Author Archives: ensonsales

About ensonsales

Duane Christensen leads ENS Media and is the owner / operator of 9 Yards Marketing. For more than 20 years, he’s worked alongside local radio stations, advertising clients and media sales teams—helping businesses communicate better and helping salespeople become more useful to their customers. He writes ENS on Sales with one goal: practical ideas radio and media sellers can actually use.

Radio Revenue Increases

This July 24th article in Media Life asks, “What’s behind Radio ad spending gains?”

 Could it be that advertisers are finding the glitter on the shiny new media is not yielding gold?  Businesses that have built strong brands with broadcast media, don’t lose those brands the instant they cut their broadcast. For a period of time, ‘cheaper’ digital can coast on the coat tails of the success broadcast has built for advertisers, but we all know that the only way to coast is down hill.

What’s Behind Radio Ad Spending Gains?
Up 5 percent in first quarter, led by fast food, telecom and auto

By Bill Cromwell

McDonald’s is one of the top fast food spenders on radio.

Spot radio spending was up 5 percent in first quarter, according to Kantar Media.

This is a bit surprising, considering how badly other traditional media struggled during that same span. TV, magazines and newspapers were all down.

Radio has been getting strong spending from three major ad categories that have helped lift the medium to start the year, following a down 2014 when spot radio declined by 5.1 percent.

Fast food, auto and telecom have all been strong to start the year.

“I think for the most part it is the tried and true advertisers that keep the medium afloat and allows stations to be creative with other advertisers because they’ve got that base laid in,” says Lisa Garofolo, director of broadcast at Empower MediaMarketing.

After an 11 percent decline last year for the restaurant category in radio, fast food has been more active during the first half of the year.

Buyers say this is in part to complement dollars spent on TV, since radio and TV work well in tandem for fast food restaurants.

“Radio is a nice complement to the video portion of a campaign,” Garofolo says.

“It’s great to see a McDonald’s commercial at 10 p.m. on Wednesday night, but if you want someone to have a McCafe on Thursday morning, you have to follow up [while they’re in the car].”

McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts remain the top advertisers in the category.

Automotive has spent consistently on spot radio the past few years, Garofolo says, following a big decline in 2009 and 2010 with the recession.

The Toyota Dealer Association has been driving much of that spending, ranking No. 7 overall among radio advertisers last year, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau.

Honda and Ford’s dealer association are also active.

Finally, telecom has been hot across a number of media to start the year, including radio.

Overall ad spending on the category rose 3.8 percent in first quarter, according to Kantar, and buyers say wireless companies have been especially bullish on radio

Three Ways Your Prospect’s Say ‘No’

The three most polite ways to stop a rookie radio rep in their tracks are to say;

  1. My budget is allocated for this year, come back next year.

  2. I’m too busy and can’t handle any more business.

  3. Send me your media kit.

Number one, the budget excuse, is never true. If you’re talking to the person who established the budget, they can change that budget whenever they want to.

What they are really saying is ‘I don’t believe I’ll get an adequate return on my investment with you.’ If they did believe, they’d either revise their budget, or pay for your schedule with the additional business you attract.

Number two is either not true, or you now know a category where a competitor can be sold a campaign to capture the business Mr. Busy “can’t handle.”

Number three, the media kit, is just a polite way of saying ‘get lost.’ No one has ever bought from a media kit. Media kits all say the same thing….”we’re number one at something.”

When a prospect asks for a media kit, the seasoned professional will respond by opening the door to more productive questioning.

 The professional will tell their prospect that they don’t want to bombard them with irrelevant information, and dig into what specifically they would like to see in ‘the media kit’. The questions and answers that follow can result in delivering a customer-focused presentation instead of a generic media kit.

 

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Are You Targeting?

   We review hundreds of radio sales presentations every month to help stations increase their closing ratios and, their average sale. But lately we’ve noticed a huge common shortcoming.

          Virtually every presentation sells radio’s ability to ‘target.’ But there is virtually no discussion about targeting the advertiser’s message!

          We see station clusters that run the same message for a car dealer on their station that targets males 18-34, as they run on their station that targets women 25-54.

          What are they thinking? It appears to me that they aren’t…(thinking, that is).

          The internet and e-marketing have increased your advertisers’ awareness of the value of targeting, and they understand that effective targeting goes beyond reaching the right audience, it’s more about saying the right thing to that audience.

          Now I’ve heard the argument that it’s too expensive for a station to produce separate targeted messages for each station in their cluster. But if you don’t target your ads, your digital competitors will!

           If you want to increase your sales and your renewal rates, think about focusing on creating messages that resonate with your target audience.

 

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Radio’s Big Surprise

Your clients tend to think of Millennials as permanently attached to their smartphones.

They also tend to think of radio as a medium used mostly by older people, the ones who can’t quite figure out how to work an iPod.

Both of those stereotypes are dead wrong, along with a lot of other ideas about media usage in a must read article published in Media Life Magazine.

The article quotes Nielsen’s most recent total audience report, a quarterly document that tracks media use by different age groups, shatters a number of misconceptions about new and old media use.

It says “It might surprise you to know that more Millennials listen to traditional AM/FM radio each week than use smartphones.”

Nielsen found 93 percent of adults 18-34 listen to radio weekly, while just 80 percent report using a smartphone.

In fact, radio is the most frequently used medium among Millennials. It’s well ahead of TV at 76 percent and PCs at 49 percent.

I recommend that you copy the entire article at this link  http://www.medialifemagazine.com/surprising-facts-about-media-usage/                    and mail, email or hand deliver it to every business on the planet as a third party endorsement of radio’s continuing relevance.

 

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The Myth of Complete Disruption

One of the blogs I read this week said, “Mobile has completely disrupted digital marketing”.

          I have not seen piles of laptops along the roadside on garbage pick-up day with the move to mobile anymore than I saw radios piled in a heap when the internet began in 1982.  We continue to use laptops, and radio, even as we add new media to our lives.

          And while there is no doubt the digital marketing world continues to change faster than a speeding bullet, ‘complete disruption’ is an over-statement. This complete disruption myth is one that has been repeated almost weekly as the internet, search engine optimization, social media, mobile and a long list of digital marketing alternatives evolves.

          As our digital media expert, Alysia Taylor, explains it, “These changes are an evolution, not a revolution.”

          Imagine being a business owner in 2004 who bought the ‘complete disruption’ story with the introduction of MySpace, the self-proclaimed first social media. What would have happened had you put all of your eggs in that marketing basket just before Twitter, Facebook, and a long list of other social media evolved?

          No business wants to be left behind in the evolution of electronic media. At the same time, as this world changes ever-faster, there is a great deal of comfort, and success, in continuing to use tried and proven heritage media like radio as the constant in this chaos.

          The announced complete disruption has not made allowance for the fact that one of the oldest electronic media, radio, continues to reach in excess of 90% of adults every week, in spite of all of the new media introductions.

          I would never discourage an advertiser from trying something new. But we also owe it to advertisers who want to sleep at night, to point out a constant that they can rely upon during this evolution….radio advertising.

          Our Winning in the New Media Economy advertiser seminars and local market surveys are convincing local advertisers across North America to include radio as a primary media in their media mix. Contact [email protected] if you would like to facilitate our surveys and seminars in your market.

 

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