Traditional Channels: When Print, Radio, TV and Direct Mail Still Make Sense

A salesperson from the local paper walks into a new business with a rate card and an offer to design the ad for free. The owner says yes to both. Six months later there are four versions of the company’s look floating around town, produced by four different in-house design departments, and none of them brought in a call anyone can point to. I have seen this so often that I called it, in my book, the most common mistake a startup makes with marketing material.

Traditional channels still work. What has never worked is buying them the way that owner did.

The two questions before any traditional buy

Whatever the medium, two questions decide whether your money comes back. Does the audience match my avatar? Does the ad ask for one clear action?

The first question means real homework. Every station, paper, magazine and mailing list has audience information and will show it to you if you ask. Sit with your perfect-client profile from earlier in this course and compare. The radio show that runs your ad at seven in the morning has a listener; is she your Jane? If you cannot say yes with a straight face, no price is a good price. Free placement can be actively harmful if it puts your name among businesses you would not want to be associated with; knowing who you are as a brand tells you where not to appear as much as where to appear.

The second question separates an advertisement from a branding exercise. Unless you have deliberately chosen to run a branding piece, every ad tells the reader or listener what to do next: call this number, stop by this weekend, visit this page. One action, stated plainly.

Print

A good print ad can pay for itself several times over and a bad one is a waste of paper and money. The key is understanding how people move through a page and using the artwork to match. The eye scans a printed page in a predictable path, roughly from top left across, down, and finishing in the bottom right corner. Put what catches attention where the eye lands first, build curiosity in the middle, and place the action where the eye finishes.

If you can avoid it, do not let the publication design your ad. Their designers are running a factory: as many ads as possible in a day, with no stake in your brand or your results. Work with one designer who understands who you want to be, and reuse the same base design across placements. Fold the cost of designing the ad into the cost of running it; that is the only honest way to compare a print buy to any other channel.

Radio

Radio can be very effective and very cost-effective, and it is one of the easiest media to target if you do the work. Look at the shows a station runs, ask for their audience information, and match it against your perfect client. Before you sign, ask four things. Is the show’s audience the same as mine? Is the spot built around a call to action? Can the listener actually hear what is being advertised, or is the music drowning it? Will the station produce the spot, and do I get a copy I can use elsewhere? Radio can be your best friend or your worst enemy, and which one depends on the homework you did before you paid.

Television

Television still reaches the senses at once in a way almost nothing else does: sight, sound and emotion in the same moment. The catch is budget, and on a local scale it is one of the hardest channels to measure. It takes a meaningful spend to do well, and a badly produced spot wastes the entire medium. If television is right for you, and for some local businesses it is, work with a proper production team and make the spot earn its air time. A cheap ad on an expensive medium is the worst of both.

Direct mail and promotional items

Direct mail lives or dies on the list. A postcard to the right five hundred homes with one clear offer beats a glossy mailer to ten thousand random addresses. Match the list to your avatar, keep the offer to one thing, and track the response with a code or a dedicated number.

Promotional items are, as I put it in my book, both the most expensive and the cheapest advertising there is. Per piece they cost a lot. Per year of exposure they cost almost nothing; how many mugs and pens are in your garage from businesses that no longer exist? The ad outlasted the business. So think before you order. At a trade show, a pen makes you one of a hundred handing out pens. A letter opener, a corkscrew, something that relates to what you do, gets noticed when the show bag is emptied back at the office. We once did a co-op piece for three companies at a show: an aluminum CD case with three brochures inside shaped like discs and all three logos on the outside. People came to the booths asking for the case because they had seen others carrying it. It cost only a little more than pens and brochures for all three, and every one of them got more from that show than from any before it. Being different and sharing the cost: two old ideas, combined. Talk to the promotional suppliers in your area; many will brainstorm with you.

And remember your current customers. A useful reminder item sent to someone who already buys from you is marketing to the people most likely to buy again.

Before the next proposal

Take the next traditional proposal that lands on your desk, or the last one you said no to. Ask for the audience information and lay it beside your avatar. Then draft the one sentence of action your ad would end with. If the audience does not match or you cannot write the sentence, you have your answer.

The real cost

Properly evaluating a print, radio or mail proposal takes two to four hours including the conversations with the rep and your designer. Costs range from small for a postcard run or community paper to substantial for television, so ask the rep for the full cost including production and get it in writing before you decide. Design and production should always be counted in. If you cannot afford to have the ad made properly, you cannot afford the placement.