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While radio is still an important component of many local advertisers’ strategies, it isn’t a channel they’re likely to start investing more into. Here is how 2019 advertising spend compares to projected 2023 figures:
(Source: eMarketer)
With billions of dollars flowing into digital, the radio broadcasters that survive and thrive in the future will be those that embrace the changing landscape. Adding pay per click management services is a critical step forward in digital transformation.
Positioned correctly, your core competencies in radio can help, rather than hinder, your success in selling digital solutions. Here’s how you can augment your offering with pay per click management services to future-proof your business.
Why should you offer pay per click management services?
Offering digital advertising solutions in addition to your core offering of radio ads makes sense for both you and your local advertisers. You both stand to gain from a more robust advertising offering, and you have an opportunity to establish yourself as a uniquely valuable partner to advertisers.
Consider a few important facts about your advertisers and audience members:
The customers are online
Whether it’s on the commute to work, while doing chores around the house, or while getting some exercise in, 92 percent of Americans are still tuning in to radio each week. However, they’re spending much of the rest of the day online. The average person spends about 7 hours online daily. This represents a massive opportunity for radio broadcasters willing to embrace consumer habits and offer pay per click management services that help advertisers get in front of their target audience.
Grow in a time of stagnating radio revenues
Local advertisers are spending less of their advertising budgets on radio. Growing your business while relying only on your core offering of radio ads means competing more fiercely for a dwindling pool of advertiser dollars. It’s hardly a recipe for sustainable growth in the decade ahead. Offering pay per click management services gives you access to a much larger, and growing, revenue stream. By adding these services you can set yourself up for sustained growth.
Provide more value and improve retention
Radio advertising is effective, which is why it has remained relevant even in an increasingly digital world. However, it’s no longer sufficient as a standalone advertising strategy. With pay per click advertising, you can offer your clients much more granular data about how their advertising campaigns are performing. Unlike radio, digital enables you to track the performance of individual campaigns, make ongoing tweaks and adjustments to optimize them, and ultimately boost advertisers’ ROI.
The more value you can deliver, the more inclined your advertisers will be to continue working with you, boosting client retention.
Reduce your overall cost of acquisition
The effect of advertisers reducing their radio spend will be a steadily increasing cost of acquiring each new radio advertising customer. By offering a more robust advertising solution, you can present a more attractive package and open up your services to a larger audience, reducing your customer acquisition cost (CAC).
Overcoming challenges in offering pay per click management services
You may be convinced that offering digital advertising services is the best next step for growing and protecting your business. However, you might have concerns about how exactly to transform to digital sales.
After all, digital advertising is a completely different beast from radio ads. There is new technical jargon to learn, and your sales reps would have to compete with digital agencies that specialize in pay per click management services.
These challenges are easier to overcome than you may think. Your core competency in providing radio ads can help you position yourself as uniquely valuable to existing and prospective advertisers.
Here’s how to transition your team to selling digital advertising services:
Training your sales teams to sell pay per click advertising management solutions
One of the challenges radio broadcasters face when adding digital advertising solutions to their portfolio is getting their sales staff comfortable with selling the new offerings. The reality is that other traditional media companies are successfully making these changes, and you can take notes from them to ensure a smooth transition for your team:
- Consider hiring specialized digital leads to help train the team and keep them accountable. Rather than hiring a bunch of new sales staff with experience in digital, a digital lead can be a go-to resource for your existing sales staff, helping them identify opportunities and position the new services.
- Motivate your team by showing them how much more valuable data they can show their clients. For sales reps who don’t have much experience with pay per click advertising services, taking the time to help them see just how powerful these advertising tools can be compared to radio will often be motivating and energizing.
- Another surefire way to motivate your sales team to get on board with new digital services is with a commission-based structure for new digital advertisers they secure. If you make it a more profitable use of their time to focus on selling more pay per click advertising services by having larger bonuses for this category, you’ll be providing your sales staff with a good reason to sell it.
Your edge in offering pay per click management services
You likely already have long-standing relationships built on a high degree of trust with your existing local advertisers. This can be a powerful differentiator when it comes to setting yourself apart from other, digital-only advertising providers.
Sure, there may be many digital agencies out there, but consider how difficult it would be for a digital-only advertising services provider to pivot to incorporating traditional advertising such as radio into their offering. You don’t see that happening, because it would be very challenging to enter as a new player in traditional media.
However, as a radio business, you can much more easily add digital advertising to the services you can provide. This gives you a unique advantage because you can combine your services to offer all-in-one multi-channel campaigns. This gives advertisers a great reason to choose you over digital-only agencies.
The spillover effect
With radio advertising, it’s difficult to provide solid evidence that an ad is working. The spillover effect is always in play, which is when an ad prompts a person to conduct a Google search which leads to a sale, causing that sale to look like it came directly from an organic search.
This has historically made it difficult for radio advertising sellers to quantify the effectiveness of their campaigns. By selling both radio and digital ads, you will be much better positioned to show data about the effectiveness of multi-channel campaigns.
Bundled pricing
Selling both traditional and digital advertising services gives you a unique opportunity to entice advertisers to work with you by offering bundled pricing deals. You’ll increase your profits, and advertisers will be able to get multiple services at a better price.
With time, entering the digital advertising space opens up opportunities to grow your digital offering further, with things like SEO services and website building, which you can offer in bundles.
Offer white-label pay per click management services
To start offering pay per click management services from scratch would be an expensive and challenging undertaking.
The easiest way to start offering pay per click management services is through a white-label PPC platform. Your customers trust you to deliver radio ads, and you must deliver the same level of quality with your digital services. With a white-label service, you have access to a range of digital PPC solutions that you can resell to local advertisers under your own branding. You can have an outside team deliver the services, such as campaign management, all under the banner of your company. This way, you can be confident you’re offering top-notch services, without the risk and challenges of hiring an in-house team.
The future of radio is digital
Staying alive in the radio industry will increasingly require offering digital advertising solutions to your customers. Sticking with your core offering will mean getting left behind. To ensure a bright, profitable future for your business, rise to the challenge of meeting your advertisers’ needs by expanding into pay per click management.
