How to Measure ROI on Radio Marketing

Tracking marketing performance is a crucial measure to promote a business and attract new customers effectively. Ultimately, your goal is to recognize a healthy return for your marketing spend. If you don’t measure your incremental ad performance, you risk ending the campaign only to find you wasted all your money and effort.

ROI is an essential measurement for all ad performance. However, you need a different set of metrics than digital to measure your ROI for radio ads accurately. It requires specific performance measuring tactics to demonstrate your radio marketing campaign’s success effectively. 

Pick Your Key Performance Indicators

Part of having a solid marketing plan is defining your key performance indicators. Without KPIs, it is difficult to determine whether your business is benefitting as you expected. Even worse, you won’t be able to make critical course corrections if your ads aren’t working. Setting your key performance indicators is best accomplished during the planning stage when you determine who your audience is and where to reach them.

Setting SMART goals is an excellent way to set key performance indicators for measuring radio effectiveness. SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely, meaning that you have clear criteria by which to judge the efficacy of your ad spend. This easy-to-follow, repeatable roadmap allows you to think strategically about what you want to achieve with your radio ads. SMART goals not only help you craft KPIs that you can use to measure efficacy to date but give you some predictive measures that allow you to correct course if necessary.  

Develop Unique Links For Your Radio Ads

Another way to measure how well your radio ad is performing is to develop a proxy measurement. When your customer hears their favorite radio personality encourage them to try your product with a unique link or phone number, the resulting traffic is clearly a result of your ads. There are several ways you can do this:

• A unique URL or landing page — Also called a vanity URL, it could be a memorable link like “BestProductEver.com” 
• Tracking text-in — It lets customers text a number to give marketers the phone numbers of interested consumers and lets the customer automatically receive coupon codes or offers 
• Tracking phone number — A tracking phone number is an excellent solution for businesses like plumbers or locksmiths that must talk to people to provide a quote. 
• Tracking link clicks — These are popular for online radio platforms, podcasts, and popup ads

Establishing a unique link is a very effective alternative to KPIs for measuring how many people call or visit your site due to your radio spot. You can use several tactics like clever URLs, repetitive and easy-to-remember numbers, or numbers that spell out your brand or even the radio station call letters or name. After tracking, if you aren’t getting the traffic boost you expected from your radio ads, you may want to adjust your strategy.   

Check For Increased Web Traffic

Measuring radio ad effectiveness can be accomplished even without KPIs or unique links. The often difficult task of tracking your marketing activities’ ROI can be made more accessible by putting tools and strategies in place to track site traffic increases in volume, quality, or conversions after your ads have aired. Forty percent of marketers admit monitoring the ROI of their marketing efforts is their top challenge. Using complex attribution tools, you can compile the analytics you need to track your ad impact with more granularity and sophistication.

Ask Your Customers

When your business needs more insight into how the customers perceive their brand, the most effective way is the most simple. Just ask. Asking your customers or using surveys to test brand and ad recall will help you determine how your ad is reaching people and that they remember it. One way to accomplish this is to do brand tracking surveys. 

Surveying in conjunction with a radio advertising campaign gives you insight into the ad’s overall impact, the customers’ purchase intent, and awareness of your brand without ever mentioning your brand.  This critical data gives marketers the information they need to craft even more effective campaigns in the future. It provides an understanding of how consumers feel about the brand before launching the radio ads. Surveying after the ads run lets you confirm the campaign’s efficacy by comparing it to survey results before the ad airing. 

You Can Measure ROI for Radio Marketing

While measuring the ROI of your radio marketing is challenging, it is absolutely achievable. Setting SMART goals to establish your key performance indicators gives your company guideposts to measure marketing efficacy before, during, and after the campaign. Implementing unique web links allows you to track customer behavior and web traffic lift after airing specific radio ads. Using attribution tools gives marketers quantifiable data for tracking your campaign’s ROI while asking your customers what they think about your brand before and after your radio ad airs lets you verify improvement in customer perception. 

As you plan your marketing campaign, keep in mind that while measuring ROI is important, it isn’t the only measure of your marketing effectiveness. Every business knows brand awareness and brand recall are critical success indicators. Keeping track of other metrics like brand awareness and recall amongst customers allows companies to track radio advertising returns to adjust their strategy in the future.