Small Business Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Producing Radio Ads

In 30 or 60 seconds, a good radio ad grabs attention, involves the listener, sounds believable, creates a mental picture, spins a story, calls for action, and manages to keep the product on center stage and the customer in the spotlight — all without sounding pushy, obnoxious, or boring.

Done perfectly, a radio ad is a one-on-one conversation with a single target prospect, written and produced so well that the prospect hears the introduction and says, in essence, “Shh, be quiet, you guys, I need to hear this. It’s talking to me.”

Great writers write out loud when creating radio ads. Here’s how:

Use language that’s written exactly the way people talk.

Write to the pace that people talk, not to the pace at which they read.

Include pauses that give people time to think and announcers time to breathe.

Cut extra verbiage. You wouldn’t say “indeed,” “thus,” “moreover,” or “therefore” if you were explaining something exciting to a friend. Don’t do it in your radio ad, either.

Rewrite elaborately constructed sentences full of phrases linked together with who, which, and ...