Читать книгу Media Selling - Warner Charles Dudley - Страница 36

Solution selling requires a deep understanding of a customer’s business, customer problems and challenges, customer strategy, and a customer’s competitors, all of which require asking customers a lot of questions. This process of discovery and investigation consumes a great deal of a customer’s time, which business customers are less and less willing to give. Furthermore, in the age of Internet disruption, many customers are unaware of some of their more pressing problems and especially of the opportunities available in digital media.

Also, advertising agencies purchase the majority of national media advertising by using a highly formalized request‐for‐proposal (RFP) process, although because of programmatic buying, the use of RFPs is declining. You can see examples of RFPs at http://mediaselling.us/downloads.html. Agencies email RFPs to media salespeople and expect proposed schedules emailed back that meet the criteria specified in the RFPs. Face‐to‐face selling is kept to a minimum because of the vast number of media outlets, and only salespeople from large media brands such as Google, Facebook, ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, BuzzFeed, Huff Post, or Snapchat, for example, can get personal selling time with major agency buyers and planners, who are neither interested in nor have time for solutions‐based selling approaches; they only want to know the price, the medium’s ability to deliver impressions to a specific target audience, the social‐media support a schedule will be given, the appropriateness of the content, and the responsive service they will get. Effectively selling media to agencies requires conversations with agency planners and buyers before an RFP is crafted in order to affect the scope of the RFP so that it favors in some way the medium being sold. On the other hand, if a buy is being made programmatically and no RFP is going to be issued, effective selling to agencies requires educating the agency planners and buyers on the benefits of your medium so they will consider putting it in a media plan and buying it.

Local businesses that place ads in media, such as on radio and television stations or in local newspapers and magazines, are typically interested in solutions to their marketing problems and, thus, are willing to take the time to share information about their businesses with salespeople. Local advertisers will usually answer discovery questions and will be grateful for help in crafting solutions to their marketing problems and in navigating a complex and fragmented media environment.

John Zimmer and his brother, Don, own the Zimmer Radio and Marketing Group in the Columbia‐Jefferson City, MO market. The group consists of nine radio stations, three magazines, creative services, website design and development, logo design, digital promotion, social media, print design, and jingle production – a complete integrated marketing communications offering. The Zimmer Group has 20 salespeople who are trained to assess the marketing and advertising needs of local businesses and propose integrated, cross‐platform solutions, including being an advertising agency that plans and buys digital media, primarily Google and Facebook, in addition to placing radio, television, and magazine schedules.

The salespeople for the American‐Statesman newspaper in Austin, TX, also sell on a cross‐platform basis. Over 20 percent of the American‐Statesman’s total revenue comes from the digital edition of the paper and from two other websites, Austin 360, a things‐to‐do website and Ahora Si!, a Spanish‐language version of the newspaper. The American‐Statesman also offers an advertising agency service to its clients, similar to what the Zimmer Radio and Marketing Group offers.

These two media companies are bucking a trend of local radio and newspaper advertising revenue decline by offering cross‐platform, full‐service solutions to local advertisers. The Zimmer Radio and Marketing Group and the Austin American‐Statesman are partnering with local businesses and helping both themselves and their partners grow.