(By Michelle Wilken) You’re aware that “radio is one of the most powerful mediums in the U.S., with a weekly reach of “around 82.5% among adults,” according to Statista.
So, why am I telling you to stop pitching only spots to your advertisers? The answer is two-fold: You leave advertiser dollars on the table when you don’t include digital advertising, decreasing your revenue; and you deliver weaker results for your advertisers with a one-tactic approach.
Every proposal that your sales team puts in front of advertisers should include a multichannel approach that combines radio and digital, without exception. Why is this?
The Differences and Synergies of Radio + Digital
Start with the audience each reaches. Radio casts a wide net, reaching people who are in the market for their product or service, people who may someday be interested, and people who will never buy but may influence others’ purchasing decisions. Digital advertising, on the other hand, is more targeted. It reaches small groups of very interested people and is the ideal way to go after an audience based on factors such as where they are and what they’re searching for on the web.
By combining both the broad nature of radio and narrow focus of digital, an advertiser can get far better results than using just one or the other. This is because digital advertising enhances the effectiveness of non-digital media channels. The point is to do this in a coordinated way rather than having the broadcast radio advertisement and the narrowcast digital advertisement in unrelated silos. Only you can offer this powerful integrated approach to advertisers.
Local Radio Sellers Have an Advantage with Local Advertisers
Your clients already know the power of digital – if they aren’t buying it from you now, they are buying it from someone else. But radio sellers have unique advantages that can persuade advertisers to move their digital budget over to their team; local broadcasters enjoy relationships with local advertisers and know their space better than any large, out-of-town or internet-only digital agency ever will.
When advertisers buy both broadcast and digital from the same provider, they get better reach, tighter targeting, and more consistency across their message, plus the benefit of coordinated tactics across an integrated campaign. This means better results for advertisers and more renewals (and often higher value renewals) for you.
How do you convince your clients that you are the best resource for their entire advertising budget? Remind them that broadcast advertising allows them to choose exactly when the radio audience will be hearing their message. Digital, on the other hand, offers a wide variety of tactics for reaching the highly interested audience at a time when they are available and more likely able to act. This is why geofencing, social media, desktop display, and OTT can deliver such exceptional results.
When your sales team has proper training on both radio and digital tactics, they can propose the right multichannel solution to their clients that will produce the best ROI for their budget, based on their campaign goals.
How do you make this happen and transform your sales?
Preparing Your Team to be Confident Selling Digital
Start by preparing your organization for change. Communicate with your sales team about why and how digital can help them and the company to be more successful. Ensure that your digital advertising platform integrates smoothly into your existing operations and workflows and take steps to help salespeople become comfortable with the new options.
First, provide training opportunities and incentives to increase their capabilities around the new workflows. That includes direction on building multichannel proposals, handling insertion orders, developing creative, offering clients rich reporting on results, and following up effectively with unified invoicing for campaigns. If these tasks are just too complicated or unfamiliar for your sales team to use, they simply won’t sell digital advertising, and the investment will be a failure.
Second, take advantage of any support your vendor offers, and not just for their software. Get your sales team lined up for sales enablement training so that they are confident in what they are proposing. Without this confidence, their efforts will be futile (if they try at all). Support learning and growth through continual education opportunities.
Help Your Advertisers and Gain a Larger Share of Their Ad Budget
The digital advertising boom is not going away. Now is the time to develop, support, and drive multichannel advertising sales approaches in your company. If you’ve tried it before and it didn’t work, or you have it in place, but it isn’t yielding results, it’s time to reassess and find a better solution. One that will lift you to the higher revenues and advertiser satisfaction potential that exists
Michelle Wilken is Vice President of digital operations at Marketron.
