Marketing Dollars Make Radio Sense

Every law firm struggles with the dilemma of how to allocate their marketing and advertising budget. Should funds be used to pay for sports tickets, a dinner at an elegant restaurant or perhaps advertisements in a newspaper or magazine? Few firms consider radio as a means to make information available to the listening public while also attempting to develop or perpetuate a brand in their community.

In 1984, I stumbled into the embryonic genre of talk radio. I began hosting a radio show that emphasized financial matters while also discussing employee benefits, wealth preservation, real estate matters and elder law. As talk radio became the rage so did the availability of brokered time where individuals and companies could buy an entire hour to discuss more narrowly defined areas ranging from automobiles and gardening to insurance and mortgages.

Our law firm developed two call-in talk shows, known as “Financial Focus,” heard on Saturday mornings, and “Planning Perspectives,” heard on Sunday mornings. We taught a number of our principals how to host the shows and expanded our markets to cover both Baltimore and Washington, DC areas. Periodically, we integrated guests and sponsors from the financial, insurance, real estate, and health care industries, which afforded us the opportunity to cultivate business relationships ' new and old alike. We also developed successful seminars with similar institutions that were promoted on the radio shows.

For the last 20 years we have successfully used talk show radio to brand our wealth preservation and estate and elder law practices, while raising the profile of our firm throughout the region.

Some of us found it difficult to continue to commit our weekends to hosting a live talk show, and at the same time, there was a desire to reduce our radio budget and spread the marketing dollars in different directions. We refined our strategy to develop relationships with other organizations, employing a shared approach for the use of our marketing dollars. From this concept, we developed a pre-taped radio show with two co-sponsors, which were complimentary to the show's focus and our practice areas (the sponsors were a well-known money management firm and a regional long term care chain). We even built an inexpensive recording studio in our law offices. The cost was less than $5000 and the facility doubles as a conference room with video conferencing capabilities. In a single day, we tape four half-hour shows heard every Sunday morning at 8:00 a.m. on our largest 50,000-watt AM radio station. We interview two guests each week concentrating on people's health and wealth care. Since our law firm splits the costs equally with two long-time sponsors, our marketing budget can be channeled into other outlets, like a baseball skybox, football tickets, charitable events, etc.

I personally tired after nearly 20 years of hosting a talk radio show every weekend. It took me a few years to develop a way to use 1-minute ad spots on talk radio to provide information to the public, while doing it in a dignified way. What developed was a commercial called “I'll bet you didn't know.” This succinct nugget of information is passed along to the public on a rotating basis. The ads were designed to be a “call to action,” offering just enough information for the listener to identify with, prompting them to call us or visit our Web site for more detailed information. My partner and I tape 15 different segments for the two largest radio stations in our area, one in Baltimore and one in Washington, DC. One-minute commercials on a radio station, however, can be costly, and if you require that it be played in morning or evening drive time, or at another specific time, it can be very expensive. To combat this problem, we give the radio station the option to play the spots between 8:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. 3 days a week (also known as “Run of Station”). Then we load up on weekends, playing six to eight commercials from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. We stop airing these segments from November 15th through January 10th when the airwaves are loaded with holiday commercials. In the past we have also removed them from the rotation for the month of August when many people are traveling.

If you want to reach out to a specific group such as the Hispanic or African American community, you can develop a talk show or commercials to play on targeted stations. We have run our informational segments on Maryland's Eastern Shore so it can impact the summer vacationers and make the locals aware of our satellite office. We have also sponsored segments on public radio so that we could hit the exclusive upscale audience.

At the same time that we host our radio shows and provide our informational segments to the public, we also promote our Web site and our seminars as well as our multiple offices. When crafted properly, radio can be an inexpensive, yet powerful medium to provide information to prospects. It all depends on the location of the radio station, its signal and listening audience, and the time of day of the broadcast. By reaching out to the community at large, it creates an awareness of the firm and can differentiate a law firm from the pack. It has been instrumental in our firm's ability to brand our wealth preservation, estate and elder law practice, and has afforded us the ability to more easily market our other areas of practice. The end result is that it has allowed us to become one of Maryland's 10 largest law firms in a relatively short period of time.

Every law firm struggles with the dilemma of how to allocate their marketing and advertising budget. Should funds be used to pay for sports tickets, a dinner at an elegant restaurant or perhaps advertisements in a newspaper or magazine? Few firms consider radio as a means to make information available to the listening public while also attempting to develop or perpetuate a brand in their community.

In 1984, I stumbled into the embryonic genre of talk radio. I began hosting a radio show that emphasized financial matters while also discussing employee benefits, wealth preservation, real estate matters and elder law. As talk radio became the rage so did the availability of brokered time where individuals and companies could buy an entire hour to discuss more narrowly defined areas ranging from automobiles and gardening to insurance and mortgages.

Our law firm developed two call-in talk shows, known as “Financial Focus,” heard on Saturday mornings, and “Planning Perspectives,” heard on Sunday mornings. We taught a number of our principals how to host the shows and expanded our markets to cover both Baltimore and Washington, DC areas. Periodically, we integrated guests and sponsors from the financial, insurance, real estate, and health care industries, which afforded us the opportunity to cultivate business relationships ' new and old alike. We also developed successful seminars with similar institutions that were promoted on the radio shows.

For the last 20 years we have successfully used talk show radio to brand our wealth preservation and estate and elder law practices, while raising the profile of our firm throughout the region.

Some of us found it difficult to continue to commit our weekends to hosting a live talk show, and at the same time, there was a desire to reduce our radio budget and spread the marketing dollars in different directions. We refined our strategy to develop relationships with other organizations, employing a shared approach for the use of our marketing dollars. From this concept, we developed a pre-taped radio show with two co-sponsors, which were complimentary to the show's focus and our practice areas (the sponsors were a well-known money management firm and a regional long term care chain). We even built an inexpensive recording studio in our law offices. The cost was less than $5000 and the facility doubles as a conference room with video conferencing capabilities. In a single day, we tape four half-hour shows heard every Sunday morning at 8:00 a.m. on our largest 50,000-watt AM radio station. We interview two guests each week concentrating on people's health and wealth care. Since our law firm splits the costs equally with two long-time sponsors, our marketing budget can be channeled into other outlets, like a baseball skybox, football tickets, charitable events, etc.

I personally tired after nearly 20 years of hosting a talk radio show every weekend. It took me a few years to develop a way to use 1-minute ad spots on talk radio to provide information to the public, while doing it in a dignified way. What developed was a commercial called “I'll bet you didn't know.” This succinct nugget of information is passed along to the public on a rotating basis. The ads were designed to be a “call to action,” offering just enough information for the listener to identify with, prompting them to call us or visit our Web site for more detailed information. My partner and I tape 15 different segments for the two largest radio stations in our area, one in Baltimore and one in Washington, DC. One-minute commercials on a radio station, however, can be costly, and if you require that it be played in morning or evening drive time, or at another specific time, it can be very expensive. To combat this problem, we give the radio station the option to play the spots between 8:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. 3 days a week (also known as “Run of Station”). Then we load up on weekends, playing six to eight commercials from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. We stop airing these segments from November 15th through January 10th when the airwaves are loaded with holiday commercials. In the past we have also removed them from the rotation for the month of August when many people are traveling.

If you want to reach out to a specific group such as the Hispanic or African American community, you can develop a talk show or commercials to play on targeted stations. We have run our informational segments on Maryland's Eastern Shore so it can impact the summer vacationers and make the locals aware of our satellite office. We have also sponsored segments on public radio so that we could hit the exclusive upscale audience.

At the same time that we host our radio shows and provide our informational segments to the public, we also promote our Web site and our seminars as well as our multiple offices. When crafted properly, radio can be an inexpensive, yet powerful medium to provide information to prospects. It all depends on the location of the radio station, its signal and listening audience, and the time of day of the broadcast. By reaching out to the community at large, it creates an awareness of the firm and can differentiate a law firm from the pack. It has been instrumental in our firm's ability to brand our wealth preservation, estate and elder law practice, and has afforded us the ability to more easily market our other areas of practice. The end result is that it has allowed us to become one of Maryland's 10 largest law firms in a relatively short period of time.