Local digital advertising spending has consistently been a growth engine for radio. Selling it doesn’t need to cut into your airtime book of business. Rather, it’s a way to expand the dollars you capture from businesses.
Radio and digital are a great complement, but why should these companies buy digital from you? If you look at the trends from the benchmarking report on radio digital sales, there are some distinct conclusions.
First, most local businesses do invest in digital; they just don’t buy it from you. However, those who do find radio digital sellers to be advertising experts. Why is that?
Let’s break it down and look at 5 ways to win more local digital ad spending.
Top Ways to Win: Use These Strategies to Position Your Station
Do you have a local digital strategy? If not, these approaches can help you build one. If you are going to grow the digital ad side of the business, you need a plan. Otherwise, you’re navigating without a compass.
1. Turn On-Air Trust into Advertising Interest
Your on-air personalities have influence. It’s a top reason why people tune into your programming. They are a perfect conduit for promoting your digital ad options.
Create a plan that inserts on-air callouts into high listening intervals. They shouldn’t be generic or overly salesy. Instead, mix in things like customer testimonials or data points about how radio and digital work together for better ad performance.
2. Differentiate to Compete
The competition for digital ad spending is, in a word, fierce. Local and national sellers are targeting these business owners. You can group competition into these categories:
- Other local media (radio, TV, newspapers): Key angles to compete include emphasizing the quality of your digital media and targeting capabilities, OTT/CTV over traditional TV buys and the value of third-party digital over owned inventory pushed by newspapers.
- Agencies (local and national): If they are national, you have market expertise, they don’t. If local, the better angle is to call out their fees.
- Direct to platform management (Google, Meta, etc.): This can be time-consuming for internal employees. They also may not have the knowledge of best practices or be able to manage campaigns across sites, meaning over-spending and under-delivery occur.
3. Promote the Integrated Advertising Campaign Model
As noted, radio and digital are the perfect pair for local advertisers. Radio delivers reach, while digital allows for specific targeting. When they buy both from you, they can see how a multi-tactic campaign fares versus those in siloes.
You can propose all of this together, showing the advertiser how their budget will be spent across radio and digital. At the end of the campaign, you can review the results, providing insights on how the tactics worked together to meet their goals.
Overall, it’s more convenient for businesses to have one advertising partner. They don’t have to manage multiple vendors. If folks are already buying airtime spots from you, getting them on board for digital is much easier.
4. Deliver Hyper-Local Proof, Not Just Promises
Advertisers that are more digitally savvy require extra work to convert. They are looking for quantifiable proof that your digital solutions will work for them. There are a few ways to do this:
- Give them a glimpse of your digital reporting: If it’s transparent and easy to understand, it could be what convinces them.
- Share real case studies: Having these stories on hand that demonstrate another company’s success is compelling.
- Point out specific things you can measure: Not all metrics are the same. Some businesses may only be getting the basics of impressions or clicks. There is often much more to the story. Examples include providing the platforms OTT/CTV played on and the geographic areas that had the most engagement.
5. Ideate and Consult, Don’t Sell
People do business with you for many reasons. One of the most critical is the relationship, built on trust and reliability. You can foster this further by being a source of ideas for campaigns and counseling through digital choices.
Advertisers don’t always have a creative strategy or realize what they should promote. You can help by looking at industry trends and leaning on your market knowledge. When you “own” the creative, you’ll almost always get the win.
The other side of this is what to propose for digital, based on their goals. They may come to the table with strong ideas about where they want to advertise. However, this doesn’t always align with what they want. You don’t have to be a digital expert to guide them. You can use our digital ad mix tool to make sound recommendations.
Next Steps for Growing Local Digital Advertising Spending Wins
For radio to thrive now and in the future, diversifying your advertising revenue is essential. You can maintain a business’ radio investment and capture its local digital advertising spending with these practices.
For more insights, here are five more strategies for selling digital advertising.
