Overview

While iPods and other communication options make it more difficult to reach younger age groups with radio, the more mature audience for hospice messages is still very reachable with traditional radio advertising. In larger markets, you can target your message by selecting the station with programming that matches your target audiences’ tastes. You can also target your messages on radio by scheduling your spots to air at the most advantageous times.

Listenership for radio is good during the morning and afternoon “drive times” – the times people drive to or from work, reaching a good share of all adult listeners while they’re in the car. In many markets, radio also has strong listenership during the workday as well. But radio listening decreases significantly after 7 p.m. on most stations.

Radio spots are particularly cost-effective in smaller markets, where spots running on just one station can reach a large percentage of a target audience. In larger markets with multiple stations and many formats, advertisers must buy spots to run on several stations if they want their message to reach the same percentage of audience. In this case, the fractured nature of multiple-station markets will offset some of radio’s traditional cost effectiveness.

Advantages of Radio Advertising

• Radio is highly flexible with very good cost efficiency per message delivered to a listener.
• Radio offers the ability for you to get on the air quickly, with minimal advance production or planning time. It’s also easy to change your message, or to air more than one message within the same ad schedule.
• The cost of producing a radio spot is lower than the production costs for outdoor or television advertising. With a significant schedule, some stations produce spots for free.
• Because radio is audio only, you can let the listener’s imagination envision your spot emanating from an exotic location, or set amidst the peace and quiet of a babbling brook. The “theatre of the mind” makes it possible to utilize the sound effects and role-playing possibilities offered by radio, unhampered by restrictions of the visual dimension.
• Radio is a good complementary medium – it can reinforce the messages running in newspapers, TV or billboards.

Radio Usage Tips:

• The key to effective radio for hospices is repetition— repeat your name several times within a commercial and run your spots several times within each day of the schedule. If the name of your Web site is easy to recall, include that as well.
• We recommend that you use a 30-second unit for your hospice story, and try to capture one main idea per commercial.
• Add listener interest by using testimonials or interviews from people who have used your hospice, taking the very best comments from their interviews for inclusion in your spot.
• For maximum reach, buy a combination of time periods: buy some morning and evening “drive time” spots on selected days. Then, buy some broad rotators to fill out your schedule.
• A Run-of-Schedule (ROS) radio buy, where spots may air within a wide range of time periods, can be economical and effective. But be sure to specify that your spots are truly spread out—not lumped together in one three-hour time period, for example.