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Small Budget, Big Impact: Mass Media Marketing Strategies

Learn how having a small budget can have a big impact on businesses growing faster with strategic radio, TV, and billboard marketing.
Ryan Chute
Ryan Chute
January 30, 2025
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Small Budget, Big Impact: Mass Media Marketing Strategies

Before I became a Wizard of Ads® Partner, I was pretty confident I knew what I was doing when dealing with the mass media vendors. Boy, was I wrong. 

After my first meeting with all the other Wizard of Ads® Partners, I was gobsmacked at how little I actually knew. It made me question my whole existence up to that point. 

I came into the Partnership thinking I was pretty hot shit, having done some fairly impressive things in the automotive and retail space. 

To say the past 8 years have been a rollercoaster ride would be an understatement. And I’d have it no other way. 

The strategies Wizards of Ads® for Services custom-tailor for your residential home service businesses are truly revolutionary. By developing a compensation model that allows us to give world-class help to a company when it’s small, Wizard of Ads® for Services gives the underdog a leg up far earlier than normal, acting as the catalyst for growth. 

Great operators can supercharge their healthy growth earlier, getting to the finish line faster. Here’s how we can help you leverage mass media sooner rather than later, even on a small budget.  

Radio Advertising: 

Radio advertising is an astoundingly cost-effective way for residential home service contractors to reach a huge volume of people for fractions of a penny per listen. By curating the right day parts (time slots) across a variety of different listening formats, we maximize the listening frequency of your ads without blowing your budget. 

Paired with an entertaining and relevant message, you start to take up real estate in the long-term memory of your prospects way before they need what you sell. This means you are the brand they already know, like, and trust when they eventually need your thing. 

This is playing chess while your competitors are playing checkers. 

In short, because we can offer our local clients the national discounted rates we negotiate, a small Contractor can bark like a Fortune 500 way faster. 

We’ll essentially be carpet-bombing the airwaves with a brilliant brand story that gets attention. 

Television Advertising:

There are a few different strategies we can deploy in television advertising. It depends on how we can most effectively reach your service area. For a targeted area, a cable or OTT strategy makes the most sense. For a broader reach, a broadcast strategy may make the most sense. 

Television advertising is a little more expensive than radio because of the production cost. 

If you're a premium-priced provider, your ads will be tucked in between Apple and Anheiser Busch, who just dropped $500K on that 30-second spot. If you come out looking like a tiny town, it’ll cost you. 

A solid television ad, depending on scope and budget, can be produced for $2,500 to $35,000. 

The strategies to buy television advertising right depend solely on the format. Remember, repetition is essential for any kind of success when buying television advertising. You need to be able to reach the same viewers repeatedly with a better-than-average message if you want your limited dollars to work for you. 

While Cable and OTT ads are often booked at a high volume to a specific area for 52 weeks a year, broadcast television strategy is often a low-volume, high-expense play, where you focus on live news and sports. 

Billboard Advertising:

Billboards are one of the most misunderstood advertising channels used for Mass
Media advertising. While radio and television are intrusive, auditory media, billboards are a silent, passive channel. They do not have the same impact as an auditory channel. This includes truck wraps, bus signage, and park bench signs. 

A billboard, in any form, should echo your auditory campaign. It should act as a visual reinforcement of the one big thing your brand is trying to get across to your audience. Think of it as the cover of your book. It’s meant to help feed the imagination of the story inside, not be the whole story. 

Did you know that you retain auditory information five times longer than visual information? Paired with the proper repetition and a larger-than-life message, you will get much faster and longer-lasting results when you say your message out loud to as many people as you can afford. 

When you say stuff that matters, the people you tell your story to over and over again will buy from you and tell others you matter. This is word-of-mouth advertising, and it will forever remain the most powerful and cost-effective way for small businesses to generate buzz and build brand equity. 

Satisfied customers will spread the word about your great products or services, and new customers will want to try you out because you’re their kind of people. People will happily provide 5-star reviews and refer their loved ones unsolicited when you go above and beyond. 

Mass Media is Essential to a Marketing Strategy:

Most people think of a name, logo, and truck wrap as the brand strategy. Instead, think of your name, truck wrap, logo, and colors as the book title, book cover, and pictures of your story. 

Your actual brand is the story you tell about your employee and customer experiences. 

Should you draw the pictures to your story and then tell a story about the pictures, or do you tell your story and then draw pictures to match? 

If you want to compete with the market leaders in your trade area, you must transform your company from obscurity to name recognition to a household name. This will only happen with a combination of strong brand messaging, a balanced digital presence to capture leads, and a great buying experience driven by a happy, healthy culture.

Consistency is Key

Ensure your brand messaging, visuals, tone, and voice are cohesive across all marketing channels, from print materials to digital platforms. Wizards call this channel alignment. 

Ensure you get repetition right. Infrequent connections spell death for brand equity. It’s essential you get past the brain's electrical storage and make your brand message ever present in the chemical long-term memory. This often means talking to fewer people more frequently to make your limited budget work hardest for you. 

When you’re on a small budget, you have to squeeze as much impact as you possibly can out of your limited budget. There is no room for error. By strategically leveraging offline media channels like radio, television, and billboards, you are harnessing the power of word-of-mouth marketing. 

By implementing effective brand recognition strategies, Contractors can achieve significant marketing impact and build strong brand recognition without breaking the bank. 

Speaking of the bank, branding is compounding, while lead gen is a sunk cost. Lead gen is money spent and gone, leaving no trace in the heart or mind of the prospect. Branding is working after hours to build your brand up for years to come in their long-term memory. 

By leveraging the right strategy first, you put a small budget to work by having your creative and marketing dollars punch above their weight. Call me if you need help figuring it out. 

Ryan Chute
Ryan Chute
January 30, 2025
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THE frictionless CEO

I'm thinking about ways to reduce friction everyday. I'm inviting you inside my brain to explore this frictionless journey with me.

It gets weird sometimes; even dark. I'm definitely not for everyone.

If you like how I think, though (or just morbidly curious) come aboard the Nautilus and we'll navigate these choppy seas together.  

Ryan Chute

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What’s your secret sauce in business?

If I had to put it in a bottle, it would be a blend of passion, perseverance, and just the right amount of coffee. Seriously, though, it's the mix of creativity, strategic thinking, and a dash of quirkiness that keeps things interesting and successful.

What’s your superpower in meetings? 

I have this uncanny ability to turn complex jargon into everyday conversations. It's like I have a translator for business-speak. Meetings are more fun when everyone's on the same page, even if that page is covered in doodles.

What is the most unexpected thing about your entrepreneurial journey?

I never expected that my best storytelling would come to be while flying to meet clients. Turns out, inspiration loves the quiet of a long flight. Also, who knew solving problems could be so much fun?

Is Ryan Chute available as a keynote speaker? 

Absolutely! Ryan is available and excited to bring his insights and energy to your event as a keynote speaker. Whether it’s a conference, workshop, or any other gathering, Ryan is passionate about sharing valuable perspectives and sparking engaging conversations. To inquire about booking Ryan for a speaking engagement, please contact us directly with the event date & location, proposed topic, and contact information. Let’s make your next event memorable!

If you weren’t an entrepreneur, what would you be doing?

Entrepreneurship just happened to be the perfect mix of chaos and creativity for me. If I weren’t an entrepreneur, I’d likely be in the military or a covert government agency.