Why Advertising On Fort Myers Radio Is More Effective Than TV?

Adweek quotes Mindshare's Arafel Buzan as saying, “Sound and the human experience are intimately and neurologically linked. It’s the first language we learn, and from infancy is processed faster and with greater emotional prioritization than any of our other senses.”

Ms. Buzan goes on to say, "The longstanding rule in creative, that storytelling requires sight, sound, and motion, has also insisted that sight is the most important part of that equation. So while over the years marketers have made the choices to buy visual-only mediums, the industry has largely devalued the potential of sound existing on its own for storytelling.”

Many SWFL small business owners and marketers have discovered the power of telling their stories with advertising on Fort Myers radio stations.

Biggy's Place is a 164-seat restaurant serving breakfast and lunch in Fort Myers. Since new owners took over the location just over five years ago, sales have increased an astonishing 65%.

"We've grown every year since we started," says Bob Bigelow (aka Biggy) who now owns the restaurant along with his wife, Dawn. "Advertising on Fort Myers radio has been a large, large part of our growth."

"Three months after we took over the restaurant, we began investing hot-and-heavy into our radio advertising," he says. "I've been involved in marketing for over 37 years, but I have never been as overwhelmed by the response to our current advertising. Almost every day a new customer will tell us they learned about us on Fort Myers radio."

To illustrate this last point, Mr. Bigelow recalls a very successful small business owner that works just up the street from Biggy's Place. "He drove by us almost every day but never knew we were here," he says. "Until one day, when he heard our commercial on a Fort Myers radio station.  Now, he and his father come into our restaurant four times a week for lunch."

Mr. Bigelow says, "Every small business in Fort Myers and Naples can make radio advertising work just like us.  I recommend setting aside 6% of every sale to use for marketing. But the real key is to stick with it.  You must promote…promote…promote.  If a business does not begin to see results after about three months, then the problem isn't radio, it is a problem with the message. I learned that with Dominos, and I learned that at Biggy's Place."

Radio Advertising Drives Sales Records For Naples Auto Dealer

Aaron Walker is the owner of Naples Nissan. "Last year," he says, "we had the biggest sales year in the history of the store. Advertising on Fort Myers radio was a key driver of our success."

Naples Nissan had been a fixture in Southwest Florida for many years before Mr. Walker took over four years ago. "The previous owner," he explains, "had been selling, on average, 110 new and used vehicles a month. Because of the way we consistently market our dealership on the radio, we now sell 300 cars per month."

Fort Myers radio is the only way Naples Nissan advertises. "TV is way too expensive in Southwest Florida for advertising with any consistency," says Mr. Walker. "Cable is way too fragmented with people having access to hundreds of channels. Direct mail gets thrown away without being read. And the people who read the newspaper just aren't our customers."

"I chose radio," he says, "because of the traffic patterns in Southwest Florida. We have more people than our roads and highways can accommodate. So people are spending a lot of time in their cars during mornings and afternoons."

"I-75 is continually congested. Route 41 is congested. The main roads and side streets are congested. As a result, people depend on Fort Myers radio for traffic reports to get them from point-A to point B. That's good for my business because people are captive in their cars, and I can communicate with them."

Mr. Walker knows by several metrics that his radio ads are effective. "First of all, if we are ever off the air for a few days, my sales managers notice a significant dip in customer traffic."

The second way he knows is by a reversal of his "pump-in" and "pump-out" rates. For Mr. Walker, a pumped-out buyer is somebody who registers a new Nissan in the Naples area but purchased it from a Nissan dealer outside of Naples.

A pump-in customer, on the other hand, is a customer who registers a new Nissan outside of the Naples area but purchases it from Mr. Walker. In other words, pump-ins are good. Pump-outs are bad.

Before Mr. Walker owned Naples Nissan, the dealership was pumping-out 500 more cars a year than they were pumping-in.

"Since we started advertising on Fort Myers radio," says Mr. Walker, "that has reversed. We are now pumping-in far more cars than we are pumping-out. We are seeing a lot of new customers coming in from Cape Coral, Bonita Springs, Marco Island, Lehigh Acres, and Golden Gate. These are all customer who are fed up with other dealers' misleading commercials and come to us because of our transparent pricing."