Tag Archives: Marketing

What I learned About Sales from a Programming Consultant

George Johns, a programming consultant I worked with a number of years ago, told me he could always tell how a station’s ratings would fare in the next book by asking the local program director one simple two-word question.

George maintained that he could call any program director and ask, “What’s new?” If the answer was a ho-hum “We’re doing the same thing we did last year”, he could predict a ho-hum book…. or worse!

On the other hand, if the program director’s enthusiastic response talked about all of the new initiatives and promotions they were launching, George could accurately predict a great book.

You know that ‘new’ is one of the five most powerful words in marketing. But did you know your salespeople need something new to talk about on the street to keep their enthusiasm and passion at a fever pitch?

Ever since George passed that powerful bellwether on to me, I’ve used it successfully in sales. I make a point of having something ‘new’ to engage salespeople at every sales meeting, every week.

Our local TOMA (Top-of-Mind-Awareness) surveys and SoundADvice radio e-marketing system could be the something new necessary to revitalize your sales force in 2018 and beyond.

Click here to arrange an online overview of these proven radio sales systems.

BEING ‘COOL’ CAN LEAVE YOUR CUSTOMERS COLD

I read a headline in one of the numerous marketing newsletters I read each day that said ‘The 5 KPI’s Marketers Need to Measure’.

I thought to myself, “Wow, I must be out of touch because I don’t even know what a KPI is.”

I felt a little better after talking to five high-profile marketing types who also did not know what a KPI is.

Your clients and prospects are wary of lazy short-form applications (you might call them SFA’s…lol) written to make the writer feel trendy, and the reader feel obsolete.

By the way, the author apparently wanted KPI to mean ‘key performance indicators’.

I went online and found a site that listed over 100 three letter ‘marketing terms’.

I stopped at the C’s:

CPM, cost per thousand

CTA, call to action

CMO, chief marketing officer

CAC, customer acquisition cost

CRM, customer relations manager

COS, content operating system

CPC, cost per click

CPV, cost per view

CCO, chief creative officer

CPP, cost per point

CBS, creative brief summary

CSI, customer satisfaction index

CPL, cost per lead

There are 26 letters in the alphabet, meaning there are 17,576 possible
three-letter combinations. I have no intentions of learning them all and neither do your customers.

Using trendy marketing terms might make you feel important, but you’ll never lose points by saying what you mean rather than using trendy or misunderstood short forms.

You Can Be Number One

You don’t have to represent “number one” to be number one.

There are more than 200 car brands being sold in North America. So it’s fair to say that auto sales are a very competitive market.

And KIA certainly is not the number one selling brand.

Yet Fuccillo KIA in Cape Coral, Florida sells more than 1,000 cars a month!

Fuccillo is the largest KIA dealer in the world, even though they don’t sell the most popular brand, and the city of Cape Coral’s population doesn’t rank in the top 200 markets in the U.S.

So you don’t have to have the number one brand or number one market to be number one in sales.

Where you do have to be number one to be the sales leader is in your prospect’s mind.  Mr. Fuccillo is a brilliant marketer.

How do you market yourself so that local advertisers always think of you when making their advertising plans? Is your brand simply that of a spot sales person, or are you recognized as a sustaining resource to successful advertisers.

The sales go to the best marketer.

P.S. Our SoundADvice radio e-marketing system is building the brand, and the sales, for its members every week. Click here to learn how your cluster can become the exclusive SoundADvice member in your market.

It Ain’t Gonna Sell Itself

So you think your advertisers are flocking to social media? Maybe not.  Maybe social media salespeople are flocking to them.

Twitter, for example, invested a whopping 44% of their revenue in marketing and sales to capture a 111% revenue increase last year.

 Now, I’m not suggesting for a minute that broadcasters should have a 44% cost of sale. But you almost certainly are not going to experience sales increases by cutting your marketing and sales investments.

The good old days of only competing with a few local stations and the local paper are long gone.  Your prospects are being sold by the marketing automation software folks, social media salespeople, web designers, SEO folks, Google AdWords, and many more from around the globe every week.

 Click on this link to see what other publicly held companies are investing in marketing and sales

http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2015/28343/how-much-do-public-companies-spend-on-marketing-and-sales-infographic?adref=nlt082815

 Local radio is not going to sell itself.

          And….I know that you know the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

What are you doing to increase your sales in 2016?

Our suite of  revenue-development products, from local Top of Mind Awareness surveys to our SoundADvice radio e-marketing system, is helping stations across North America to increase their sales.

Contact [email protected] to discuss how we can build a custom revenue solutions program to increase your sales in 2016.
Sincerely,
Wayne Ens
705-484-9993

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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