Retailers spend less money advertising by targeting customers.

Although the shotgun approach of high priced media buys for the largest audience possible may work for large stores with big budgets it is seldom efficient for smaller stores.  To be cost effective with a limited budget a retailer must define his target customer and advertise to fewer but more motivated consumers.

For radio, specific formats and shows within the day that the target  customer likely listens to is very efficient way to invest dollars.  The same reasoning follows for TV by advertising on local shows that are less expensive than prime time.  Direct mail which targets income levels and population areas of target customers will likely bring more customers per dollar spent than the shotgun approach of newspaper.

As with any advertising expenditure, all money spent must be tracked by customer traffic and asking the customer which media was the motivation  to come in and shop.  Consistently fine tuning advertising formats and testing new ones to achieve optimum efficiency is key to achieving increased traffic flow.  This way a retailer can cut the non performing formats and put advertising dollars in formats that generate better returns.