Twice a week Paul Nachreiner, President of AMS of Madison, WI stops off at the local radio station on the way to work and records a 3 to 10 minute live radio ad during the popular morning drive segment. The ad is in the form of a mini talk show about his shop, new products and trends and related topics.
Nachreiner has been doing this since 1992. Tuesdays he talks about home audio and Thursdays about car audio.
He reminds us that “This is always supposed to be fun. Some people are about tricking people to come to your store,” he said, where on the radio he’s entertaining and informing his audience and then politely inviting them to the shop.
There have been times he’s brought in a cooler and made Bloody Mary’s at 7:30 am for the hosts Johnny and Dee.
Mostly, Nachreiner stops into the local studio and “sits at a counter during drive time. I make comments or promote the store. It allows me to talk about brand new products, to do show and tell, although they can’t see it.” He’ll talk about JL Audio VXi DSP amplifiers, for instance. Or if someone recently wrote a nice email to the shop complimenting the service they received, he might read that on the air. “Sometimes I talk about my employees and how good they are at what they do. I talk about that or even talk about things that went wrong.”
He’s even discussed transshipping. “I explained how shyster dealers sell goods sideways to places like Amazon… I think it blew their minds that people remove serial numbers and sell sideways and make an extra 10 percent.”
The whole program costs AMS about $2,000 a month. Each live ad is recorded and then repeated six more times during the week. Nachreiner says it pays off with a better return than he’d see on Facebook or social media.
The station is solid rock 94.1 WJJO FM in Madison. It’s a hard rock and heavy metal format.
“Yes, [the ads] pay for themselves. Absolutely. Half my customers come in and say, ‘I heard you on the radio,’” he said.
Consistency at work. 🙂
I have been lucky enough to have worked with Paul at AMS in those early days and through the 90’s. I remember the radio talks. Paul brings to his business a sincere belief in the value add AMS offers its customers and he is very successful at transferring that belief to and then actually delivering on same for AMS customers. There is no rocket science or super human skill involved. AMS has the capability to do, to communicate and to ask his customers to tell all of their friends. These are traits of most successful brick & mortar specialty retailers. Rather refreshing doncha think…
Ray Windsor