Category Archives: Uncategorized

What Advertisers Want

 

This article by Ed Ryan of Radio Ink is a must read. We’ve been training this for years, but when it comes from an advertiser’s mouth, maybe our points will finally hit home.
What Advertisers Want – By Ed Ryan, editor, Radio Ink
Advertiser after advertiser, agency after agency we interview are consistent when we ask them the following question; What can radio improve upon to get on more of your buys? Bring more ideas is what they say. They never answer, tell me how many listener hours your industry has every month. They never say, figure out how to beat  satellite radio. Here is an example. Jennifer White is the President of White House Media. We recently interviewed White for an upcoming issue of Radio Ink. Here is an excerpt from that interview. It might contradict what you just may be starting your sales meeting off with today, the newly touted listener number.
What’s your biggest pet peeve with Radio?
Radio reps need to know more about advertising and marketing, specifically, to understand why their clients are moving to online alternatives. Here is the challenge. Radio reps love to talk about audience size. But, why would an advertiser spend big bucks to reach the masses when only a small percentage of that audience has any desire for their product?
Radio’s efforts to adapt to new media have just been a series of fancy band-aids. At one point, a station group told me that it was launching a search capability through their stations’ websites. Well, this was obviously not going to work. Why would anyone use a search engine on WXYZ when Google has so much more to offer? Other stations put their emphasis on social networking with listener clubs, Facebook fans and Twitter followers. While I agree that “likes” are nice, these efforts are just jumping onto the back of the speedboat and trying to hang on. It’s a cluttered media world out there and it will take more than a “me too” attitude to remain relevant.
My favorite reps are my favorites for old school reasons. They anticipate my needs. They build a relationship– not by generically asking about the health of my family, but by proving that they are looking out for me and my clients. They provide unexpected services. They get creative. My least favorite reps sit back, wait for avails, and lead me to believe I’m secondary to their other clients.
Right now, the radio advantage is a local sales force, not a sheet of paper touting billions of listeners that does not translate to the advertiser. When customers walk through an advertiser’s door, it won’t matter to them whether Pandora or the newspaper or the local television station has 100 billion listeners, viewers or readers. They would care if you are the person that makes their register ring.  Go out and BE that person 

Are You Marketing or Just Selling?

 

Are You Marketing, or Just Selling?
        My father once told me, “Never buy a car from an auto mechanic. After they’ve been paid to repair other people’s cars all day, the last thing they want to do is take care of their own car for free”.
        Most radio stations suffer from the same ‘mechanic’s syndrome’; after creating innovative marketing campaigns for their local clients all day, they neglect marketing their own stations.
        Most stations rely strictly on outbound marketing, largely face-to-face selling and telemarketing.  Research proves that the cost per lead generated by outbound marketing is often three to twenty times as high as for leads generated by inbound marketing processes; marketing where the client or prospect approaches you instead of visa versa.    
        Many stations believe a ‘lead’ is a tip, referral or process that results in generating a new contact which eventually ‘leads’ to new business. Not so! The best marketers know that a lead is any tip, referral or process which results in generating new business in addition to generating lucrative revenue lifts from existing contacts and clients.
        Mechanic’s syndrome prevents most stations from generating inbound leads. As marketing professionals, we know and use all of the tools at our disposal for our clients, and leave our own marketing to outbound sales calls and telemarketing.
        Here are just a few of the inbound marketing tactics you should employ;

1.)Advertising. You’re not sold out! And believe it or not, advertising works and can generate leads. 2.)Websites.  Your website is the perfect venue to extol the virtues of radio advertising and establish your brand as marketing professionals. 3.)Blogs.  The blog portion of our SoundADvice radio e-marketing system generates an average of 4.5 leads per month per account executive. 4.)Marketing Seminars. An educational seminar that clearly positions radio’s role in the new media landscape can generate new leads as well as more revenue from existing clients.  ( I mean a real educational seminar, not a sales pitch where you put Dobermans at the door and don’t let clients out until they buy your ‘package’) 5.)Social Media. Social media can build awareness, credibility and leads with no cash investment. Admittedly, social media does require your valuable time everyday. 6.)Talk Show Guests. Pro-radio marketing experts can generate interest and on-air inquiries and put radio in the driver’s seat of a bus that is currently filled with new media advocates.  A guest appearance I did on an east coast station actually generated a lead for a west coast station from a business owner who had been listening online.

        Outbound marketing works and you can always get better at it too. But the cheapest, fastest way to improve your sales is to compliment your outbound efforts with a solid inbound marketing process.

Click here for a free no-obligation demo of how SoundADvice can generate an average of 4.5 pre-qualified inbound leads for each one of your salespeople every month.

The Account Executive Vs the Sales Rep

The Account Executive Vs the Sales Rep

          What you do after the sale separates an Account Executive from a salesperson.
          In his book, Selling to VITO, Very Important Top Officer, Anthony Parinello explains, “Many salespeople have learned what it takes to talk a good game. They are so far-removed from what customers actually experience with their products or services that they develop, knowingly or unknowingly, a huge credibility gap with top decision makers.”
          Parinello says, “So if your aim is to keep sounding like a standard salesperson, and leave the execution of your promises to someone else in your organization to worry about, VITO’s will simply have no patience for you!”
          Broadcast salespeople who think their job culminates with the completion of a broadcast order are responsible for the high advertiser attrition rates many stations experience!
          Broadcast salespeople who sell spot schedules and efficiencies as the Holy Grail inevitably commoditize our product. Focusing on spot rates, frequency or CPP (Cost Per Point) levels gives the advertiser an easy-to-compare quantitative measure of one media over another. And of course the lowest rate, be that spot rate, cost per thousand rate or any other quantifiable rate, wins!
          While I’m not naive enough to think your quantifiable measures don’t need to be competitive, I also know that at the completion of a campaign your station won’t be measured by cost ‘efficiencies’. It will be measured by results.
          Professional Account Executives don’t leave the execution of a campaign up to someone else. They are involved from strategy development right through to creative development, post campaign analysis, and everything in between.
          Broadcast Account Executives who understand all three R’s in a media campaign, (reach, repetition and relevance) make the campaign’s strategic relevance the tie-breaker in a competitive proposal.
          But often in our pursuit of the next broadcast order, we leave the creative ‘relevance’ of our campaign to someone else who has never met the client, never taken a marketing course, and has to pump out an award-winning spot every 15 minutes. 
          Two of the litmus tests to determine if your after sale follow-through distinguishes you as an Account Executive versus a sales rep include;
 1.) The next time you fill out a copy information sheet for your creative writer, give it to one of your peers first. Ask them to write a campaign that will deliver a high ROI based on the information provided. 92% of the copy information sheets we see fall far short of the mark…neither David Ogilvy or Roy Williams could create an effective campaign from the information provided by order-focused sales reps.
 
2.) What did you learn from the last post campaign analysis you did that will arm you to create an even better campaign next time? Most ‘salespeople’ we meet are afraid to actually conduct a post campaign analysis and they don’t learn from each experience.
 You are welcome to use our free Post Campaign Analysis Form at our website, www.wensmedia.com  under “for Media” then click on ‘Free stuff’

Your 24/7 Brand

 

Your 24/7 Brand
          In his book ‘Brand Like a Rock Star’, my friend Steve Jones writes about the marketing lessons he has learned observing successful rock stars.  Steve says lesson number one from Jimmy Buffet is, “Make sure everything you do reflects what your fans expect from you.  Everything Jimmy does is perfectly in tune with his laid back Key West beach bum image”.
          In Buffet’s song, Miss You So Badly from his Changes in Latitudes album Jimmy explained the 24/7 nature of a brand when he sang;
We’re stayin’ at a Holiday Inn full of surgeons,
I guess they meet there once a year.
They exchange physician’s stories,
And get drunk on Tuborg beer.
Then they’re off to see a stripper,
With their eyes glued to her ‘G’
But I don’t think that I would ever let them cut on me!”
          Jimmy’s point?  The Physicians’ after-hours persona tainted their brand and his confidence in them to perform surgery on him.
          Is your brand as a marketing professional consistent 24/7?
          If a prospect should happen to bump into you after hours, would your appearance and behaviour be consistent with someone they could trust with their marketing budget?
          Are the proposals you present customer-focused and up to the standards of a marketing professional ?  Or do you default to media kits, station ‘packages’ and generic templates like everyone else?
P.S. You can order Steve’s Brand Like a Rock Star book on Amazon.  You can also contact me, [email protected]  if you or anyone you know is looking for a guest speaker.  I promise Steve’s Brand Like a Rock Star presentation will entertain and inform your audience.

Creating Low-Hanging Fruit

 

Creating Low-Hanging Fruit
 
          Our new VP of Marketing Communications, Craig Rosart, wisely points out how farmers created more ‘low hanging fruit’.
          Farmers have long known how cost-effective and efficient it is to pick the easy, low-hanging fruit. Broadcast account executives have also been very adept at harvesting the low hanging fruit; traditional retail advertising categories like car dealerships and furniture stores have been the mainstay of many senior account lists.
          But farmers also recognized that the hard-to-reach fruit at the top of their trees was often more bountiful and sweeter and going to waste.
          The farmer’s solution? Grow shorter ‘dwarf variety’ trees.
          The smartest radio and TV account executives have also recognized the value of hard-to-reach, non-traditional advertisers in the services and professionals categories. Some of the advantages of capturing these categories include;
1.)   They are accustomed to making annual advertising commitments in directories like yellow pages, and to making those commitments focused on results, not rates.
2.)   While traditional retail categories have come under extreme margin pressures from big-box stores, online shopping, and daily deal sites, non-traditional advertisers in the lucrative services and professionals sectors, still maintain enviable margins and have no big box or online competition.
3.)   Share of voice equals share of market.   When a new advertiser doesn’t have to out-shout any competitors on the air, their share of voice and their results, are amazing.
          Many of the previously hard-to-reach advertisers were content with their yellow directories advertising. But with the demise of Yellow Pages caused by online search engines and diminishing results, they are now low-hanging fruit; on shorter trees, easier to reach and willing to listen to new ways to increase sales.
          Although the old printed directories are going the way of the dinosaur, their sales people are desperately trying to ‘switch-pitch’ these former gold mines onto their online versions.  Like all harvesting, timing is critical to picking the ripest fruit. Radio and TV reps need to harvest these prospects now, before the online and digital directory folks put them in their baskets!  
          Click here for an online demo of how our Selling Against Printed and Online Directories system can help you intercept the migration to online directories and increase your sales.