to actual human behaviors versus the shiny objects you may be hearing about in a sales presentation. Because there’s a lot of ways to buy TV and radio. We’re going to talk about those, and we’re going to talk about the way we know gets the best results. Fair, awesome, cool. So we wouldn’t be the Maven marketing podcast if we didn’t do a quick review on the tomorrow. Customer broadcast generally is not the best way to get customers right now, you’re going to use search engines and targeted Facebook ads to get to do like your promotional type stuff and reach people the finish line. But no matter your category, whether you’re selling roofs or legal services or caskets, there are far, far, far, far, far more people in the tomorrow categories than there are today. In a medium sized market, you might have one quarter of 1% of your population buying what you sell today. So when we use these search engine targeted type medias, they’re good for reaching that person, but there’s a limited amount of them, and there’s way, way, way more people available to you to talk to about broad things, if we’re not just talking about today’s sale, because if I don’t need a refrigerator, and you’re trying to talk to me about if you’re trying to talk to me about a refrigerator, I’m done. You’re done. I’m not I’ve lost you. I’ve lost paying attention to you. But if you build a personality and you build up a campaign and people that I can connect with and remember brand language and key phrases and entertainment styles and things over time. Then you become in the category we’ll at least pay attention to today, even if I’m not buying your roof or your thing. And then one day, when I suddenly need that product, you’ll be the one I think of first. And I’ll be like, Oh, I like that guy. I need that guy. I’m gonna call that guy before I can call any of these other jerks, right?

Megan Ellis 7:58
And I give you an example of how that happened recently, please. Okay, so we get to work with a roofer in our community who we have been working with for, gosh, the whole time that 10 years. Yeah, right, yeah. And the other day we were in our neighborhood we were going through, and we saw that one of our favorite neighbors was getting the roof done, and there was a sign for absolute roofing in their driveway, you know, in their yard. And my boys were like, Oh my gosh, Yay, it’s absolute roofing. They used absolute roofing. And I think that’s so funny, because they love singing the jingle. They started singing the jingle they love. They they know the little animated face that he might on his yard sign as well, because we see it on, you know that we see it on TV. We see it on the website whenever we we go to that. So it was just, it was cool that when

Brandon Welch 8:49
we started that campaign, there were 1314, 15 year olds listening to their parents television in the morning, who are now 25 year olds buying houses. And he has stories like this, like they’re literally calling and saying, Yep, I’ve known about you for years, right? And so that can apply to a lot of categories. We pick roofing because it’s just it’s some of the roofers we work with are favorite examples of really hard businesses to get action out of. Those are hard companies to grow, right? And we have some really great success doing that, so, but we’re talking about tomorrow customer. The goal is to win over large groups of people long before they need you. And with the way we do that with broadcast, is the same way we would do it in real life if I wanted to make a new friend, undeniably, just naturally, what we do in our human psychology is we have a propensity to actively try to make meetings with that friend. We have interactions with that person, right, right? And the more interactions we have, typically, by default, the stronger we get, the stronger that relationship builds.

Megan Ellis 9:51
Yeah, that bond grows and grows and grows the more time spent with each other. Yes,

Brandon Welch 9:55
that’s a human thing, that’s that’s courtship, that’s friendships, that’s marriage. That’s why. You know, families are families, and that’s why the bonds get stronger and stronger and stronger. That’s why people that work together end up having strong relationships too. So with broadcast, it is a one way interaction. However, if you make them laugh, cry or get angry, if you bring their emotion, emotional makeup to the table, they will have the same kind of kind of neurological reaction with your name and your likeness that a real human being would have at coffee or going to a movie or going to a comedy show or playing basketball together or whatever. The same types of things happen in the mind. That’s where we build those connections. So broadcast, it’s not any different. We want to be with the same person over and over and over for a long period of time, and we want to do things that are relevant and say things that are relevant to them over a long period of time. And isn’t that how we build friends in real life? Absolutely yes, nobody hangs out or listens to or pays attention to people that aren’t relevant to them, right? That don’t make them laugh, cry or feel good, right? So or feel something, right? So that’s, that’s what we’re gonna do. I want to keep that in mind, because it’s going to become really important here in just a minute when we talk about building media schedules. But what happens most often. Megan, what happens in real life when people are buying broadcast? Where are we not doing this?

Megan Ellis 11:26
Okay, so you want me to talk to you about what typically happens whenever you’re a small business owner. Okay? When you’re a small business owner, you have a product or something that you’re trying to sell, something that you need people to purchase. You need to stay in business. And you are hustling. You’re doing a million different things. And you know, one Monday afternoon, some charming or handsome or lovely gal pops in, maybe they bring you a Starbucks coffee, they start talking to you about your business. They you know, if they’re well versed, they might start asking you questions about your business, and they might start thinking about how the product that they sell could help you, you know, build your business, right? These are the good sales reps, right? These are the good sales reps. And so what typically happens is, you’ve got someone who comes in there. They’re building a relationship with you just like you hope to build with your potential customers, right? They are understanding your needs. They come back with a plan, and as a part of the plan, they have to sell their product, right? So they’re either selling TV or radio or billboards or print or whatever it is that they need

Brandon Welch 12:38
to sell all good things, really, no such thing as bad advertising, right? No, we

Megan Ellis 12:41
buy it all, I mean, all the time. But what happens is, is that, you know, there are certain parameters of things that they have to sell based on, you know, the company that they work for and the stakeholders at hand, they have to fulfill a specific type of quota, and it’s whatever it is that they are selling right? And they believe in it because they see it work, and we buy it because it does work. But what happens is sometimes they have to package things in a way to meet all of their specific quotas. So it’s about them and their business at the end of the day, and not as much about you and your business. Yes, right. Megan

Brandon Welch 13:22
and I were lucky enough to work for a station group that understood a little bit more the formula you should be using to grow a business they did. When we entered the agency world, we saw very much how, and I actually saw this before I was in the agency world as a business owner working for my family’s company, how most account executives, or, you know, professional media sales people, they’re incentivized, like the thing they heard this morning is from their boss why they had to sell this package, or how many, how many spots they had left in this type of day? Or, Hey, we’re really low on this station, and almost every media group in America owns not two, not three, but like five television stations or radio stations, and they’re all selling the same things. And then 1015, years ago, when I was in the wild, wild west, and then, you know, early digital world, all the TV and radio stations saw this money going to Google. And at the time it was things like Yelp and Yahoo and stuff. Now it’s Facebook and but they they wanted to get a piece of that. So they were like, We got to sell digital. And they made it about the media. And so in a building not even close to their station, you know, five states over, there’s some executive saying to their sales manager, you got to sell X amount of this, X amount of this, X amount of this, X amount of this, and you got all these budgets you have to meet or you don’t get your bonus, right. That’s how the that’s how the world is wired. This is what we call the broken system of advertising. We write a lot of a lot about it in the book the Maven market and get it on Amazon. It’s a best seller and but it’s just it, unfortunately, it’s true, and it’s no one person’s fault, and it’s certainly not the person’s fault that’s being required to do that. And

Megan Ellis 14:59
it’s confusing. Using because, here’s the thing, what they are selling you, does work. It does work. It’s

Brandon Welch 15:05
just any one of the given things could work. Well,

Megan Ellis 15:07
right? Exactly, any one of the Yes, that’s it. Fill one glass.

Brandon Welch 15:11
Fill one glass at a time. It’s a core value here at Frank and Maven, and it’s a core value you should employ in all of your communication everywhere. Megan, yes, sir, would you rather sell 100% of the population, 10% of the way, or 10% of the population, 100% of the

Megan Ellis 15:31
way, 10% of the population, 100% of the way,

Brandon Welch 15:34
10% of nothing is nothing right, but 100% of 10% is something right, right? And take that to the bank. And what we’re getting at here is that every media, every website, every radio station, every TV program, it has an audience attached to it. It has a group of people that, on a regular basis, come back to it and listen to it and consume the entertainment. And therefore, in the middle of those things, they consume your ads, and they are influenced by them, yes, and most budgets for a small business, and I’m talking about the you know, if you’re spending under $200,000 in a medium sized market, most budgets do not support enough money to do all of those things well. And so when a very well meaning, very well intentioned media company or media salesperson brings you a proposal that’s chock full of you’re going to be a little bit in this program. You’re going to be a little bit in this program. You’re going to be a little bit on our website. Oh, we got this great text messaging thing, and, oh, we’ll make a Facebook post about you. And it’s like little, you know, 500 and $1,000 little dollar signs adding up, and you go, Oh, cool. Well, I can afford five or six grand a month for my to market my business, and I’m going to be in all these places, and it feels really good, but the truth is, like probably nine times out of 10 in America right now, we’re not doing any one of those things well enough to cross the threshold where those audiences hear you enough feel you enough to remember or feel Good about you, and you’re just caught up in the noise, and that is where the big bad wolf of wasted advertising comes in.

Megan Ellis 17:07
Yes, that’s what we see most frequently. When we have new clients that are coming to our doors. They are. They’ve got all this beautiful media mix that they’re very proud of, and they’re spending a ton of money on it. And usually we can find ways to eliminate and cut the fat on a lot of that, because they we say, why don’t you take a bunch of this money and put it all on this thing? Let’s do this right. Then we’ll go to the next thing. Then we’ll go to the next thing. And that’s how we attach strategy to what they’re buying. Yes,

Brandon Welch 17:32
there is some science to this. Harvard is the study I’m the most familiar with, or that’s where it came from. There is a law of diminishing returns that we hit. There is a law of diminishing returns, like, if you hear a message too many times and it’s like eight or nine times, is when we start to get that diminishing effect where, you know, added frequency points don’t aid recall and don’t aid feelings. So you either have to change the ad or you have to put the ad in a different spot. But most media plans that are tuned to the way we’re tuning won’t even reach the same person five times in a year. When you’ve split that $5,000 budget three ways, that’s wild, isn’t that crazy? Yeah, your average frequency just goes down. And so frequency, if you’re not familiar with the term, is the amount of times that the average person in the audience hears the ad, and there are some formulas we’ve learned to depend on that sort of guarantee, that recall and that snowball effect that you’ve been in their life long enough and often enough in a in a window of time that they start to think of you first and feel really good about you when they need your service. Below that threshold. I’m not going to say it’s a complete waste, but there’s like, an ante that you have to pay. There’s an ante you have to reach in terms of the amount of time somebody’s seen that ad. Make sense? So far? Yes, so far. So what you what you don’t want to do, or what you want to be cautious of, is any plan that’s brought to you that sounds really fancy, and it is fancy and and has multiple, multiple, multiple places that you’re going to be spending your money, and you probably want to, for the average budget. I’m talking people that are spending, you know, that are, that are spending in the, you know, 100 to $200,000 range on advertising in a medium sized market. So not like Atlanta, and not like, you know, Timbuktu Oklahoma, but like, you know, your Kansas cities, your St Louis is your Louisville, Kentucky’s your Houston, Texas type markets, anything that’s in that two ish million two, three ish million population, you’re spending a couple 100 grand a year. You don’t have enough money to do probably. But one thing really well, one station or one program really well, right? That makes sense. It does fill one glass at a time. Example, I like to use about for this, any program or plan that comes to you that is you’re feeling like, Oh, I’m over here and I’m on two weeks here, and then I’m on a different station two weeks here, and I’m on this little digital thing your. Teaching large groups of people each time you do that, but they’re different people, and it would be the same thing if I said, Hey Nate the camera guy, we were out of milk this morning, and my wife, Valerie would like me to pick up some milk on the way home. And she told me on the way out the door, hey, will you get milk on the way home? And I’d be like, Heck yeah, I love you. I’d love to get some milk for you, right? What are the chances of me getting that milk by the time 6pm rolls around and I’m driving home? Oh, I

Megan Ellis 20:29
think you’ve forgotten by the time you get to work, yeah? What

Brandon Welch 20:32
are the chances of me even having a second thought right now, if she calls me at, you know, midday and says, Hey, hope you’re having a great day. I love you so much. Would you please remember to get that milk? I’m like, Yeah, of course, right? Did Did my chances increase? They did increase. They did increase, right? I have a better chance, right? Am I probably still going to forget about it

Megan Ellis 20:57
on the way home? Gosh, I hope not. Because she told you once, she told you I

Brandon Welch 21:00
done, told you twice, yeah, but if she’s smart, and she is so smart, she would call me, she would track my phone and see when I’m leaving the parking lot, and she would call me on the way home. She’d go, Hey, love you. Can’t wait to see you. I missed you so much today. Would you please get stop and get that milk? And what? I hit a home run with the milk. I think you would, I would probably, chances are way better, right? That is frequency with the same person. I’m

Megan Ellis 21:25
the same person. That’s

Brandon Welch 21:26
a three frequency in a day. Okay, right? We’re gonna talk about the three frequency in a minute. Now, if she called or told me on the way out the door, and then at noon, she called Nate, the camera guy, and said, Hey, Brandon’s gonna give me some milk on the way home, he’d be like, I’m happy for you, right? And then he would go about his day. Did I get that message?

Megan Ellis 21:44
Nate? Did you do your job? Well, no, she

Brandon Welch 21:47
didn’t tell him to tell me. She just said, Hey, Nate’s gonna give me some some milk, right? Now, that didn’t increase my chances. It was another impression with Nate, right? If she called you at 545 and said, Brandon’s gonna give me smoke on the way home, you’d be like, Yeah. Way Home. You’d be like, I’m happy for you, but yeah, did it help me? I’d

Megan Ellis 22:05
be like, What are you making? Yeah, uh, no, it did not help you first time

Brandon Welch 22:09
you’ve heard that message. And when you have a fragmented media plan and you’re not hammering that same person over and over and over again, it’s like starting over every single time your message plays, and not any one person gets enough time or reminder of that thing you’re trying to bring to life, whatever it is you’re selling, whatever you’re entertaining, whatever it is you’re putting out of the world. This is why you need to do fewer things, but do them better. We call it filling one glass at a time. Absolutely,

Megan Ellis 22:38
yeah. And how frustrating for you to be spending all this money and not making an impact,

Brandon Welch 22:44
right? Yes, yes. So don’t tune your message. Don’t call me the camera guy or Megan until you need Mel call the same person over and over and tell him that, right? Yep. Frequency increases recall at least up to like that eight or nine factor. Okay, so let’s talk about how to buy TV, right? And put things in a in a format, how to pick the things to buy with your very limited budget, so that you get this wonderful flood of customers over time, beautiful.

Megan Ellis 23:11
The way I buy TV, and the way I think that I buy it correctly is I believe that people watch programs, not stations, right? They’re watching their show. They’re watching their favorite news anchor. They’re watching their favorite weather guy. Talk to them about what to expect for the day. Yeah, what

Brandon Welch 23:32
they’re comfortable with. People go with what they know, right? They’re loyal to programs, not they’re not just gonna sit and watch a NBC affiliate you know, from the local news to some national news program to some, you know, soap opera in the middle of the day, to some talk show host in the afternoon, just because it’s the same, you know, station Exactly, right? Exactly. We switch around what’s on now we’re gonna flip through the channels, right? We’re a nation of channel flippers. So what does that mean for people who are buying TV?

Megan Ellis 24:02
Well, what it means is that they should buy programs. They should they should buy like, let’s start with one program. Let’s buy that same program every day, you know, every day of the week, if we can afford it, but at least four times a week. Yes, let’s be there consistently, consistently for, you know, my mom, Tony, who watches, you know, the news every morning. Let’s be there at 7am on Monday. Yes, be there at 7am on Tuesday. How about Wednesday? How

Brandon Welch 24:31
about Thursday? Because we’re creatures of habit, right? Absolutely, we tend to go to bed about the same time, wake up by the same time, make our coffee, the same time, brush our teeth, the same time, drive the same route to work, watch the same 15 minutes of news on the way out the door, listen to the same couple of radio stations on the way,

Megan Ellis 24:47
influenced by the same billboards, the same, you know, all of those same things every day. Yeah, humanity

Brandon Welch 24:53
as creatures of habit. And so there are exceptions to the rule, but on any given day, that’s how, that’s how you. Guarantee reaching that same person over and over. That’s how you guarantee that frequency. Whereas a lot of schedules will come and say, Well, we’re gonna put you in like nine different programs, and you’re like, Ooh, that sounds fancy. I can afford nine programs. And they’ll be like, yeah, you’ll be in Dancing with the Stars, and then you’ll be in this news program, and you’re gonna put you in Ellen and all this stuff, and Dr Phil and all these fancy things.

Megan Ellis 25:18
And it sounds so good. It sounds so good to a business owner, or, you know, to the person that’s placing that media, because they feel like they’re getting such a great deal, yes,

Brandon Welch 25:28
you know, or worse. And somebody needs to hear this right now, they’ll do what’s called an R, o, s, a run of station, yeah, program, right? And, and then they’re just guaranteeing, guaranteeing you a large time window, like, you know, 3pm to 6pm your ad is going to be on some part of that time period. And, my goodness, the audience has cycled out every 30 minutes, so five or six times by then, right? So then you’re just randomly going, and they don’t have to guarantee you to a program. So some people right now are probably, have bought a big group of spots and a big red flag. And I want you to be mad at your rep, but I just want you to be a little more educated than this. If somebody’s talking to you about how many spots you’re getting and not saying, No, you this is the program you own. This is the audience that you’re going to become famous with. You need to be careful, and you need to say, I’d actually like to buy in programs, not in run of station, not in ROS or not in random time slots. Okay, that’s a great tip, yeah, because that honestly, and where this really, really happens is January, there’s a lot of reps that are selling what’s called a first quarter package, or selling some big intro package, or they’ll call it some, you know, silver plus, or whatever. They’ll have a fancy name for it, and they’ll probably call you into their TV station room, and they’ll bring some out of town guy with a briefcase, and he’ll talk to you about the power of TV. And they’ll say, and the good news is, now we got a first quarter special, and we get all these spots, and they’re going to try to sell you a lot of inventory. It’s going to sound really good, because the values are discounted, right? But you’re not going to do the ultimate thing, which is the human thing, which is be frequent with the same person, and you do not want randomness to your schedule, especially if you’re a new advertiser or you haven’t been bonded with your community for more than three or four years. I

Megan Ellis 27:12
love that. I’m saying so much sense. Yeah. Um,

Brandon Welch 27:15
slight disclaimer, if you’re well known already, if you’re like a legacy business, like some of our clients are at this, at this stage where it’s like, it doesn’t know, it doesn’t matter where they put their ads now, because everybody, like all million people, have heard of them. And so any point is a frequency point. But I’m talking about my people, who are, you know, at that sub $5 million business mark that are trying to grow. Yeah,

Megan Ellis 27:41
they’re just picking up steam. They’re they’re trying to make their way out of that highway, and they’re just getting going. So, so

Brandon Welch 27:47
TV, you want to buy one program fill it up. When we say days per week, that means you’re gonna have one spot in the program every day for for at least four days of the week. So if it’s a Monday to Friday program. I’m thinking like, you know, 7am news or something like that. You want to be in that program, and hopefully they’re 30 minute programs. Like, if it’s an hour long program, you probably need to go at least five times a week, if not six or seven, because that hour long very rarely does the audience sit there and watch the whole time. But you want four times per week in a 30 minute program, and buy one program, and then if you have budget left over, and by the way, you do this 52 weeks a year, we don’t take off for Christmas. We don’t take off for Fourth of July. We don’t slow down in the fall, just because our business goes down a little bit back to school time. We stay on every single day because sleep erases the recall every night’s sleep, somebody goes without hearing you or being reminded of who you are, dilutes and takes away that stickiness of of your likeness in their mind. I recall so doing every every four times a week. And let’s just say the program costs $500 and you’re doing it four times a week. So that’s $2,000 a week times 52 weeks. We got it. We just spent $104,000 and if you got money left over, and you’re like, cool, I got 50,000 more bucks because I said I was going to spend that on my company this year. Then buy another program, right? Yes. Do you want to talk a little bit about picking programs?

Megan Ellis 29:13
I yeah, I would love to talk about that. This is the way that I think about that. I like to think about buying news or buying shows that people are so excited to see that they they don’t want to DVR it, they want to watch it live, such as news products such as, yeah, I don’t know, Wheel of Fortune, or some show that they love every day. Man Andy Griffith used to be in this market as

Brandon Welch 29:39
a weird one, but yeah, they watch that show. Like, yeah, 50,000 people, they turn in to watch that every

Megan Ellis 29:45
what was it was like a 1230 to one, I can’t even recall, but it was like the best place to buy TV for a certain demographic, right? Because those people, they would watch the new news, and then right after, they’d hang out for Andy Griffith. And it was like, no. Nostalgic hour. It was such a winning combination. I love buying things that people want to see every day. Yes, habitual TV. Habitual TV. Yeah. So it’s kind of difficult to buy sports or to buy events or specials, because those things are rare. They’re not consistent buys. So we have to buy those things differently. We still buy them. We just that’s not our core schedule. Yeah,

Brandon Welch 30:23
your core money you want to spend, the first money you want to spend, and having those 52 weeks a year is in programs that people come back to daily. And it’s guys, it’s going to be it’s going to be a handful of programs. It’s going to be news you won’t ever lose in life. You won’t ever lose in Live. We’re going to do a different episode on like, ratings and like, do some really nerdy stuff, like, how people can size one program up over another. What you want to ask your rep for all the programs like, pick, pick the one that’s the most efficient for your demographic first. So say, hey, 45 plus is my demographic. I want the program that is the most efficient for that, and I want, I want your news programs and then your other syndicated programs, Wheel of Fortune, price is right. There’s some, there’s some soap opera type stuff there that comes on every day in some markets, but pick that audience, Okay, Ellen, Dr Phil stuff like that, yeah, although those are old programs, but yeah, your daytime, Kelly Clarkson type stuff. Okay, so what are we doing for TV, picking one or two programs, probably for a starter budget. Um, now our clients, many of them, have seven or eight programs, but we never added programs, 2345, or six until we filled the other one up, right? I

Megan Ellis 31:37
love, I love starting with like midday news or like early fringe news or early morning news, because I can usually buy those programs consistently. Yes, I can usually afford to buy those programs consistently. If I’m a starter budget type of business, yes,

Brandon Welch 31:52
for clarity, that probably means your new news product or 11am news in your market, and most markets now have a have a 4pm or 5pm news that that you get larger groups of people for less amount of money. So

Megan Ellis 32:05
or 5am 6am yeah, yeah, yes,

Brandon Welch 32:09
okay, we talked about TV. How do we apply this to radio? Yeah, how

Megan Ellis 32:13
is radio? Do you want to talk about radio? How, how radio talk about

Brandon Welch 32:16
it? Okay, so you said, I love how you said this, people are loyal to programs, not stations, right? In TV, yeah. Well, in radio, people are loyal to stations, not programs, exactly. We tend to have the same, well, we all have the same six radio stations we flow through on our dial, but we tend to use two of them in a day’s time, right? And when one ad is really annoying, we switch over to the other. Or when one of them plays a song we don’t like, we don’t like, we switch over to the other right? So for radio, remember the macro goal here? The big goal is to reach the same people over and over and over again. So we are going to buy outside of one just little, tiny area on radio, because radio, collectively, throughout the day, has a big audience, but at any given time, it’s pretty small. In a medium sized market, the biggest radio station in town may have six or 8000 people listening any every given 15 minutes, but and that changes. The the bigger your market is and the longer your drive time is, those audiences will get bigger. But take a take a Tulsa or a Houston or a, you know, a place that doesn’t have a ton of, like, hour long traffic, your audience cycles out pretty quick. So to reach that larger group of collective people, we have to be on more often every day. Okay, right? We are looking for what is a measured four frequency with the average audience four times per week. Now, your radio station rep can tell you what your average frequency is. There are programs that media buyers like us have to calculate that. But your radio rep can tell you, and you say, hey, I want to be on one station. I want to fill one station up. That’s my glass. And I want to be on enough times to where I get a four frequency in America right now, August of 2024 that tends to be 30 to 35 spots per week, between the hours of six A and 7b make sense. So if a radio station has a cumulative audience of 50,000 people in a week, and those spots cost on average $50 a piece. I’m buying 30 of them, that’s $1,500 a week, times um, 52 weeks a year, that is 5000 plus 25 that’s $75,000 and an annual schedule, I’m spending that on one station before I add another. Now, some people’s minds are blown, yeah, on one station, okay, and that, that is the scientific frequency. We’re not going to go into this. But Roy Williams, who was a legend, he was the most effective small business advertising dude of our time, grew lots of, lots of little tiny companies into mega, mega. $200 million plus companies. His his formula actually used to be a three frequency, but we have upped that because today’s consumer has a more fragmented mind. Today’s media is more fragmented, and to get that proper recall where it over time, it equals this no like and trust factor, you want to be on minimum of 30 spots a week between the hours of 6am and 7p i really

Megan Ellis 35:24
like to buy 35 or to 40, honestly, because, bless our little hearts, we’re just we have too many things fighting for our attention these days.

Brandon Welch 35:33
Yeah. So if, if you can’t afford that $75,000 station to do it at that frequency, guess what you do?

Megan Ellis 35:40
You minimize the time frame? Well, first

Brandon Welch 35:44
of all, we look for a smaller station. We look for a station we can’t afford. Well said, okay, yeah, so, so there’s a station that’s not as big or grand or well known, but they do have a loyal audience. Trust me, they have a loyal audience. Every broadcast station has some weird little group of people that eventually are going to need to buy what you do, and even if the audience is small, don’t think that biggest is always the best. The one you can afford, the right frequency with is the best for you. Okay,

Megan Ellis 36:11
other things that you can do, or you can you can break out like the radio station that you’re buying oftentimes, like, let’s say it’s talk, talk radio stations. You can buy it. You can buy programs and radio stations too. You

Brandon Welch 36:23
can talk. Is a little bit of an exception, because some people will switch the dial for a specific radio host or a specific radio All right, if you’re in a really big market, you know, I’m thinking LA, Atlanta, even Charlotte. I’m just thinking these really expensive Chicago, top 10 type markets, Austin, Dallas, all that stuff, and you’re going, golly, I’m, I’m just a, I’m just a small starter out advertiser, and I’ve got 50 or 60 grand to spend. How in the world am I going to make this work? Buy a specific hour and fill, or, sorry, buy a specific program or a day part is what they call that so from like 6am to 10am but fill it chock full of like 30 spots a week, right? Or maybe 10 or 15 a week, but in those combined hours. But that’s a little bit fancy of a topic for the average person. You should be cautious if you’re not buying at least 30 to 35 spots between six A and 7p Monday through Friday. Okay, people are asking, What about weekends? Those are bonus. Sometimes you can get those thrown in if you ask the right questions. Go back and listen to our episode on how to get the best deal on TV and radio advertising with the one on Megan Ellis. But you want that course schedule to be within the most consistent times people have a eight to five work lifestyle, right? So TV, four times a week, buy a program before you add another program, four times a week, 52 weeks a year radio, buy a station, 30 to 35 spots a week, between six A and 7p 52 weeks a year before we add another radio station, there are some of our media rep friends going, dang it, that’s not at all what I need to sell. It’s not what my boss told me to do. Here’s what you do, if you’re those guys. I’m gonna talk about media rep friends, your clients, if you do it this way, will start to grow so much faster and so much better that you’re going to have a reputation within a year or two’s time where you’re not going to have to worry about selling everything to everybody. Only sell the clients that are willing to do a 52 week schedule, show them this episode and get them a copy of Roy Williams book for wizard of ads. To back that up. But then for the for the small advertiser that can’t do your big station, like pick

Megan Ellis 38:49
your can’t do $75,000 a year, yeah, pick

Brandon Welch 38:52
your, pick your red headed step child client, or sorry, station, not client, Reddit, step child station, the one that is the smallest is the smallest, yeah, and go make somebody freaking famous with that 20,000 people, yeah, they’re probably gonna grow faster than the fancy guy doing the big station, right?

Megan Ellis 39:09
There’s a way to do it. Yeah, there’s a way to make it work, make them. We had a, we have a

Brandon Welch 39:15
client that’s been doing radio like, 30 years, and they started so obviously before us. Because obviously Megan and I aren’t even 30 yet, but they started way, way, way long ago on like the smallest station of town, and they built this wonderful big business by starting and never breaking loyalty with this one audience, and they’re still with that audience. Now. They’ve added four or five other audiences, but you can do that. And so tell your boss, hey, I’m going to meet my sales quotas, but I’m going to do it by selling fewer things to per client at a time. We’ve made a really long episode. What are we doing? Back to the big thing, you’re trying to win people over long before the sale, and to do that, you need to reach them often, just like you would build a good friendship and good relationship. In broadcast, this means choosing fewer audiences with higher frequency and entertaining them, making them think like, know, trust us on a daily and weekly basis, we don’t take off. We do this every week of the year, regardless of seasonality, regardless of our industry, and before we start fragmenting our budget into these other weird little digital things or add ons that the station may want to sell us for their needs. We’re going to say, No, thank you. I’d like to fill one glass at a time, and you’re going to become famous with that group of people, and they’re going to make you so much money that you’re going to be able to afford to do all the other things, but you’re just going to do them a little bit later, and so that you can do them

Megan Ellis 40:39
very well. I love it. You just summed up a very complex thing. You just made it sound very, very simple. Well, it is

Brandon Welch 40:45
simple. Most genius is simple, right? I suppose so it’s our own little agendas that make things more complex than they ought to be. Yeah, that’s my TED Talk. All right, so we’ll be back here every week answering your real like marketing questions. In the meantime, there’s somebody you know that’s either frustrated with their radio advertising or TV advertising, or they’re not growing as fast as they’d like, or they’re contemplating,

Megan Ellis 41:12
should I even decide it? And they don’t believe that it worked because they didn’t follow any of these formulas,

Brandon Welch 41:17
or, yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of people that have just quit,

Megan Ellis 41:21
yeah, they’re like, I tried that that did not work. I did that for two months, and I got nothing. Side Story. We

Brandon Welch 41:26
had somebody in here one time, like, I tried radio and didn’t work. And we’re like, what’d you do? Like, well, I put it on for two weeks and I was on four different stations, and I spent $3,000 and I didn’t get any calls. And I’m like, well, there’s about five things wrong with that. Let’s try it a different way. So, you know somebody like that? Maybe you are that person. We have dozens and dozens of examples of owner operated companies that were humble, hard workers just had a vision to do something good for their community and build a good company that weren’t marketing gurus, and they followed these simple formulas, and now they’re dadgum millionaires, and they’re doing all these fun, wonderful things, and are growing wonderful companies and expanding to multiple states and guys, this is the formula like you want the media formula. It’s really not fancy. You should be weary of fancy. So forward this episode to one of those people. Or if it’s you, listen to it again, keep it handy and send your questions, if you got a Yeah, but, or what if, or I did this, or what do you think of this? I would personally love to answer that for you, and I know Megan.

Megan Ellis 42:28
Yes, me too. Send, send us your question, your questions. That’s Maven

Brandon Welch 42:32
Monday at frankon, maven.com or if you want to skip me, just go to Megan at frankon, maven.com and we’ll talk about it. We’ll bring out the schedule. We would love to workshop that with you so no strings attached. We will be back here every Monday answering your real life marketing questions, because marketers who can’t teach you why

Megan Ellis 42:52
are just a fancy lie. Have a great week.