Welcome to our series, Bar Stool Q & A. Join us as we tap into decades of Mid-West Family’s marketing experience and share top shelf tips, suggestions, and fun marketing stories! .
Welcome, Jodie Froehlich, Brand Ambassador.
A: Let’s talk about endorsements. What are endorsements?
J: Have you done any endorsements or adlib campaigns?
A: I have not. My business functions off of referrals and word of mouth. We don’t do much with advertising.
J: That’s actually what an endorsement is. I like to call endorsements a controlled word of mouth.
The cool thing about our stations is we have live and local on-air personalities.
They’re here. They’re living it just like the listeners are.
The cool thing about that is, the majority of our listeners find a “friend” actually in our on-air personalities. So that friend then can act as your word of mouth.
A: So they almost become an influencer for your brand?
J: 100%. When you look at national brand advertising, you have big celebrities like Michael Jordan doing the Nike commercials. It’s very similar to that but on a more local level.
A: How do you execute a controlled word of mouth campaign with these influencers? How would an advertiser dictate what they want to be said and with what type of messaging?
J: The easiest part about it is, it’s not a produced commercial. This is done live, so they can change up the copy points as frequently as they want with just a quick little email. If there’s a last minute sale they decide to do, it’s a quick email to me that I shoot right up to the on-air personality. And in some cases, [the business owner] will talk to the on-air personality directly.
A: Jodie – I’m interested in doing a little bit more than just on-air with the influencers. Is there anything else you can do digitally?
J: Absolutely, let me take a step back with the influencers a little bit. In order for a campaign to succeed in doing any kind of live endorsements with the on-air personalities, those personalities must believe in your product. That is the first thing that I go to. I reach out to the ones that I think are the best to fit the demographic and the station, and then I will talk to each on-air personality to make sure it’s something that they want to endorse. You can really tell it when they’re faking it. You want to make sure it’s something that they do endorse.
One they’re on board, they’re on board for everything! Our on-air personalities are so good about doing live Facebook posts, going out to your business and doing a 1-4 min video while they’re there and then posting it on that stations’ website. They’re also really good about all social [media] to help – there’s definitely businesses that we work with that our on-air personalities become friends with those business owners. Every time they go in to use their product and to do what they’re telling you to do, they might take a short video or take a picture and put it on Facebook, put it on Twitter, whatever it may be to help boost that campaign because if they sign onto it, they believe in it and they’re 100% behind it and you.
In the end I’ve had a lot of success with different businesses and endorsement campaigns for all the reasons that we talked about just now. They really do work. It’s a great way of building your brand, alongside somebody who already knows the listeners. It’s definitely the only way that you can do controlled word of mouth and it’s very similar to what you were saying with different referrals you do get on a local level. These are referrals from our on-air personalities that you choose.
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