I have 45 days to sell enough ads to pay for a ten week hs football season. We have a new fm signal and traditionally sell all ads in 1 qtr of the year.
I have a staff of two. Station format is christian adult contempory. We have to get this done no choice. Help! I need ideas to get folks to to say yes to great ad packages.
Goal Big!
You sound just like us. We are CCM in Bloomington, IN, and carry local high school football and basketball. Our mandate is that we must generate $1000 per game in sponsor revenue. The news-talk station here also carries local football & basketball, which doesn't make it any easier for us, but we manage to get 'er done. I believe in season and annual plans. As a CCM station, you might want to offer plans that give them both promos and commercials in your regular programming, as well as the games-a total audience-reach plan. I'm uploading our plans so you can see if they might work for you.
Hello Mark,
You have a bit of a problem for sure! (not very encouraging).
Couple of thoughts:
1) You need to bring in a wider customer base in order to get rid of the minutes.
2) Selling Spots in Packages create a pricing point that may exceed the dollar ability of new and smaller advertisers.
3) Selling just a few spots normally has a high cost of sales to income ratio.
The solution:
Sign up your Station to the sellbyradio.com Ad Spot production and sales engine and automate selling process.
This service allows you to sell minutes in small quantities as well as record or upload the Ad message. The system also collects the revenue and places that in your account immediately.
Then an email arrives at your Station with full transaction details and the timed MP3 file attached.
More info is available at sellbyradio.org.
This may not sell a lot but the service is free to join and only takes commissions on sales.
Good luck!
Robin
Host a well-advertised, (by the two sales people) Hail Mary sale. This sale is all day on a specific day of the week that plenty of prospects have been alerted to. Provide these prospects a published rate card which is sent out by email, or physically brought to as many prospects as possible a week or two before the sale day. Then on the day of the sale get on the phone and don't stop till you hit your mark. You could possibly hire interns to help make calls, as this is a day of order-taking for the most part. Make sure you offer a deal that day that you will (honestly) offer at no other time. and of course limit the time frame within which the campaign can run at these rates. I have seen these work. They don't work everytime, but the more you manage to make your urgent need a rare benefit to prospects the more you can leverage that in their/your favor. Then pray, and start selling.
Good Advice. Half the battle of selling sports is the emotion and excitement behind the sale.
They are not only getting a captive audience that listens intently (even to the ads), but they are showing community and High school involvement.
Package this with some regular ads and promos, and you reach even the non-sports audience. It's a great package.
We even offer long term, Football, basketball, baseball, and softball packages that run 10 months out of the year. But people like being included in all sporting events.
Good Luck!
????
Great response. We are digging in and launching sale on Tuesday next week. we will see how it goes.
Thanks! for the options. We do seem to have the same issues. Time will tell whether we will pull this off.
