| Aug 18, 2022 | | 6 min read

How radio broadcasters can get PPC clients

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If you want to stay relevant as a radio broadcaster in today’s digital world, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do so while sticking to your core offering of radio ads. While radio advertising remains a part of the marketing mix for many local businesses, it simply isn’t growing the way digital advertising is.

Radio advertising is going digital—are you? Download “Challenges Radio Stations Face” to learn how to overcome the top challenges facing the media industry today.

However, radio broadcasters who embrace the evolving media landscape and diversify their services are in a great position to grow in the years ahead. Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is a natural fit for radio broadcasters, who are already in the business of delivering returns on ad spend for their clients. We’ll go over what PPC is, why it’s a must-have service for radio broadcasters, and how you can get PPC clients and start growing your revenue today.

What is PPC?

PPC is a type of online advertising in which platforms are paid every time someone clicks on an ad. This means that if an ad is displayed to 100 different people online, and 2 of them click the ad, those 2 clicks will be charged. It’s a powerful way for businesses to boost their online visibility and increase their leads and sales. And MatchCraft's latest research shows that PPC is on the rise across several industries. 

PPC is an essential component of any ad campaign today due to your ability to:

  • Target the most interested potential customers
  • Start with a small budget and scale up as results improve
  • Get detailed insights into how each campaign is performing

Challenges facing radio broadcasters

While radio ad spending is recovering from the pandemic slump experienced by many advertisers in 2020, it was roughly stagnant for the decade preceding the outbreak of COVID-19, and it still hasn’t rebounded to 2019 levels.

A graph showing a decline in US radio ad spend from 2000 to 2024.
(US radio ad spend. Source: Statista)

The same isn’t true for display ad spend, which dwarfs total radio ad spend and is quickly approaching 50 percent of total ad spend in the US. Display ads, the type generally used in PPC campaigns, are combinations of images and text that can be clicked on to navigate to the advertiser’s website.

A graph showing an increase in US digital ad spend from 2019 to 2026 as a percentage of total media ad spend.
(Source: InsiderIntelligence)

As marketing budgets shift away from radio and toward digital, radio broadcasters are feeling the pinch. They’re competing with one another for a smaller pool of advertising dollars, which dampens prices in the long term.

Without a diverse range of services, these trends can spell trouble for radio broadcasters.

What can you do?

By adding PPC solutions to your offering, your core competency in radio can become an asset that sets you apart from other providers and helps you get PPC clients easily.

Why you should be offering PPC advertising

Radio enables you to get in front of consumers at certain times of the day, such as during their morning and evening commutes. Offering PPC solutions makes it possible to reach them throughout the rest of the day during the seven-plus hours they spend using their screens.

Not only will adding PPC services enable you to offer more value to your existing clients, but it will also open you up to a large new market of prospective advertisers who may not be interested in radio ads (at least exclusively) but do need PPC services.

Enhanced reporting with PPC

PPC produces detailed, actionable data in a way that simply isn’t possible with radio. Sure, you can play a radio ad at a certain time of day when a given demographic is most likely to be tuning in. Beyond that, though, it’s not possible to target ads to a specific audience or to know definitively what the return on ad spend (ROAS) is for your local business clients.

Radio ads do deliver results, but it’s difficult to quantify those results precisely.

With PPC reporting software, you can provide your clients with granular data on exactly how each ad in a campaign is performing. You’ll be able to pull data from different advertising platforms like Google and Facebook into one dashboard and keep running only the ads that result in the most conversions.

By showing what the return on each advertising dollar spent is for your clients, you can demonstrate your value to them with real data. Being able to provide detailed reports is an edge that can help you get PPC clients and sell your existing advertisers on trusting you to handle their digital ad spend.

How to get PPC clients

It’s not unusual for radio broadcasters to feel out of their depth when it comes to getting PPC clients. Your team may feel confident in the traditional media space but be unsure of how to sell digital services to local advertisers. With the strategies follow, you can start booking your first PPC clients in no time.

Use sales intelligence software to get PPC clients

Digital advertising is all about data, but the right sales intelligence software can do all the heavy lifting for you. Instead of having to conduct in-depth research on a local advertiser’s current digital performance, you can generate an automated report that provides scores and metrics across important digital marketing channels such as social media, search engine optimization, and, of course, advertising.

By beginning your conversations with customers with a detailed report, you can demonstrate to them that you understand their needs and can use data to deliver measurable results for their business. It’s an excellent tool for your sales team to use to start conversations with prospective advertisers, showing where they may be falling behind and how your PPC services can help them succeed.

Get PPC clients by bundling your offerings

While it may feel intimidating to compete against digital agencies that specialize in services like digital advertising, your expertise in radio gives you a competitive edge that others can’t easily offer. While you can expand your offering into digital services, it’s not as easy for those offering digital marketing to add traditional media to their list of competencies. Offering both radio and PPC ads lets you position yourself as an omnichannel advertising provider.

By creating discounted product bundles, you can incentivize both current and prospective advertisers to use more of their ad spend with you so that they can enjoy some savings. Your existing clients already know and trust you, so if you can offer them PPC management in a bundled package, they will have an extra incentive to entrust their digital spend to you. Meanwhile, prospective PPC clients may experiment with radio if there is an attractive bundle offer incentivizing them to do so.

Use white-label PPC to deliver

White-label PPC makes it easy to deliver your services once you get PPC clients on your roster. For radio broadcasters who may not have in-house digital advertising expertise, white-label fulfillment eliminates the challenges, risks, and costs of hiring and managing staff.

If hiring, you’d have to start paying salaries upfront before having an established client base. White-label PPC prevents this entirely since you don’t have to pay for fulfilment until you onboard a client.

Instead, you can let experts working under your brand take care of managing advertisers’ PPC campaigns, so you can focus on landing more clients and scaling this new revenue stream. Choosing white-label PPC also saves you the risk of delivering a sub-par service and damaging the established relationships and trust you have with your local advertisers. You can be confident the experts will deliver results.

Get PPC clients through referrals

Word of mouth has always been an effective way to get new clients since people tend to trust recommendations from those they know. To replicate the word-of-mouth effect at scale, consider creating a referral program to incentivize existing advertisers to recommend your new PPC services to others.

Your incentive could be a discount on a service they regularly buy from you or a complementary service. This can be a very effective way to get your new digital offerings in front of prospective advertisers efficiently and without a high cost.

Advertising is changing—get ahead of the competition

Advertising may be changing, but radio broadcasters who can adapt are in a unique position to offer local advertisers both traditional and digital advertising services. With white-label PPC, you can deliver digital advertising to existing clients and prospects reliably and at scale.

To get PPC clients as a radio broadcaster, demonstrate your data proficiency and start conversations by using reports from sales intelligence software. Consider offering bundles to incentivize more ad spend with you and harness the power of referrals with a formal program that rewards those recommending your business.

With PPC advertising, you can future-proof your media business with a reliable revenue stream and benefit from a growing digital ad market.

About the Author

Solange Messier is the Content Strategy Manager at Vendasta. Solange has spent the majority of her career in content marketing helping companies improve how they connect with their prospects and customers. Her diverse background includes magazine publishing, book publishing, marketing agencies, payment processing, and tech. When she's not working, Solange can be found spending time with her family, running, and volunteering.

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