At the beginning of the pandemic, many companies cut their advertising and marketing budgets due to decreases in revenue. Some businesses thought that due to mass layoffs, customers would stop spending so advertising and marketing budgets were reduced. These companies hunkered down in response to economic hardship.
In addition to companies hesitating to continue or launch new advertising campaigns, television and radio stations were also struggling to bring in and keep clients. Agencies and marketing firms can use this opportunity to help both sides overcome pandemic induced hardship. As Silver Frog Marketing has seen, this can result in advertising and marketing campaigns that helped expand businesses during the pandemic. Here’s how businesses were able to grow during the pandemic, and practices to keep in mind while building post-pandemic advertising campaigns.
Digital Transformation
As businesses watched their pipelines freeze when the pandemic hit, leaders worked to keep and grow the relationships rather than depend on prospects. Many companies made the move to invest in digital transformation as their workforce wasn’t working at capacity since it minimized the impact on overall operations. By migrating and automating internal processes, companies were able to drive efficiency.
Externally, the migration to more robust platforms opened up opportunities to provide a superior customer experience as well. Implementation of customer journeys, for example, drove engagement, value, and upsell opportunities with current clients. Both internal and external impact squeezed more dollars and provide the baseline to springboard sales as the economy returned.
Negotiate On The Front End
For television and radio stations, the pandemic caused uncertainty due to changing advertising budgets and companies pulling their advertising campaigns. It became clear that agencies and stations need to work together in order to help fulfill their needs. Working together with a station to negotiate rates on the front end can not only benefit the station, but also benefit your client.
Finding elements like audience size and certain buying parameters to base negotiations on to get lower rates for all clients is something that can be key to these campaigns. Once you lower your rate, your cost per response will decrease and then your ROI and profitability will skyrocket.
Christina Ross, co-founder of Silver Frog Marketing
By negotiating these rates before you even talk to the client, you lock in company rates that can be hard for competitors to beat. Instead of negotiating based off of the specific company, negotiating on the front end can provide better unbiased pricing for the station and the client.
Respect And Set Realistic Budgets
During the pandemic, companies were hesitant to set aside large budgets due to the uncertainty and doubt that consumers would be spending money. That’s why its critical for companies to continue to set budgets they were comfortable with and respect them as the campaign is launched.
Always start with a budget that you are comfortable with. You can do this by analyzing past rates, experiences, and what has worked for you and your company. By setting these benchmarks, you can have a clear understanding of what you need to spend in order to pull in target revenue.
This understanding and holding honest conversations with clients during the pandemic lead to big success. Through researching market data, staying on top of rates and holding stations accountable for their run times to gain credits, companies can establish large wins for their clients.
Have a Flexible Schedule
The pandemic has been extremely hard to navigate because it’s an unpredictable factor. We have no insight on the sheer impact or trajectory of the pandemic simply because we’ve never navigated this before. During this time, it’s important for advertising campaigns to remain flexible.
Only booking clients out for two weeks, or a month, at a time allows for optimal flexibility. This allows agencies to analyze numbers and decide what markets, stations, and dayparts are best and where campaigns are hitting so you can focus on the best performers instead of wasting your client’s money.
This flexibility allows for companies and agencies to constantly pivot their campaigns to achieve higher ROI. As hardest hit areas continue to change and state government parameters loosen regarding reopening, allowing your campaign to have constant flexibility enables your advertising dollar to roll with the unpredictable punches that we face right now. More stagnant and lengthy campaigns will waste advertising dollars and result in lower response with higher cost per call.
Target Daytime Slots
During the pandemic, some consumers were being laid off while others were working from home.
Sometimes we have clients express a slight concern about airing during the day because of the erroneous assumption that all people watching TV during the day are unemployed. That was far from the truth, even before the pandemic, but now it’s even less so with so many people working from home.”
Steve Ross, co-founder of Silver Frog Marketing
With more people watching television and listening to the radio, cost per call rates dropped. More people were home meaning more people were seeing the product advertisements and calling in.
It’s important to take advantage of these slots since the audience is continuing to change. By tapping into this new audience, your product will be put in front of more people who are able to invest. It’s also allowing access to those who you may not be able to reach before the pandemic due to busy work schedules and low viewership from certain demographics.
Develop Specialized Measurement Tactics
When consumers respond to advertising campaigns, simply asking where they saw the advertisement can be a risky move. This is because most of the time, the consumer is so focused on the product that they don’t remember where they saw it. This can lead to misleading reporting by no fault of the customer.
To help measure advertisements, it’s best to use an authentic 800 number for every commercial. You can connect them and have these numbers streamline into the same calling center for your client’s convenience. By providing an authentic number for each advertisement, you can track where calls are coming from and produce more accurate reports. This way, you know exactly what stations are benefiting your client the most so you can continue to narrow successful sources of revenue and build ROI.
These numbers can be helpful when understanding what stations and markets your campaign should continue to target. By not having accurate measurements of response, it can not only hurt your campaign, but also hurt your advertising budget.
Pandemic Growth
As Silver Frog Marketing confronted more businesses that didn’t know if they were going to survive the pandemic, they continued efforts to reproduce their previous success. From growing clients’ budgets 500%, to decreasing clients’ cost per response by 66%, they enabled businesses to increase revenue and return on investment during the height of the pandemic; all while spending less money than they were used to.
Right now, it’s crucial for companies to continue to advertise to rebound from any loss and continue to grow.
Steve Ross, co-founder of Silver Frog Marketing
If you or your company would like to learn more about tips and tricks to improve advertising campaigns during the pandemic, visit the Silver Frog Marketing website.
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