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.