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Personnel Management

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Business Success Tips

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Checklists

Contributing Authors

	Stephanie Chandler Author of The Business Startup Checklist & Planning Guide
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	Tom Severance Author of Business Start-Up Guide
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	Joe Kennedy Author of The Small Business Owner's Manual
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	Steven D. Strauss Author of The Small Business Bible
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Media Outlets

Choose the best media to get your message to your target market. Knowing the demographics of your customers and their reading, listening, and viewing habits is essential.

Media choices vary with location and with changes in technology. Continue to test and compare to see if better choices become available. Measure the results of all advertising campaigns. Break them down to a return on investment that you can use to compare campaigns and strategies.

Here are some of the traditional media choices with comments on the suitability and advantages and disadvantages of each:

Newspaper:

Suitability: Useful for all general retailers; covers single community or metro area; zoned editions sometimes available; audience is generally male, older, higher income and education.

Advantages: Wide circulation, location segmentation, frequent publication, short lead time, and credibility. Favorable for cooperative advertising, volume and frequency discounts, and assistance for copy and layout.

Disadvantages: Non-selective audience, limited exposure, expensive, short life, limited reproduction quality.

Shopper:

Suitability: Useful for neighborhood retailers and service businesses; covers most local consumer households.

Advantages: Consumer orientation.

Disadvantages: Consumers don’t always read giveaways or take them seriously.

Yellow Pages:

Suitability: Useful for service providers, retailers of brand-name items, and highly specialized retailers. It covers the geographic area serving active shoppers.

Advantages: Users are in the market and ready to buy. This is often the first and only place a prospect may look.

Disadvantages: Limited to active shoppers; expensive.

Magazine:

Suitability: Local magazines useful for restaurants, entertainment businesses, specialty shops, mail-order businesses. Trade and national magazines available; zoned editions sometimes available; appeals to better-educated and more affluent.

Advantages: Delivery of a loyal, special-interest audience; high-quality production; volume and frequency discounts; credibility; reprint value. Several people often read the same issue.

Disadvantages: Limited audience, long lead-time, limited control over placement, expensive.

Radio:

Suitability: Useful for businesses catering to identifiable listening groups such as teens, homemakers, commuters; definable market area and demographics; works well in combination with other media.

Advantages: Target demographic and geographic segments; audio capability; relative low cost; short lead time; reaches large audience; reaches audience in cars; remnant (unsold) space rates, discounts, and bartering are all possible.

Disadvantages: Limited to audio; short life of message; subject to distractions while listening. Business must buy time consistently to be of value.

Television:

Suitability: Useful for sellers of products or services with wide appeal. Specialized cable channels can target a more specialized audience. It appeals to younger age group that is less oriented to print. It covers a definable market geographic area. Television is authoritative and influential.

Advantages: Dramatic impact, wide market coverage, visual and audio capabilities, short lead time, low cost per exposure, high prestige.

Disadvantages: High cost of time and production, requires production specialists, short exposure time.

Direct Mail:

Suitability: Useful for new and expanding businesses and for those that use coupons and catalogs. Demographic lists control audience and coverage.

Advantages: Personalized approach to an audience of good prospects; flexibility and control in reaching target market; no clutter from competing ads; stimulate action; easy to test and measure; useful for building a database; equalizer for small business.

Disadvantages: Easily thrown away as “junk mail”; high cost of lists and mailings.

Outdoor:

Suitability: Useful for amusement and tourist businesses and for brand-name retailers. It covers auto drivers in neighborhood or metro area.

Advantages: Dominant size, frequency of exposure, relatively inexpensive, message works 24 hours per day.

Disadvantages: Limited message possible; cannot reach well-defined target markets; clutter of many signs; short exposure time.

Transit:

Suitability: Useful for businesses along transit routes, especially those appealing to wage earners. It covers area served by transit system and appeals to employees, shoppers and pedestrians using or viewing the system.

Advantages: Repetition and length of exposure.

Disadvantages: Limited audience.