I honestly don't know. But that's only becasue I don't know you, your business or more importantly your ideal customer.  What I can offer you is some insight into the value of each medium and some interesting research findings to consider.

Radio works in funny ways. Many are hard to explain because the auditory nature of radio leads to memory of ads in non-visual sense. The result is recall of actual stimulus that caused action is hard to identify. What does that mean?  Well if you ask someone how they heard of you or why did they come into your store today. They will undoubtedly answer with anything but 'your radio ad.'

We in the radio business know, no one ever comes into a store with a cassette and throws it on the counter and says "heard your ad. where's the special offer."  Though that does happen with the newspaper a lot thus leaving the impression that newspaper works and radio doesn't.  The good news is they both do especially together.

In attempt to  explain my point I bring up the old advertising adage coined by David Ogilvy the Babe Ruth of advertising. He said, "I know 50% of my advertising works. I just don't know which half."

That of course is not very helpful.  And with a limited amount of budget small businesses in the Valley have, it’s hard to put your hands around the problem and just buy everything. You are far better off determining who you are trying to reach for what. Then set reasonable time frames and benchmarks for success.

For example, you can use radio to build brand awareness and establish a image far better than newspaper. But does a light schedule translate into immediate business? Not always in fact the cumulative audience of a radio station far exceeds a newspaper but according to research it takes nearly 4 weeks for a radio station to effectively reach all its potential listeners and drive them to action. Newspapers tend to reach the same amount of people each and every day with little increase in overall reach. There is also substantial research rebuffing the myth that size matters.  Reducing the size of a newspaper ad has very little effect on its effectiveness.  Therefore perhaps the most effective strategy maybe to decrease size and frequency of newspaper ad and pouring your cost savings into radio schedule.

Make similar copy claims on the radio and you will notice an increase in your newspaper ads effectiveness! That’s right less money, smaller ads equals more response?  It's been proven time and time again by study after study. Email me at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it