What do you need help with?

Question: What are your thoughts on placing and ad in the paper or doing ads on the radio? We’re trying not to spend too much money as business has dropped off.

Gary Elekes; EGIA faculty member and iMarket Solutions Founder:

We’re doing PSAs on the radio in conjunction with our traditional media, which would be a radio campaign.

January through March is the shoulder season anyway in Arizona, so we were already prepared with the idea that we have a promotion. But we went to the radio station and said, “Hey, you guys aren’t going to have all of your advertising time filled up. If anybody cancels on you, can we have some PSA spots?”

Similar to what Wally is doing, we’re basically saying, “Hey, we’re here to serve the community, this is a bad time for all of us and we’re happy to help out anybody that needs medication or groceries or whatever.

So, I would recommend that you talk to the radio station and see if they’ve got some gaps. They have so much inventory to sell and if they’re getting cancellations they probably want to fill that time anyway.

They also have a requirement as part of their licensing through the Federal Trade Commission. They have to do certain public service announcements. They tend to do them in off periods to check a box but right now, it even helps the radio station.

We’ve had some personalities that we do work with and they sat in on those types of PSAs as well. Then I think your social media content – it depends on what you’re writing and it depends on what’s going on. It’s going to reach a certain audience.

It’s not going to reach everybody. Whether you audience. It’s not going to reach everybody. Whether you want to do a newspaper ad or whether you want to do something else. I think that’s very dependent upon your local marketplace.

I would recommend that you maybe send us a question and say which specific market you are in. So we can look a lot closer at the hard demographics and the psychographics of that community. If you’re in Los Angeles, you’re probably not going to afford to be able to go on TV or any of the major broadcast radio stations unless you’re a really scaled business.

If you’re in a smaller market or more rural type community, the costs are going to be a lot less, even the newspaper and so forth. So, I like where your mind is at there. I like how you’re thinking. I do believe that you need to try other medias to reach.

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