Group Advertising 101: Increasing the Reach of Your Ad Budget

If you’ve never heard of group advertising, you may want to read this. It’s a special kind of partnership between companies in the same industry having similar advertising needs and interests. For any business looking to access large-scale advertising solutions with a small-scale budget, a group advertising partnership could be the answer.

These arrangements allow local businesses to collectively leverage the advertising efforts in markets where media like TV and radio are typically very expensive. By pooling resources, group advertising solutions allow individual businesses to access the budget necessary to make the necessary impact to attract new customers. Read on to learn how group advertising increases the reach of your company’s ad budget.

Getting More from Your Advertising Budget

For this arrangement to make sense, the businesses opting into a group advertising program must:

1. Share the same general market area of the country.
2. Want to market locally in an area where the media covers a larger footprint than your business.
3. Be part of the same brand and/or industry.

The key lies in leveraging common interests and goals. Group advertising arrangements are particularly valuable if broadcast television and broadcast radio rates in your region are too expensive to fit your business’ ad budget. While these media options are the least costly media solutions for reaching the largest amount of people possible, they can be expensive in some markets and have too broad of a coverage area.

For example, let’s say you’re in the HVAC business. Your business is primarily focused on a single brand of heating and cooling systems, but your service area is in the Northeast corner of a larger city, and you don’t want to pay to advertise for the entire city. Typically, the radio or TV coverage area is larger than the market area you want to accommodate. This is where it makes sense, since you can pool or group dollars together to advertise in the entire TV or radio area by having several like businesses participate in your group plan.

What? Pool My Money with Competitors?

Now at this point, you may be wondering how this benefits you when the advertising is mixed together in a “group” of like businesses. Good question!

There are some key elements to an effective group advertising plan:

• The individual business service areas are spread over a larger advertising market area.
• The message needs to be the same for all involved.
• The offer needs to be the same and agreed upon by all parties participating.
• Though the message and offer are the same, the ad must be individually tagged to mention your specific business.
• The campaign needs to be tracked for effectiveness.

Consumers and Group Advertising

We must realize that the consumer often isn’t picky – they aren’t always loyal, and particularly with a time-of-need home service, they’re searching for something they rarely need. The way to reach them is through repeated advertising any way you can.

You may wonder why Coca Cola advertises. Everyone already knows who they are, right? They do it to stay top of mind, and they have big data that shows sales increase year over year when they advertise consistently.

There are a couple of ways to track the effectiveness of the advertising, but first it’s important to understand that — more than ever before — consumers are finding you in a variety of ways.

One scenario, you decide on a radio campaign, customer A hears you in his car; customer B is at home listening to the news and hears you there; customer C is at work and listening via a pair of Bluetooth headphones at the office and hears the ad.

But once the ad is seen or heard, what happens? Customer A decides to go mobile at the stop light and types in what he remembers, customer B picks up the phone and calls the number he remembers or uses the IPAD to go online; customer C in on his computer at work and looks it up there. We are not sure what device or mechanism consumers will use to reach you, so we need to track it all.

Consumers and Group Advertising

So how do we track it all? Call tracking is an ideal solution if you have an easy to remember number has been used for years. And we need to track not only the number, but each device to understand how people find you through your advertising plans.

We can track all devices with individual tracking numbers, and develop unique landing pages online to track all activity directly online. Keep in mind, though, that when it comes to tracking and reporting, Murphy’s Law is in effect. Even with the best-laid reporting plans, the consumer will find you another way if possible. The real gauge of success will be an uplift in your sales.

Comprehensive Group Advertising Solutions

Group advertising is a smart investment for any company that’s well-placed to take advantage of this strategy. Ad agencies like Mediagistic can help you harness the power of a group partnership, launching effective advertising campaigns that benefit everyone involved.

If done properly, these programs consistently achieve results in three areas:

1. Increasing consumer awareness,
2. Growing market share for the brand,
3. Creating supplemental lead generation for the businesses participating.

Group advertising programs can be an affordable way for the business to get their name into their target market in a big way. Using this program in tandem with your own business advertising plan , leverages more ways to be “top of mind” so the consumer recalls your business remembers you when the need arises.

Are you interested in exploring the potential that a group advertising plan could hold for your company? Contact Mediagistic today for more information.

Geri Persiano-Vukas is Mediagistic’s Vice President of Sales & Service. A veteran of international sales and marketing with AT&T, she joined the Mediagistic Team over five years ago. Within a few months of her arrival, our well established business managing regional and national dealer co-op programs for manufacturers like Carrier and Bryant exploded into full service agency representation of dealers for all of their individual marketing and advertising needs. Connect with her on Linkedin.