Tag Archives: followers

Data-Driven Vanity

Maybe it’s time for radio to produce some vanity metrics.

Vanity is defined as ‘excessive pride or admiration for one’s appearance or achievements’.

Vanity metrics look good on paper and make advertisers feel good about their investment but they don’t give advertisers an accurate picture of how successful their advertising is.

Our friends in digital, flog vanity metrics as if they were the holy grail of advertising, and some of your clients are eating it up.

Digital vanity metrics include clicks, likes, followers, downloads, subscribers, pages views and more.

When you think about it, invoicing your clients for ‘spots’ really doesn’t appeal to their vanity. Maybe we should invoice based upon something like ‘estimated impressions.’ Invoicing for 30 spots, isn’t as appealing as invoicing for 5,000 impressions per spot for a total of 150,000 impressions.

Of course, you know impressions aren’t the final measure of results, in part, because the relevance of the message dictates whether the ‘impressions’ actually produce results. But if you’re dealing with clients who value vanity metrics, maybe you should show impressions or some higher number other than ‘spots’ on their invoice to appeal to their vanity.

Our new partner at ENS Media, Rick Fink, forwarded the following video link to me. It seems today our toughest selling job is not selling advertisers, it’s selling our sales people. The video at this link unveils the fallacy of digital media metrics, and can help you sell your sellers at your next sales meeting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBvCnsxtNsI

We’re looking forward to more of Rick’s contributions to help our station clients increase their local-direct revenues in 2017 and beyond.

WORDS THAT SELL

Our friends in digital media have been much more effective at harnessing the power of words than we have.

While we had ‘ratings’, they introduced ‘big data’ making our mere ratings seem pitifully small.

While we merely ‘reach’ people, our digital friends claimed to ‘engage’ them. Can you see the difference? I learned very early in my career that simply  ‘reaching’ an audience did not necessarily mean you influenced that audience. ‘Engaging’ people just seems like such an endearing term compared to merely reaching them.

While we only had audiences, which the dictionary defines as spectators,  listeners or viewers, they claimed to have ‘followers.’ The dictionary defines  followers  as ‘devotees or admirers of another person or a group.’

You have a myriad of sales tools available at your fingertips today, but in the end, all of those tools resort to  the use of words; from PowerPoint to ratings, and from prospecting to presenting, it’s the effective and sometimes subtle use of words that ultimately make the sale.

Yet those of us in traditional communications are surprisingly ineffective at using the most relevant words when attempting to persuade, convince or sell.

At ENS Media, we critique hundreds of sales presentations every month to help our clients create more effective presentations, and we still see the careless or lazy use of words in most of those presentations.

For example, many presentations refer to ‘costs’ or paying a ‘price.’ The best presentations position your rates as “an investment” not a cost. Most entrepreneurs like to invest, while most are trying to reduce costs.

We still see presentations trying to sell ‘spots.’ Spots are something that have no perceived value, and in fact, we send our clothes to the cleaners to remove spots. There is much more perceived value in selling messages, commercials or announcements, than in spots.

And we still see way too much use of  “we or I,” in presentations versus “you or your”. It’s much more effective to say “Your campaign will reach 100,000 of your prospects” than to say “we reach 100,000 listeners.”

          Click here to inquire how we can help your sales people craft presentations that sell.