Regional Companies Need Data But May Be Overlooking Obvious Numbers

There is critical audience data regional companies must focus on when making a media buy.

According to Statista and Statistic Brain research there are 60+ TV network companies, 1,761 TV Stations, 15,330 radio stations, 368,263 out of home placements and 1.7 billion websites, with 200,000 being active sites in the US today. And, according to the US Census Department there were more than 325,000,000 people in this country in 2017.

“So what?”, you might ask. Well, lets do a little math.

Per person that equates to 5,400,000 people per network and 184,500 per station. It’s 21,200 people per radio station, it’s 882 per outdoor placement and 1.6 per website. Sure, market size, demographics and an infinite number of variables come into play and nothing is this simple, but it still should make you pause and think about a few things if you live in the marketing or media world, especially if you are a regional company operating in a limited area of the country. Here’s some food for thought.

• Determine your priority audience. It’s imperative that you absolutely know what your number one consumer looks like. Not who you believe they are, but you must know who they are.

• Determine your second most important consumer. Often a product, brand or service has a very large secondary consumer base but is rarely discussed. While keeping your eye on the primary consumer is critical your greatest potential of growth may come from your largest secondary source.

• Determine whether there is additional growth in sub demographic sections. In other words, maybe your product’s primary demo is 35 – 49 males with a secondary demo of 35 – 49 females. But if additional creative was created and additional relevant placements were added to your media strategy would it be possible to gain favor with males 21 – 34?

Why should you do this? Because regional companies rarely have enough media budget to achieve all their goals and quite often they have more than one business objective to aim at. If you need to poach customers from your competitors, it may be easier to poach from a group they are not targeting. If that is the case, then further review of the statistics above maybe necessary to ultimately decide which mediums in a local market may gleam you more eyeballs and consumers.

Digital is everywhere, and it is necessary in nearly every campaign but digital can also be so highly targeted that you achieve only your main targeted audience and miss the rest. Where traditional media may not be as highly targeted but reach several consumer audiences at one time.

Regional companies need to assess their likely audiences and determine which may be more effective and cost efficient. An example I’ll use is trying to reach men during football season. You have a choice. You can buy ESPN.com which is nearly 85% male and geotarget your market area for males 35 – 49 or you can buy a local NFL package, which is typically comprised of nearly 60% males and 40% women and nearly every age group. Even though both mediums would measure their cpm against only one audience (males 35 – 49) the overall cost of potential audiences reached maybe far cheaper with an NFL commercial than and ESPN.com flight.

Every case is different so I’m not suggesting one over the other. I’m suggesting that regional companies need to look behind the curtain before they assume one medium is better than the other.