Small Business Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition

The Making of a Mass Media Schedule

When advertising on all mass media except digital media (see Chapter 10), the amount of money you spend and how you spend it depends on how you balance three scheduling considerations: reach, frequency, and timing.

Balancing reach and frequency

Your ad schedule needs to achieve enough reach (that is, your message needs to get into the heads of enough readers or viewers) to generate a sufficient number of prospects to meet your sales objective. It also needs to achieve enough frequency to adequately impress your message into those minds — and that rarely happens with a single ad exposure.

Reach is the number of individuals or homes exposed to your ad. In print media, reach is measured by circulation counts. In broadcast media, reach is measured by gross rating points (see Chapter 14 for information on broadcast ad terminology).

Frequency is the number of times that an average person is exposed to your message.

If you have to choose between frequency and reach — and nearly every small business works with a budget that forces that choice — limit your reach to carefully selected target markets and then spend as much as you can on achieving frequency ...