Radio Sales Café

Happy Friday, everyone!

Here's this week's poll question:

How much external advertising does your station do?  When and where do you advertise in other media?

Looking forward to reading your replies!

we do lots of poster and bus advertising.

Good Friday morning...... we do as much as possible. We trade with 3 television stations and choose the appropriate channels to broadcast our commercials on fitting with our target demographics and format. As well as newspaper.

I've found that promoting a small market Radio station on outside media can be difficult because in many small markets there isn't much outside media except the newspaper, the cable system, and maybe if you're lucky there is a billboard company. In our particular case we publish a daily print product, so we cross promote in that, and we promote ourselves on our website. We have used specific channels on the cable to promote specific programming, but unless you're on one of the two or three major cable channels, the viewership is small. Most of the time we use off-air promotion to show our advertisers that we're doing what we tell them to do.

We do very little outside the station. We're a very small market. We do have a trade agreement with the local newspaper. They advertise with us and we with them. We use that trade when we're doing promotions, etc.

We also trade with the paper and try to cross promote with our local television stations on specific events. Our market is very small 6 total radio stations (of which we own 3). We use facebook for all three stations and we also have a more client focused facebook page that we use to promote ideas and opportunities in the business community. We have a great relationship with the Small Business Development Center and we do Seminars and workshops with them. We try to practice what we advise...Using radio and supplementing digitally (with the exception of MAJOR station events).

I am in a small market on an island in Alaska and we do very little outside advertising. The advertising we do is usually centered around running ads in the local arts council programs, the high school schedule of athletics poster and some paper advertising with our sister company. In Alaska, billboard advertising is illegal, but we do have signs on our building and that we take to live remotes along with a couple of banners.

Julie Slanaker
KFMJ 99.9 FM

We advertise on Busbacks, Bus sides and Billboards on the Freeway. We do a light campaign throughout the year and hit it heavy during Arbitron Ratings which is twice a year in our market. We also promote our promotions heavy during ratings.

The Pullman stations have a trade with the local newspaper and the only broadcast TV station in the area, used mainly to promote the annual Palouse Empire Home & Garden EXPO - both to solicit prospective exhibitors and later to draw traffic to the event. The stations also receive advertising on the community classifieds site that we put together in partnership with a local ISP. PalouseAds.com has become well established over the years and is a popular marketplace for buying/selling/trading. (A visit to the site is the only way to appreciate the volume of activity it gets.) There's good potential for selling online display advertising that has not yet been realized. The stations have also used branded merchandise (t-shirts, BBQ aprons, coffee mugs, sewing kits, bottle openers, frisbees, etc.) to gain exposure and goodwill. In the early 1980's the station hired a professional sign artist to paint the station logo on the side of a grain elevator right on the main highway between the cities of Pullman and Moscow. Unfortunately, a couple of years later the property owner erected a second grain elevator on the sign-side of the first, effectively hiding the advertising message from view. In the late '80's or early 90's, our esteemed competitors in Colfax (15 miles from Pullman) had the brilliant idea of putting the logos of two of their stations on the sides of cement mixer trucks that regularly deliver to construction sites throughout the market. I thought it a clever and effective way to gain exposure for the stations.

We operate one commercial and one non-com. A local billboard company graciously furnishes us space when available, we just pay for vinyl covers. A couple of local newspapers/shoppers are used on a trade basis. This gets our name "out there".