2018 is here! Whether you’re a sales rep or in management, many of you have probably made a resolution to bring in more revenue at your respective stations. How do you go about doing that? My suggestion: follow the money.
A quick Google search for “ad spend by medium in 2018” will provide you with a number of articles covering where advertisers are placing their dollars. As you’ll see, and have consis- tently read in the Radio Ink headlines, digital will continue to be a focal point for local advertisers looking to get the best bang for their buck. How do you find the right prospects in a hyper-competitive digital space? Here are the tools that will help you win more digital dollars in 2018.
Become a “plumbing inspector.” Not a real plumbing inspector, a website plumbing inspector. When a home is built, it must meet certain requirements before someone moves in — one of which is passing a plumbing inspection. If a plumbing inspection isn’t completed, a number of issues might arise, resulting in a homeowner’s having countless dollars go down the drain (pun intended). A client’s website is no different.
Once you have a prospect in mind, here are three free tools you should be using to inspect the prospect’s website. Each of these could be an article on its own, so I recommend going to YouTube and searching for each one. There are a number of short videos explaining how they work.
GOOGLE TAG ASSISTANT
Once downloaded and enabled, Google Tag Assistant will tell you if a client has Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and AdWords Remarketing properly set up on their website. These three elements are critical for advertisers who are using Google pay-per-click and want to learn more about the traffic that is coming in from paid search.
FACEBOOK PIXEL HELPER
Many advertisers say they are using Facebook, but they don’t have the Facebook Pixel placed on their site. This is a pixel provided by Facebook for businesses that have created a business.facebook.com account.
The pixel works by matching the advertiser’s site traffic to specific Facebook user profiles, then giving the advertiser the ability to create custom audiences of people to remarket to inside the Facebook ad platform.
Imagine telling your client that you know of a way to help them retarget everyone who visited their page in the past 30 days, or explaining to a local florist the value of retargeting everyone who made an online purchase on their site in the previous six months for an upcoming Valentine’s Day special. Placement of the Facebook Pixel is an essential component of proper digital plumbing.
GHOSTERY
This tool will save you a ton of time before you meet with a prospect, or even help you decide whether to do so. There’s nothing worse than scheduling an appointment, taking time out of your day to drive to your prospect and pitch them, only to find out they are already using many of the services you are presenting. Ghostery will tell you which display advertising platforms the prospect has integrated into their website. Now you can compare your display offerings against what they’re currently using.
Prospecting in 2018 is about doing your homework up front. Not only will this save you time, it will have you prepared for the onslaught of questions that will come your way about how what you have to offer is different from what the prospect is already using. So get to work. Download these tools, inspect the plumbing, and start swimming in new digital dollars today.
Gabriel Barnes is the Managing Director of RevKick — a platform for radio stations to sell ad-targeting services and retargeting capabilities to their advertisers.
Great read and great advice. I can’t wait to research and implement your practices. Thank you, so very much!
Thank you for your feedback, Jerry.