DRTV is the bread and butter of any huge success. Why? Because you can make the most money the fastest via TV. It’s also the most expensive and risky channel – so one has to consider the risk/reward tradeoff. As you’ll learn, radio plays the role of “risk minimizer” – that’s why including radio in your marketing efforts is such a smart business move.

We routinely work with DRTV agencies to craft a strategy that allows radio to provide the most strategic value to a DRTV campaign. Below you’ll find out why the most successful, most profitable DRTV campaigns also include radio advertising.

Before You Launch – How Radio Will Boost Profits

1. Radio will create a profit stream that can fund DRTV development efforts DRTV development and media testing is costly and requires a long timeline. In contrast, radio ad development and testing is inexpensive and quick. What costs $100,000 in TV costs $1000 in radio. What takes 3-6 months in TV takes 2-4 weeks in radio. With these advantages, you can build a radio campaign that delivers profits that can finance the TV development.

2. Radio will provide a source of testimonials Almost without exception, infomercials and DRTV spot ads are more effective if they contain real testimonials from real customers. Initiating a radio campaign prior to launching in DRTV provides a source of qualified, legitimate, authentic testimonials – and as every DRTV creative agency will tell you, those characteristics will make for very compelling stories that sell your product.

3. Learn about customers with real data, and gather insights inexpensively The radio ad development process will push your creative team to uncover the core customer insights that will drive the campaign, regardless of media channel. Therefore creative efforts in radio can be a valuable input into the TV ad development – not that they will transfer exactly, but the core elements of the psychology behind the appeal of the product will become clearer. This will greatly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the TV ad development.

4. Refine the “back-end” of your campaign There are many moving pieces to a successful direct response advertising campaign. The creative and the media are “front end”. The “back end” is comprised of areas such as sales, customer service, fulfillment. It can also include manufacturing and merchant processing. Leveraging radio allows you to refine many of the back-end details that go into making a campaign successful without the pressure that comes with a large ad development budget and large media buys. Refine the sales scripting, the offer path, pricing, and upsells so your close rate and average revenue per order are strong. Establish and improve the “save the sale” efforts in your customer service area. And fix any product or packaging issues that would drive a high return rate and therefore impede a rapid TV roll-out.

Already Running a DRTV Campaign? Here’s How Radio Will Boost Your Profits:

1. Acquire incremental new customers
It is commonly known that Radio and TV audiences don’t overlap very much. That means when you advertise with radio, you aren’t cannibalizing your TV sales. You are reaching a whole new group of customers. Nearly all TV campaigns reach a point where their results begin to fall off. If you want to maximize the profit of your campaign, and build the strongest brand, you can’t do it without radio.

2. Establish a strong competitive position in the market
You’ve spent a lot of time and money building your DRTV campaign and you’re finally reaping the profits from it. Your media spend has grown and you know you’re one of the top advertisers. So does the competition. If you want to establish a strong position in the marketplace verses the competition, leaving radio out of the mix is a terrible mistake. Many new entrants will look for that weakness, establish a profitable radio campaign and fund their competitive entry into TV. The next thing you know, your entry into retail is threatened.

3. Minimize call abandonment through efficient call center scheduling
This is particularly true for soft-offer campaigns which typically go to “smaller” call centers where staffing is a science based on the call forecast. Basic math says that radio will produce smaller call spikes. As a result, radio can “smooth out” the call volume and allow the call centers to effectively staff so they don’t abandon the calls coming in off of TV.

4. Inexpensive means of ongoing creative testing
Fresh creative appeals are the lifeblood of all successful advertising campaigns. Without them, you have a “flash in the pan” campaign. With them, you have a long-running success that becomes a brand. That’s why ongoing testing is so important. Radio provides a low cost way to ensure ongoing testing of different appeals, offers, pricing, or packaging on a smaller scale before rolling out. And while radio campaigns can be set up as mass appeal like TV, but they also can be highly targeted. If you find that you have a certain common profile target customer that you are – or are not – capturing with TV, radio’s ability to target can be of significant use. Developing that area will further enhance your profits.

Brett Astor, Vice President at Strategic Media, Inc. has over 10 years experience in direct response radio and radio advertising.

The most difficult part of writing about the “5 Biggest Mistakes” is narrowing down the list. It would be easier to write about the “Top 20 Mistakes”. Nonetheless, this paper presents the blockbuster mistakes that are a) way too commonly made, b) sure to doom a direct response radio advertising campaign, and c) relatively easily avoidable. In other words, get these things right, and you’ll live to face the lesser challenges with greater strength and greater knowledge.

Biggest Direct Response Radio Mistake #1: Faulty or non-existent testing methodology

There are many ways for a testing methodology to fall short, which is why this is #1 on the list. Testing the wrong variables, testing in the wrong order, testing too many variables, testing too few variables. The list is long. The point to remember is that success requires a scientific approach. That means disciplined and well thought out – a “ready-aim-fire” approach verses “fire-fire-fire”. Any good direct response agency has staff that understands the process for conducting scientific research, particularly research methods, statistics, and database management. The best DR agencies have applied this knowledge over time and have developed a proven testing methodology, along with the supporting technological infrastructure, that will get you from testing to profitability with the least amount of up-front time and money.

If you don’t follow a well-defined, proven testing methodology, you are throwing your ad dollars away. Period. You simply will not know why one ad works better than another or whether there are other approaches that could work better. You will just be out of money before you can determine whether your campaign has legs.

Biggest Direct Response Mistake #2: Inadequate data capture and analysis

The power of direct response radio stems in part from the ability to collect and analyze results from the bounty of data that can be collected - and to distill insights that drive further refinement of the campaign. As all experienced marketers know, it is the insights that lead you to grand successes. With the right tools, technology, and processes, it is possible to conduct station-by station analysis, look at performance by market, format, day of the week, daypart, and a whole host of other variables to understand what’s working and what’s not for a particular campaign. This is vital to the process of optimizing campaign profitability.

Yet many avoid this process, shield it from their clients, or conduct “analysis lite” on the data. The problem is that you can’t distill the insights if you don’t dive into the analysis. As a result, perfectly viable campaigns are being deemed failures. In these situations people declare “radio just doesn’t work”, and proceed to run away as fast as possible. Avoid this mistake by making sure your media buys are backed by thorough, detailed analysis, not a cookie-cutter approach cloaked in unproven, formulaic assumptions.

Biggest Direct Response Mistake #3: Flying blind

It still astounds us how many people, smart businesspeople, ask us to move forward with advertising before they know the basic key metrics associated with their campaign. We refer to this as “flying blind.” It is not unlike deciding to fly a plane surrounded by instruments that are providing you data you can’t use to make important decisions about flying the plane. Turn left, turn right, speed up, ascend, descend? Scary thought? It should be, because absent a tremendous amount of luck it spells sure death.

Every direct response campaign has a similar set of key profitability metrics and each one has a hurdle or break-even level that must be met in order to achieve some level of profitability. The big mistake is spending a dime before this exercise has been completed. Why? Because when you get the test results back, you won’t know what to make of the data. You won’t have a context within which to assess whether what you are looking at is good, amazing or awful. Bottom line: model the campaign, identify the key metrics, and know what those numbers have to be. And by all means, make sure your agency knows so they can maximize the profitability of your media campaign.

Biggest Direct Response Mistake #4: Having the wrong people on the bus

Each DR campaign is comprised of similar vendors. This includes a manufacturer, a creative and media buying agency, a sales center, a customer service group, and a fulfillment center. You can poll any one of these groups of vendors and there is one thing they would all agree on: not one of them alone can make the campaign a success. This is a classic team situation. If one member drops the ball, the whole team fails. As the client, perhaps the single biggest impact you’ll have on the success of the campaign is how you decide to choose the members of your team – who you put “on the bus”. Sales centers will always tell you they will meet the needs you’ve expressed (guess what, they’re good at sales!). Big agencies will always try to convince you that only they can get the lowest rates and only they can grow your campaign really big (as if suddenly the laws of market economics don’t apply). Will you choose the ones who say they’ve been around since the beginning of time and believe they know all there is to know, or the ones who are experienced but also unassuming enough to be constantly learning, improving, and giving birth to new ideas? Will you choose vendors who play nice with the other team members, or those who throw the others under the bus at the first sign of trouble? If you don’t choose wisely, your campaign could fail for reasons you won’t even understand.

Biggest Direct Response Mistake #5: A corrupted creative process

The biggest mistake in the creative development process is…not having a disciplined approach. This is too common and is easily avoidable. To avoid this mistake, you’ve got to communicate one thing very clearly: how do you define success? Agencies want to please the client. If you ask for an ad that will make you proud (even though you aren’t the target market), then you’ll get exactly that. If you ask for an ad that sounds and/or looks like all other ads, you’ll get that. You’ll get an ad that won’t stand out, won’t offend anyone, and won’t be created using the best direct response wisdom available. The ad will bomb. Every time.

Once you communicate the definition of success, allow the creative process to unfold. A professional direct response ad creator is someone who has learned a tremendous amount about what works and what doesn’t, on millions of other people's dimes. We’ve built a large database of direct response wisdom that can save you a lot of time and money. If you define success as an ad that reaches a certain CPO, and trust the creative process, you’re much more likely to get an ad that produces successful results. Now that will make you proud.

Final Words

Now that you are armed with knowledge of the top 5 Biggest Mistakes in Direct Response Radio, you are well on your way to boosting your chances of Direct Response success. To be sure, there are other mistakes to avoid. Knowing about these mistakes is half the battle. Knowing how to avoid them is the other half. How do you produce insights? How do you approach testing methodically? How do you know which vendors to choose? How do you develop breakthrough creative? How do you get the remnant rates on the best time slots?

Radio can be an enormously profitable customer acquisition channel for many businesses. We build and manage campaigns that range in size from $1 million to over $20 million in annual advertising spending. If you’d like to learn more about how to use direct response radio as an avenue for profitable growth, contact us at 1-866-488-3456 or by email at the5biggest@strategicmediainc.com.

You can also learn more about us at www.strategicmediainc.com.

Brett Astor, Vice President at Strategic Media, Inc., strategicmediainc.com, has over 10 years experience in direct response marketing and radio advertising.