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.

What’s New

 Marketers have always known the power of the word ‘new’.

    From packaged goods distributors who advertised ‘new and improved’ to the digital media folks who describe their platforms as ‘new media’, there is no disputing the allure of all things new.

       But here’s the thing. For business categories that don’t currently advertise on radio, radio can be positioned as the something ‘new’ they are looking for.

       As some of our better advertiser categories take budget from radio to try new media, radio can be new media for advertisers that are losing confidence in their old print or Yellow Pages stand-bys.

       Our Share-of-Mind surveys in more than 100 markets across North America have proven our Share-of-Voice = Share-of-Mind = Share-of-Market formula.

       When you crack a new advertiser who has no competitors advertising on your station they automatically have the dominant share of voice with your audience, and the results will amaze even you!

 

[email protected]

Radio with a Capital ‘R’

You may have noticed in our last ENS on Sales that I’ve started spelling Radio with a capital R.

 Proper names always begin with a capital letter, and Radio is the proper name of a media that’s proven to work. The TV guys have always spelled TV with caps, rather than tv.

Ironically, our ‘Three R’s Formula’ has been one of the formulas we’ve used to sell more Radio.

Reach  X  Repetition  X  Relevance of the message = Results

Is it time that your account executives, and your advertisers, learned the various formulas for creating advertising that works?

Contact [email protected]  to inquire how we can help you sell more Radio advertising in 2016 and beyond.

 

[email protected]

Downside of Relationships

If you have been on our website you know our motto is “Helping media companies and advertisers to establish stronger more profitable relationships.”

    But there can be a downside to ‘relationships’.

    I talked to a radio salesperson last week who had left the competition’s cluster to join my client’s station cluster.  Upon arriving at the stations we consult, he was shocked to learn that a client, who had spent $1,000 a month with him at his previous stations, had been spending $4,000 a month at our stations. When he asked the client why he hadn’t been spending $4,000 a month with him at the other stations, the client said “You never asked me to.”

    Many account executives confuse ‘relationship’ with ‘friendship’ or become protective of their relationships and fear asking for more. Often they become ‘too close to the forest to see the trees’.

    Your clients are all adults. They are perfectly capable of saying ‘No’ when you’ve reached their budget threshold.  Your clients are in sales too, and they respect salespeople who have enough confidence in their product to ask for more.

    I’m not proposing you gouge or over-sell your good clients.  But your relationship can be more damaged by accepting token buys than it would be by presenting solid plans to increase reach and frequency to help improve your clients’ R.O.I. (Return on Investment).

 

[email protected]

Canadian Radio’s Fear Factor

 In the past few weeks, I’ve learned one of the reasons why we don’t have an industry organization promoting radio to advertisers in Canada.

I’ve long been a proponent of the merits of industry organizations like Canada’s defunct Radio Marketing Bureau and the Radio Advertising Bureau in the U.S.

I remain a firm believer that a rising tide lifts all boats. The more radio advertisers we sell, the more radio stations they’ll buy when it works. And almost weekly, I speak to broadcasters who agree we need a Canadian Radio Marketing Bureau.

But over the last few weeks I’ve learned why a bureau probably won’t be resurrected. We are doing a small part to help radio account executives sell more radio by facilitating an event on June 4th that we’ll actually lose money on, by design.

The June 4th event is sold out, so this is not a sales pitch.

But working on this project has taught me why our industry has no advocate organization. Part of our June 4th agenda includes station executives sharing success stories and strategies to sell more radio advertising, and frankly, to bolster their confidence in radio.

Can you believe some have said they don’t want other stations to know how to sell more radio?  It’s true!

In spite of all of the new media and digital platforms nipping at radio’s heels, there are still station executives who consider other radio stations to be their biggest threat and fear helping the industry to grow by sharing their knowledge.

I share sales tips in these weekly ENS on Sales every week, at no cost to the recipients, in part because I know if I can help our industry to succeed, I’ll succeed by osmosis.

The good news is, I believe our sold out event proves the folks who don’t want to help the industry grow are in the minority.  So maybe, just maybe, the industry can get its’ act together and create a tide to raise the radio ship.

 

[email protected]

A ‘Must Read’Article About Radio Influence

Did you see the article in Forbes Magazine declaring Radio deserves a much bigger piece of the automotive advertising pie?

And did you happen to see the CTV expose’ where the Better Business Bureau has named fraudulent online reviews as one of the Top 10 Scams?

Amidst all of the digital media hype, many truths like “56% of digital ads are not seen” need to be understood by your advertisers.

There is still time for you to register for the Radio Works Workshop  in Vaughan, Ontario on June 4th  to discover the tools to sell more radio.

The Silent Killer of Corporate Profits: Ad Waste Forbes

Each year, hundreds of millions of ad dollars may be wasted due to outdated communication models. Those old ad models assumed people could be trained to purchase via stimulus. Therefore the number of times a person saw a message the more quickly they would respond. In their 2009 book “Media Generations,” Drs. Don Schultz and Martin Block of the Medill School at Northwestern pointed out that the old ad model theory was no longer viable and clearly outdated. They made the case for a consumer-centric model for media to improve ROI, which included an increase in radio allocation for car and truck advertising.   …READ MORE

[email protected]