The Choice Seems Clear

Seems like a situation with easy logic: advertisers should spend their marketing dollars with the medium that offers the most audience engagement, right? Well, then someone tell me why Newspapers get 20% of the marketing dollars when they only deliver 8% of time spent between the media and their audience?

BusinessInsider.com shared 2008 research from JP Morgan via their Chart of the Day post:




The Internet tops the chart in disparity of attention vs. advertising investment by delivering 38% of time spent with the medium but receiving a mere 8% of total advertising dollars.

The other big missed opportunity is Radio, only receiving 9% share of advertising budgets, but delivering 19% of audience engagement -- a virtual mirror image of Newspaper!

Certainly something to talk to your clients and prospects about as you help them plan their strategies for 2010.

BusinessInsider.com notes the numbers are from 2008, so the ad spend on newspapers is lower today-- but go on to say "it's not low enough, considering how little we spend with them."

Web Pricing Poll

If your clients could buy out all of the display ad (banner) space on 971TheFan.com for an entire day (streaming pre-roll and web players not included), what do you believe a reasonable price would be for this sort of exclusivity?

Please use the poll below to choose one of the preset prices, or enter a price of your own...



Your participation will help as we create web sales strategy for the coming year. Watch for more of these quick and simple polls in the future.

Thanks for sharing your opinion!

Accountability is King

From today's Inside Radio:

Marketers Seek Accountability
Do more with less isn’t just radio’s operating standard. A new survey shows two-thirds of marketers are being told by their companies to drive more sales with the same or lower budget -- and three-quarters say their marketing budget has shrunk this year. Facing that challenge, accountability has taken on a much greater significance.

The St. Louis Business Journal report the same trend in their article about ad agencies taking a hit from Anheuser-Busch spending...

Anheuser-Bush has changed it's "free-wheeling, let’s-give-it-a-try attitude" for a more "scrutinized and calculated" results-based approach.

From the article...
"A-B has always been good at listening to agencies with good ideas. But now you’ve got to do more back-end research,” Litwicki said. “The way they make decisions is a lot more mathematical. It used to be enough to do brand building and create an image that would ultimately drive sales. Now they also want to see the component that will actually incentivize the consumer to pick up the product. When you come in with those solutions, they are very receptive."

Measurable results are beginning to matter more and more to advertisers, and they are cutting spending with their agencies to find marketing resources elsewhere who can provide those results. As the article above states, when you have an idea that is based on delivering actual results (rather than just another branding campaign) companies are ready to listen.

Marketing to Inactive List Members

Some marketers feel that if a member of their email list has been inactive for a great length of time, that the list might be better served by deleting the name -- even if the list member themself has not requested to be unsubscribed. This has to do with the ego and expectations of the list owner more than the preference of the list member.

They say:

• Inactive list members create lower percentages of open rates
• Inactive list members lower the ratio of clicks
• Inactive members lower the percentage of return on investment

You know what else inactive list members can do?
Account for 10% of your total annual sales, or even generate over $115,000 in a single campaign!

The DMA Email Marketing Blog has an interesting post up redefining "inactives" as "emotionally unsubscribed." They cite several instances where a significant number inactive list members have been triggered to take action based on their personal 'itch cycle.'

In one case, over $115,000 dollars was generated by making a special offer (a really great offer) to those list members who'd not click on the previous 25-40 past offers. Another statistic showed that over 10% of the revenue generated in 2008 had been contributed to the bottom line by list members who had not opened or clicked a single message in the previous year.

The lesson is to not over-obsess about inactive members on your list. Just because not everyone feels compelled to read every single missive you send, doesn't mean they won't remember you when their needs match your offers.

How Does Your Marketing Measure Up?

Read a great article in the latest MarketingProfs "Get To The Point" newsletter on Marketing Analytics. They recap a post from the Email Experience Blog on measuring the success of email marketing campaigns. This specifically addresses email, but the principle applies to ALL marketing efforts and the importance of pre-establishing metrics for success.

The blog post says data gathered on email marketing campaigns might not be as useful as you think. "Real danger lurks in not measuring the right factors or not measuring accurately. You could suffer lost revenue. You might not know which messages are working. And your sales team won't know what to focus on."

There are just SO many different things you can measure in marketing (especially online marketing), that it's extremely difficult to agree upon industry benchmarks in order to make effective comparisons. People are focusing on impressions or clicks or only those clicks that lead to a single sale.

The purpose of any marketing is to trigger an ACTION. Actions could include:

• Forward to a friend
• Signing up for a mailing list or additional informaiton
• Visit to a physical store location
• Attend an event
• Buy a product

It's vital to have a clear view of your client's specific goal for the campaign's marketing message and for the results on which the campaign will be judged. In order to meet those goals, tools must be in effect to capture the correct data by which effectiveness can be judged. As they say in the article... "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it."

Who's Yer GoDaddy?

Bob Parsons of GoDaddy.com is doing a great job of providing entertaining, yet informative, video content for his customers. What sort of content, advice, and expertise are you providing to YOUR clients?

Sell Smart - Not Hard

Very quick (but very good) interview with sales guru, Jeffrey Gitomer from SalesRepRadio.com.

"The salesperson, man or woman, who walks into the potential buyer's office and starts to puke all over them about how great they are and how wonderful their product is... they're going to lose, or they're going to fight the price because they haven't differentiated themselves in any way."
~Gitomer

Click the PLAY button below to hear the short audio interview:
Sell Smart - Not Hard

Jump-Start Your Car Business

The latest issue of Fast Company's Now Daily email newsletter (you can sign-up for free by clicking here) shares 25 ideas for getting the automotive business back into drive. Why not take a look and see how many of the concepts you might borrow for use as VBRs to contact the car dealers on your client list?

Some of my favorites...
#5 Why geckos can't solve the problem
As powerful as advertising and marketing are, they're not going to save the American car industry. What the industry needs is a vision. Tell us why we should want your cars. If you can't figure out what makes your product special, then it's probably not special. When you do have something to say, market the hell out of it.

#8 Urban Outfitters
Car-free living is the car dealer's worst nightmare, but it also may be their greatest opportunity to reinvent themselves. The auto industry could reframe itself as a transportation industry in the same way some of the oil companies have started talking about themselves as energy companies. What events or features could car companies sponsor? "Imagine a young professional driving her GM car from her suburban home to a well-maintained train station, taking her GM collapsible bike from the trunk, boarding the GM train to the city, unfolding the bike in 15 seconds, and riding to work," says the director of the National Center for Bicycling and Walking. "Now is the time."

Powerful Questions

Sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer says: "Ask smart questions and they'll think you're smart. Ask dumb questions and they'll... well... you figure it out."

Dumb questions:
What will it take to get your business?
(If you don't know -- go away.)

Can you tell me a little about your company?
(There's a little something I like to call "research." Look into it. Start with Google.)

What's your budget?
(Jeez. Just point a gun at them and grab their wallet.)

My friend Scott Ginsberg created a great video that shares "44 Killer Questions Your Competitors Aren't Asking" and I've embedded it below. Before you wipe your brow and say "Whew!" these are "starter" questions, meaning that Scott gives you a great beginning to a question -- you're still going to have to put some thought into the subject of the question in order to really drive it home and make it personal to your customer.

Now, THAT'S smart.

Are You Helping Your Clients 'Work the Room?'

...or are you just selling them advertising?

Nationwide Is All A Twitter

Meet Shawn Morton.
He's the Senior Consultant for Social Media at Nationwide Insurance.

Nationwide Insurance hired a full-time guy to oversee their social media. That's huuuuge. Shawn's job (according to his linkedin.com profile) is "establishing the enterprise social media strategy and advocating social media within the organization." (Watch your back Shawn. I want that job.)

Shawn recently held a Twitter 101 seminar for his Nationwide associates and was kind enough to post his slides on a (what else?) social website dedicated to sharing presentations.

Twitter 101

View more presentations from Shawn Morton. (tags: socialmedia twitter)

Slide 12 should be of special interest to any of you with 'boring old insurance accounts who cut all their advertising budgets this year...' It's a screen filled with some logos of corporate entities who are using Twitter. Among them: State Farm Insurance, Allstate, and of course Nationwide.

For any of you who've wondered why I send links to companies and articles and examples of businesses who are embracing new media as an option to traditional advertising -- THIS is the reason. Because, although they've reduced their spending on traditional media advertising, they are embracing and investing time AND MONEY into developing their social media efforts.

Become an expert in social media and apply the concepts of effective marketing principles to this new way of communicating to your audience and YOU will be the expert to whom they turn when they decide to reallocate advertising dollars to social media dollars. YOU can be the social media expert who gets rewarded for helping these companies strike up a dialogue with the audience that already loves YOUR brand and communicates through YOUR traditional media and social media tools.

Branding vs. Awareness

The PR News Blog has a nice post on the difference between branding and awareness...

"Often people mistake branding with awareness. Awareness is fleeting. Like a fireplace -- there's fire as long as you're feeding it logs. Branding is the ability to leave the family room and still feel the glow of the fire within."

I also liked their advice on making sure your brand possesses the four tenets of branding: intellectual, intuitive, emotional, value-based.

A good article to keep in mind when discussing awareness and branding campaigns with clients.

Do Ads Work?

A great post to kick-off the new year for anyone buying (or selling!) advertising. Forward this post to your favorite media salesperson or buyer.

Do ads work?
by Seth Godin

If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?
Most rational people would say, "I'll take them all please." Especially if you had thirty days to pay for them.

So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?
If your ads work, if you can measure them and they return more profit than they cost, why not keep buying them until they stop working?

And if they don't work, why are you running them?

The time-tested response is that you're not sure, that ads are risky, that you can't tell. And for some sorts of products and some sorts of ads, you'll get no argument from me.

Digital ads are different (or they should be). You should know cost per click and revenue per click and be able to make a smart guess about lifetime value of a click. And if that's positive, buy, buy, buy.

And if you don't know those things, why are you buying digital ads?

When Amazon was at its key growth peak, the mantra there was $33. They would buy unlimited ads, of any kind, as long as they generated new customers for $33 or less each. There was a risk that $33 was too high a number for the business to sustain, but the ads were no risk at all. As long as they came in under that number, there was unlimited money to buy them.
How often do year the marketing person say, "that's a neat idea, but we don't have the budget this year"?

Shouldn't she say, "We have an unlimited budget for ads that work"...

Got Opt-Ins? ..Now What??

So, your client ran a promotion with you that contained some sort of sign-up form which offered an "opt-in" -- a mechanism used to allow our audience to signal their interest in receiving additional information from the Advertiser. The individuals who choose to opt-in can then be used to develop permission-based marketing programs by our clients.

The very WORST thing an Advertiser can do is to let these most-qualified and most-interested leads (they responded to the Advertiser's message AND gave them permission to be contacted!) is to let them fade away unused. You wouldn't hang up the phone on someone who called your office and said they wanted to buy something, would you? The more time that passes between a person opting-in to a list and actually being contacted increases the likelyhood they will have forgotten theay actually signed up for the list in the first place and will either immediately opt-out of the first message they receive -- or worse yet -- report the message as SPAM, which can get the Advertiser immediately blacklisted by many email services (like gmail, yahoo, and aol.)

Here is some excellent advice from Kevin Sinclair at How-To B2B Articles on what your client can do to effectively build relationships with their new opt-in audience.

Tip of the Week
Want to cut word count and boost readership in one step? Showcase a Tip of the Week. You can easily brainstorm enough content for six months of weekly newsletters (you need to come up with 24 tips, which you will present weekly.)

Checklists
A good checklist is like a step-by-step how-to. Turn a lengthy advice column into one. Checklists can save a lot of time, and your readers will be delighted to get one.

Before-and-After
Who doesn't like makeovers? This is a great way to interact with clients. Invite them to send in details of whatever needs a makeover: an article, a website page, their wardrobe, then present brief solutions -- or ask for examples of their own in-house makeovers.

Source: How-To B2Barticles. Read the full article here.

Goodbye Yellow Pages?

Borrell Research predicts 39% of yellow page revenues will vanish as local advertisers shift spending to the internet.

This doesn't mean one less competitor for your Radio dollars!

Other Borrell findings report there are now more than 34,000 local sales reps peddling online products -- more than for any other medium. The chart at right shows that 84% of these reps are being fielded by newspaper and yellow pages companies, all cross-training sales reps to rush toward their most-promising growth opportunity. To date, and in the foreseeable future, directory companies have fared better than any other legacy media at this strategy, garnering about 14% of their total gross revenues from online sales.

Their report also details how online video commercials have emerged as the fastest-growing online ad format for small businesses. By 2012, they expect streaming video advertising to surpass all other formats, including banners and paid search. The report includes local online spending estimates for search advertising and streaming video for 210 markets.

Download a free executive summary of the report by clicking here.

My advice is to continue focusing on the task of finding a real customer need -- the one that goes beyond driving traffic, selling more ('whatevers'), and branding/awareness. Find the customer's pain and create a custom marketing strategy that integrates Radio and Web to provide both audience reach and message trackability in order to take their pain away. Solve the real problem and you'll have a customer for life.

A Twist on Tips

Here's a nice twist I found on a "Top Tips" campaign...

Instead of a single sponsor, Yahoo used multiple continuing education programs (DeVry, Kaplan, etc.) to be 'featured schools' from a ten tips page that shared the best work-from-home job opportunities. To score even higher interest based on rising fuel costs, the tips article was additional tagged with the full title of "Stop Pumping Gas: Ten Hot Home Office Jobs."

Think about what multiple complementary businesses you could combine into a single Tips Campaign --
Pets, Auto, Finance, Travel, "Green", Education, Fashion, Cooking, etc... virtually limitless!

Here's a link to the full article/example:
http://education.yahoo.net/degrees/articles/featured_ten_hot_home_office_jobs.html

VBR: Staycations

With the already established MixFunGuide.com and TheFanGuide.com websites, the trend toward families cutting costs by reducing the travel and expense of their family vacation is a prime marketing challenge for our advertisers and real revenue opportunity for the creative account executive.

The latest buzzword for the trend mentioned above is "Staycation" and here is some information that can help you craft a compelling VBR that gains the attention of your prospects...

Let's start with Weber, the grill-maker, which released some survey results last month that say this is the summer of staycations and grilling. They surveyed over 1,000 people and received some interesting results:

• Among grill owners planning staycations, a whopping 80% plan to grill weekly
  
• 41% plan to grill at least several times each week
  
• Once having the term explained to them, 51% of the respondents said they plan to take one or more staycations this summer
  
• 24% who are changing their traditional summer vacations to include a staycation this year
  
• 40% say they plan to try new grilled foods or grilling recipes
  
• 13% plan to purchase a new outdoor grill this summer
  
• 7% plan to update or improve their current grill
  
• Others plan on buying grilling accessories (11%) or a grilling cookbook (8%)

What about state tourism organizations as a target?

• In Pennsylvania The Constitutional Walking Tour of Philadelphia is pushing its staycation not only as inexpensive and educational, but as a green-friendly trip.
  
• Connecticut created a web site that highlights staycation destinations in the Constitution State and offers discounts to many of those places.
  
• The Arlington (Texas) Convention & Visitors Bureau has a local and regional campaign designed to get the locals to go to Six Flags Over Arlington and spend the night with the family in a hotel.

Retailers can be Staycation destinations, too!
Wal-Mart is making things interesting for consumers, with its subsite makeyourdollarstretch.com and a downloadable desktop Widget called 101 Days of Summer Staycations.

The Staycation trend may have been created the need to cut spending on the rising cost of gasoline (and everything else!) but it may also have been created to help the innovative marketing professionals earn additional profits this summer!

Ad Networks Devalue Content Power

Great, great, GREAT article about ESPN's view of the value of their web content versus the commoditization of internet advertising.

ESPN Turns Off Ad Nets
Excerpts from the article:
Top Web publishers are planning a revolt. Even as more prominent sites experiment with selling remnant inventory through online ad networks, and in some cases ad exchanges, ESPN.com is saying thanks, but no thanks.

ESPN's decision crystallizes a philosophical debate in the online ad sales industry that has intensified since the Interactive Advertising Bureau's annual meeting last month when during a keynote address, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia media president Wenda Harris Millard gave her now famous warning against selling Web inventory like "pork bellies."

Two sides have formed—those who want to protect traditional, direct selling of premium content brands and the math-loving crowd that favors automation and data. The math lovers make the traditional sellers nervous."There is a genuine concern about commoditization of brand inventory by some of the networks," said Millard in an interview.

...ESPN, see networks as profiting on their brand investments and their user data, while also threatening their own marketer relationships. Many just think using networks devalues the power of content.

Sales Resources

90% of successful selling comes from continuing to educate yourself and staying self-motivated. Sales guru and best-selling author Jeffrey Gitomer calls it "kicking your own ass." Here's a list of some super sales resources that will help you improve in these all too important (and all too often overlooked) areas of sales success.

The Brand Called YOU
The Earth-shaking article that EVERY salesperson should read as they seek an identity in their industry.

SalesCaffeine eNewsletter
Weekly sales advice from Jeffrey Gitomer.

NametagTV.com
Scott Ginsberg is the master of approachability. Tune into his new web TV channels on Sales, Marketing, Service, and Entrepreneurship and be inspired by his fresh approach to business.

SalesRepRadio.com
Weekly online audio interviews with sales leaders.

JustSell.com
Daily inspirational quotes and lessons on how to be a better seller. Be sure to take a look at their archive of desktop wallpapers and free ebooks.

PromoXtra eNewsletter
Excellent daily e-blast with news on all things promotional. One of my favorite resources for ideas and sponsorship leads.

The Advertising Show
Weekly audio program on selling, marketing, and product development.

3-Minute AdAge
Daily video reports from AdAge.com

MarketingProfs "Get To The Point" eNewsletters
The MarketingProfs new "Get To The Point" series of newsletters are brilliant bite-size bits of marketing insight.

I have dozens of other favorite resources, but this is the short list. Use the comments section below to add YOUR favorites to this post.

Does Your Marketing Volume Go To "11"?

I am re-reading a couple favorite marketing books during my last-of-2007-vacation-time, and came across a great analogy in John Moore's Tribal Knowledge: Business Wisdom Brewed From the Grounds of Starbucks Corporate Culture.

It's from "Tribal Truth #8" wherein John draws a comparison to marketing strategies being more commonly akin to an on/off switch versus a volume control knob. The analogy seemed especially appropriate for Radio advertising campaigns, and blends perfectly with a well-planned Web component.

When a client considers an advertising campaign, it's either an active schedule that is on the air or off the air. The duration and frequency is dictated by budget restrictions, and the common goal is to turn "on" the marketing campaign and bombard the audience for as long as their ad dollars hold out, and then turn "off" the marketing and hope the message momentum will carry forward long enough to bring about future customer purchases.

Starbucks' strategy was to look upon marketing as a constant flow that could be dialed up or down depending on the need to influence their audience. There were radio and print ads, but usually it was in-store marketing, word-of-mouth, etc. The mainstream media was only used to dial-up the knob and increase the marketing "volume" to allow more people to hear their message.

Consider this in regard to Radio+Web marketing strategy:
The addition of a Web component can help an advertiser's ad dollars go farther. The comparatively lower investment allows the client to maintain a constant level of 'marketing volume' and then turn the control knob to "11" by adding Radio components during times of greater need.

Actually, a steady marketing 'volume' maintained Online will allow the increased volume of additional Radio to work more effectively -- their Web efforts pay-off by building brand awareness so that the Radio message doesn't need to work quite so hard to break through the clutter. The Advertiser will have already been introduced to (and built a relationship with) our Listeners. You may want to reference a blog entry from July of 2007 in which I shared a study that showed Web+Radio demonstrated a 27% ability to recall vs. a 6% recall for using Web-only ads.

Maintaining a constant Web presence and increasing the message 'volume' with Radio as-needed is a great way to help a client's ad dollars work more effectively on their behalf. Try using this Volume Control vs. On/Off Switch comparison the next time you're speaking with a client. It's a great way to tell a compelling story about a 'sound' (...had to slip in a pun!) marketing strategy.

To learn more about John Moore's book (and read all the Tribal Truths) visit: http://tribalknowledge.biz/

NOTE: In case you were wondering, the headline is a reference from the movie "This is Spinal Tap" (for all you heathens.)