Radio Sales Café

Happy Friday, everyone!

Here's this week's poll question:

Of your current advertisers who have long-term contracts with your station, which one(s) were the most difficult to get on the air?  How did you overcome their resistance?

Looking forward to reading your replies!

In my cluster, my team focuses on 52 week annuals consistently. Our business is approximately 93% long term schedules.

Most difficult sales our health care at this time. Most state funded programs are short on funds.

I would be happy to discuss how we achieve such a high penetration on annuals at anytime. Just email [email protected]

The toughest one to land was a local non profit which took us 7 years and 18 proposals because they kept sharing our proposal with our competition and then the competition would practically give away their station to get their business. The tide finally turned after a new president was elected to their board who realized that it was unethical to ask us for a proposal to present to our competition and they had an event that they advertised exclusively with our competition where half the tickets went unsold and their board of directors reported that many people mentioned that they had never heard the ads that ran.
They are now on a regular contract and things are going well. They recently did a run of ads for an event where they had to pull the ads a week early as the tickets were sold out. So basically, we showed them the results and now they are loyal to us.

Julie Slanaker
KFMJ 99.9 FM

The local Cineplex would not advertise with us because when they surveyed their patrons we never showed up very well. I explained that since they did not advertise with us our listeners were not aware of their movies and thus were unlikely to patronize their theater. A while later they used us to promote a couple movies they felt were “up our alley.” Shortly afterward we started showing up very well in their surveys and we became one of their regulars. Later on when their budget got tight we remained as only one of two stations that they used regularly.

This was also true for a particular car dealer who heavily promoted their maintenance department. They would survey by checking the car radio settings. When we started advertising their oil change, air conditioning specials, etc., our survey numbers vastly improved and so did the money they allocated to us for advertising.

I have told this story dozens of times to potential advertisers, with the good results. Sometimes a simple common sense success story works wonders.