I may have mentioned previously that when we first opened our store we paid for three months of radio advertising which, from what we could tell, didn’t accomplish much. We got some customers who mentioned they’d heard our ads, but largely it seemed as though we got more traffic from our sign out by the road. We dropped the advertising, figuring there were better places to spend our money.
We recently decided it was time to try again. But this time we discussed at length what we thought had gone wrong with the last attempt. For the most part we had to conclude that the station we had picked was not a good match for our target demographic. Male gamers between the ages of 15 and 35 are probably not listening to the pop station playing Katy Perry, Kee$ha, Justin Beiber, and the like. 
So this time we made a concerted effort to advertise with a radio station that seemed to have worked well for a similar company my partners and I had worked for in the past. And it was an effort. Would you believe it was hard to get the station to come ask us for our money?
To their credit, once they did finally pay attention to us they hit a home run with a package that gets us exposure on two stations covering both our primary and secondary demographics for about half the price we were paying for the previous station. I was also a bit more reassured to see our account executive take an active interest in our studio session when we got our commercials ready for air.
So we’re once again giving radio a try. Our ads start airing on “100.3 – The X” and “105.1 – Variety Rock” this week. So if you hear any ads for VIP Gamestore, please leave a comment below and let us know. We’re very interested in seeing if we’re getting the coverage we need. Meanwhile, I’ll keep you posted on how it seems to work out from our end.
Have you used radio before in your business? What worked well? What didn’t work so well? Drop me a comment and let us all learn from your experience.