Sales & Marketing

We tend to tell our clients a little too much what “our unique position” in the market is. I’ll catch myself saying it from time to time. But here’s the truth when it comes to radio and TV

Here’s my business card, okay great here’s mine. Okay perfect, well nice to meet you. Oh wait what do you do for a living? Networking events. The place where we used to hand out and receive as many business cards as we could get our hands on and in exchange

When it comes to the direct response television industry, the trend for 2014 will be producing commercials that are of higher quality coupled with an overabundance of toys. Great commercials center on the product. The product is king. While various reports note that the success rate for short-form commercials is 1 in 40, others have stated that it is 1 in 20. Yes, the odds are long, however, the vast majority of those failures are for products that don’t fit the DRTV mold. As highlighted in the Scimark Report (scimark.blogspot.com) week after week, companies are throwing their cash in the trash by repeating the same failures time after time. Although not a guarantee of success, following the basic rules can raise your batting average to 1 in 5 at least. My company has been batting .400 ball for the past decade. We concentrate on what we know, venture selectively in new categories like Tag Away, but always try to stay true to the rules. It makes our inventors and product scouts that we sign up happier to know at outset that there is meaningful chance of success at the end of the journey. All great successes begin with mass appeal. Television is a mass medium.

The one thing every radio advertiser wants is results. It follows then that Radio’s promise to clients must be

We all have a product to sell or represent. No matter your career, position, business, lifestyle, or skills. There is some type of product that you are selling or representing. Back in the “good old days” we sold with the thought process that if we could convince people they needed our product badly enough to go out and buy it. And it worked. There were a couple of TV stations, no internet, talk radio, and the newspaper. Product reviews were rare and the trust factor was at an all time high. The “good old days” were a great time for those in the business with enough money to convince people they needed it. The “good old days” as you might have guessed are long gone. But the good old days weren’t really here all that long. Maybe from 1900 to the dot com bust. It might have even not started until the Roaring 1920’s and ended with the dawn of the internet. So how did you sell whatever you were representing before the good old days started? I mean we are talking centuries of sales here.

As a broadcaster, your job is to make your properties a welcome place for ad agencies. That’s why it may surprise you to learn that one of the primary obstacles to your ad revenue growth may be that at the same time you are saying, “come on in!”, the message that many ad agencies are saying to the many thousands of small to medium-sized businesses that want to broaden their media buying to broadcast television or radio but don’t have mega-budgets is: “Go Away!”

Unicorns are rare and magical creatures. In the European folklore of the Middle Ages a Unicorn was depicted as a white horse or goat-like creature with a long golden horn imbued with magical properties located in the middle of its head. They were commonly described as wild creatures and symbols of purity and grace that could only be captured by an innocent soul. But, I have another way to describe them…

2014 is almost here and everyone is scurrying around concerned with how they will grow their shares, hit their budgets, and bill as many dollars as they possibly can. But first we need to step back and accept reality. The reality is that TV, Radio, Print, and even Digital (digital is still traditional media if you are just selling by CPM or with banner ads) are in even greater danger and will be challenged more than ever before. Pandora, podcasts, Netflix, Hulu, etc will be brought to the forefront more than ever before.

One of the underused keys in radio sales is to really use your benefits of your medium and show them to your client or prospect in a way that will impact their business. I received a stat last week that jumped out at me: The use of radio in a company’s marketing campaign results in a 7.7% higher ROI than when the same companies have done a similar campaign without radio as part of their media mix.

Building relationships is the way we are supposed to thrive and not just survive in media sales. “You need to build better relationships.”—Boss to Radio Sales Person…“We have to key in on growing our relationships.”—TV Sales Manager to Marketing Director…“At the end of the day all we have to keep our business alive is our relationships so we better have the best ones.”—Owner of company with a bad product.

Today’s IT professionals must do much more than implement and manage technology