[Joe W Brown]

Has anyone ever tried and got any results?

A local radio station quoted me £800 for 1 week advertising. Its a lot of money.

[Simon Gerrard]

I've tried it twice over the years. Unless you have very deep pockets and can afford to maintain a presence year round then forget it.
Seems like a good idea but people aren't used to buying through that medium and only persistence will win them over.
Simon

[david@zap-clean]

I've been wondering about this -

Listening to my local radio station I here some single operators advertising routinely, like 'The Lady plumber' (one woman band). A local skip hire business runs a multiple ad campaign continually...

I guess prices depend on the station's audience size. 
I'll report back if I get further than thinking about it.

[Joe W Brown]

The nice client of mine who works for vibe fm and quoted me that price for local advertising seemed to imply that I would need to be promoting a good offer for it to be succesfull.

Buy 1 get 1 free sort of thing.

Surely the advertising would extend far beyond the offer though, if it was done right. "Think carpet clean, think Carpet Ranger!"

[John Kelly]

Personally I think radio advertising is really suited to brand awareness over a long period rather than an ad to obtain work. I don't think carpet cleaning is an impulse buy so say a weeks campaign may not provide a lot of leads. Just like a leaflet campaign takes months to reap a substantial benefit. Do a leaflet once then you may as well put them in the bin. I may be wrong but thats my thoughts.

[Doctor Carpet (Ret'd)]

One of my near neighbour's is in charge of advertising for a local radio station. Having cleaned his carpets at home I in due course ended up getting an invite to one of their "promotional" evenings where they were trying to get more local businesses to commit to radio advertising.

The things I already knew simply confirmed that there are many other ways of spending your money efficiently on advertising for a greater return.

Firstly, radio advertising is indiscriminate in that you are not particularly targeting a specific audience in the same way that laflets can target a specific street.

Secondly, you have to buy "packages" of adverts with a campaign that'll run for a specific time. This sort of advertising really works when the campaign runs for weeks/months as the listeners slowly become aware of your brand. Also the adverts to keep costs down to you to make the package sound cheep will be run at all sorts of wierd times of the day-therby potentially missing the type of client you really want to target. (An advert running at 2 in the morning is more likely to get heard by teenagers who won't have any carpets to clean rather than say busy housewives or wealthy OAPs who will have already gone to bed.)

Also will your local radio station be playing the type of music that your potential clients would listen to?

The geographical spread of radio stations listeners means that you could do a lot of travelling when instead you may want to concentrate on a more localised area.

Personally I see it a bit like gambling. You get no return from the first advert so you say to yourself if I just run it a bit longer I may start to get my money back. I just can't see that happening.

I'm out of here.

Rog

[Andrew Briscoe]

I quit yellow pages last year, and instead this year put the money into a new local mag that comes out monthly, its quite a good read.
early this year they also set up a local community radio station, which covers a 10 mile radius. Actually busier now than i was in YP ,
radio was about £275 for 5 months 5 times a day, so was cheap as chips. Its non profit making. 

Have found the work i get from it is the higher end of the market, so job tickets have gone up along with my prices.

[Steve Chapman]

We've advertised on local radio for last two years and into our third. Its not cheap but seems to work well for us, the station is well known and covers three towns and I think we are the only carpet cleaning company on there.

The package we have goes out mostly mornings and targets housewives and those around the house during the day.

i dont think it would work for a new start, but we've been around for about 15 years so I think people recognize the name and go to the website. - we also sponsor the morning music quiz which draws alot of listeners.

It probably depends on area, local radio is quite well listened to in our locality, its always on in customers homes and offices and theres not much competition.

Regards
Steve

[Fran84]

And it's pretty catchy advert Steve