The solution to overcoming fear of being wrong, is avoiding the need to be right. Journalists do this all the time by asking first the obvious, then the un-obvious question. Columbo, my favorite disheveled TV detective, would pose two conflicting sets of facts and ask questions trying to resolve them.
High quality content, and more and more of it, is your social media strategy. People share content, and comment on content via social media. No content, no sharing. Build your content first. Readers will share on their social media of choice. When Facebook declines they’ll share it on the next platform, be it Snapchat or Instagram or one we haven’t heard of yet.
Smart advertising sales managers know that they can’t skip selling to the ad agencies and media buying services, but they must never forget where the power is; at the client. And getting client appointments is harder and more valuable than ever.
What gets the attention of clients? Certainly it’s not your circulation or your demographics. That is what they pay agencies to put in to spreadsheets. In order to be successful working at the highest level of advertising media decision making, at the client, you need to be adding value by contributing to their understanding of how customers make purchase decisions to buy their products. If you bring value to keeping up with the changing habits of buyers you will always be welcome in the executive suites of your advertising media customers.
It is the Path to Purchase that is intriguing to customers. It is not simple, rather it is nuanced. It is not static, but rather is changing with the changing media consumption patterns of consumers and business buyers.
Did it really take research at Stanford to prove Calvin Coolidge right? “Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full […]
60% say that “input from the client” is always “a resource use when preparing/selecting the list of media for consideration.” This is the highest of all reported sources, far above SRDS itself (27%) and above “research,” the next highest at 56%. And 54% say “client dictates” “always” or “often” are the cause of changes/turnover in a schedule. Are you getting the client sales calls you need to win ad-sales in this environment?
Too often media companies feel pressed to ad in free pages or free digital impressions when that is really not different from lowering the price. Media companies would be far more successful with breaking those ties, assuming they have their media priced appropriately, by offering research.
Perhaps what the publishing industry hasn’t understood is that we were in a print bubble in the late 1990’s and early years of this century. We believed, for some reason that the market needed dozens of home magazines. We believed that the world needed hundreds of tech magazines and more than a dozen national parenting and baby care magazines. In many, if not most, business-to-business sectors there have been 3 or 4 or even five entries.
In our capitalist world, prices of inventory are simply the result of the mysterious workings of supply and demand. The massive growth of the supply of inventory isn’t within the control of publishers. But they can and should develop a genuine plan to drive up demand for their inventory. How do you drive demand?
Recent increases in print sales for Men’s magazines show why selling print and digital through the same “hybrid” sales force can be an advantage for print publishers. We have observed that when a print campaign is won, the timing on that will be well before the digital campaign is decided. Long-ago we wrote this ad-sales tip on how to leverage that print win into digital revenue.
If you view advertising sales as a purely transactional business, you won’t be building competitive advantage. When you invest in the three practices above your competitive advantage will build – one customer and one individual relationship at a time. Then, over time, your sales team will notice that they are more likely to get calls and emails returned and you win the close calls on business that might have gone to your competitor. You’ll win more renewal-business, meaning your new business wins can build the business rather than put you on a treadmill of win-lose-win-lose.
