Fayetteville, North Carolina, radio reaches more local consumers each week than any other advertising medium.

According to Nielsen, 282,794 adults tune in to their favorite AM/FM stations every week.  This is significantly more consumers than are reached by Fayetteville TV, cable, streaming video, streaming audio, social media, or newspapers.

AM/FM radio's dominance among local consumers is driven, in large part, by the 322,117 Fayetteville area adults who take to the road in their car or truck every week, according to Neilsen.

To ensure success, every Fayetteville, North Carolina business owner needs to advertise.

"Think you have a great product?" asks the US Small Business Administration. "Unfortunately, no one’s going to know about it unless you advertise.”

The SBA goes on to say, “Advertising, if done correctly, can do wonders for your product sales, and you know what that means: more revenue and more success for your business.”

There are dozens of ways for local small business owners to advertise. By most metrics, the best way to advertise is on Fayetteville radio. These measures of effectiveness, however, are often obscured by the glimmer and glitz of newer technologies. 

To help reduce the glare that often blinds business owners to the potency of advertising on Fayetteville radio, here are the top five things many local business owners get wrong.

Marketers call them Generation Z.  Fayetteville small business owners call them teenagers.  Whatever 12-17 years old are called, they live in homes cluttered with video games, smartphones, and tablets. They have easy access to Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, and hundreds of other apps their parents have never heard of.

What may come as a surprise to many local business owners, despite the abundance of options for teens, Fayetteville radio stations dominate their media consumption.

Last week, according to Nielsen, 29,200 teens tuned-in to Fayetteville radio. On average, each of these listeners spent 90 minutes a day.

No! Satellite radio has had no effect on the number of people who tune-in to Fayetteville radio stations each.  For that matter, Pandora and Spotify have not affected local radio listening either.

The fact is, AM/FM radio reaches more consumers each week in Fayetteville than all other advertising media. Satellite, it turns out, has barely been a blip on listeners' radar.

Last week, for example, 93% of Fayetteville adult-consumers tuned-in to a local station vs. the 16% that connected to Sirius/XM, the only remaining provider of satellite radio service.

There is historical significance to the 93% reach number mentioned above.

Is advertising on Fayetteville radio just a day job for local small business owners?  

Thousands of North Carolina companies depend on radio advertising to market their goods and services. But most of these business owners choose to buy commercials only between 6:00 am and 7:00 pm.  Is this a good idea? Maybe not.  Here are the facts.

During the course of last week, for instance, 288,946 adult consumers tuned-in to their favorite Fayetteville radio stations. This is significantly higher than the number that tuned-in to a local TV station, read a local newspaper, or logged on to Spotify and Pandora.

But radio listeners do not roll-up their ears just because the sunsets. According to Nielsen, 50% of people who listen to the radio during daylight hours, also tune in at night.

To put this in perspective, more people listen to Fayetteville radio at night than listen to satellite radio, Pandora, and Spotify combined.

Warning: this article requires the exercise of math muscles not used since 9th-grade algebra class.

It is true that the cost of advertising on a Fayetteville radio station is proportional to the number of listeners that station reaches.  The more listeners who tune-in, the more a business owner can expect to pay for each commercial.

It is also true, that when a Fayetteville small business owner purchases a commercial on a radio station, they are paying to reach all of the listeners. Only a portion of those listeners, though, will ever be in the market for the goods or services that business sells.

The entirety of a radio station's audience can be thought of as the 'quantity'.  The fraction of that audience that will be receptive to a business owner's message (the listeners most likely to become customers), are the 'quality'. 

When a business owner is choosing which Fayetteville radio stations to advertise on, which is more important, quantity or quality?  Reaching the most listeners or the most likely customers?