Using Radio As A Real Estate Agent
Advertising, at its core, fulfills the same business need regardless of what type of business you have. That business need is customer acquisition.
Whether you are in consumer facing business, a web business, or have a business-to-business model you need to acquire new customers. You need to acquire new customers to grow and you need to acquire new customers to replace the ones you are losing thru attrition or loss to competitors.
For a moment, throw out all you know about advertising and marketing. Let’s start with a clean slate. In this chapter I want to unpack advertising, marketing and direct response radio.
Many people consider advertising and marketing the same thing and use those terms interchangeably. Having a clear understanding of the differences will help you get a better picture of where to deploy your budget.
Advertising is different from marketing. Once we can get clear about the differences and uses between advertising and marketing. The unique aspect of direct response radio advertising will come into view. Knowing the differences can put your company on the path to growth.
The best way to distinguish advertising and marketing is to think of marketing as a pie. Inside that pie you have slices of advertising, market research, media planning, public relations, distribution, customer support, sales strategy and community involvement.
Furthermore inside each of those slices you have individual ingredients (components). Advertising can further be broken down into direct mail, radio, newspaper ads and door hangers to name a few.
The goal of this book is not to be a course on marketing. The goal of this book is to help you understand the unique aspects of radio and Direct Response Advertising.
Radio is a direct response medium. Copy (ad) is written to elicit a response that can be measured and evaluated for its effectiveness and profitability.
Another way to understand direct response advertising is to contrast it to other approaches to marketing. If I asked you who you thought of when I said “Who can save you money in 15 minutes or less?” Most likely, you would say Geico Insurance. Geico has spent millions of dollars spreading that brand message on both radio and television. Marketing, whether done on radio, billboards or through direct mail is about increasing brand awareness.
This form of advertising is designed primarily to influence memory recall of a product, service or “brand” and associate that product or service with some type of positive emotion. Brand advertising is not meant to directly impact sales. It is designed to increase awareness, recall and sometimes “intent to buy”.
With direct response advertising; specifically radio advertising, your ad contains a clear CTA (call to action). Most of the time this CTA is a “call now” prompt with a toll-free phone number. Sometimes the audience is directed to a URL landing page. As an aside, mixing Direct response medium (radio)
and online medium sales funnels is typically not a good idea however, there are times that it can be appropriate. By directing the audience to a unique phone number or URL you can easily track the effectiveness of your campaign. By tracking calls and conversions you can see an immediate ROI (return on investment). You can determine whether the effort resulted in profit (revenue – costs = profit). You do more of what “works” (profit) and stop doing what doesn’t work (no profit).
