Forum Moderators: skibum
Does anyone have some good suggestions as to how to tastefully advertise the fact that you are looking for advertisers?
To spare you a long diatribe about my days of selling $65CPMs, my best single advice:
Don't let advertisers come to you. Go to them. Who are they? Those that are already advertising on the internet via targeted advertising buys or the engines within your target audience range for your site. Spend all your time finding the people that already spend money and less time figuring out ways they will find you. When you get them on the phone, tell them you have their target market. Tell them how you know this and how they will get a ROI as a result of it.
This presumes you have your pricing worked out, you have traffic, you have rate card, you have traffic monitoring software, notwithstanding ad rotation softwate et al. --if not figure out what you do have. TheOtherOne, I have spent enough time in ad sales to know that if you don't believe it they wont. And i say that with the utmost respect, not knowing any more than your post.
past behaviour is always the best indicator of future behaviour. If they have spent on online advertising before they are more likely to do it in the future, all things considered, than those who havent.
We are in a niche area with almost no competition from other content sites so we dont even worry about click tracking and reporting other than reporting the number of impressions for each page they are on regulalry. We leave it to them to check how many referrals they are getting. This means that you dont have to slow down laoding of pages while your click tracking scripts do their thing. So slightly differ from Chicago in the case of small specialist sites with a a few to a dozen advertisers.
Also anther tip. When you check out possibles the way Chicago has suggested, also identify their competitors. For example if an airline is advertising on one of your competitors sites. pitch to other airlines as well. If its working for somone else in the same industry it has a high likelohod of working for their direct competitors. This is ALMOST as good as going after existing advertisers.
Spend time identifiying the actial decision maker or ad buyer, and even more smarter - their boss. if you can get the boss excited, he can force thir buyers to change their tired old procedures. Never use email. Phone after sending a letter or fax. That way they know a bit about you already. bit more likely it will prompt them to read the letter or you can send again.
If you have a newsletter list or such, offer subscribers special limited time offers to try it out. Some of your best prospects may well be among your readers.
As much information as you can gather on your sites demographics and readership is great. Either from surveys you have done in the past. Or at the minimum there is always some great info in those logs - like page views from intranets so you can see that certain companies visit every day etc.
eljefe3 is right in saying that you must prominantley display your advertising availability on your site. And you should really work on making a sexy rate card. Very important. Also there are many outlets wherein you can gain exposure for your inventory, these include networks such as burst! (small-content driven sites) if you want to rep it. You can also join an affiliate program like Commission Junction and pull in advertisers yourself on a CPC, CPL, or CPA basis. You can also actively send emails to those that are already advertising on your competitors sites. Just some thoughts..
Good advice, as always. When I reread his post, however, it seems clearly to me TheOtherOne doesn't want to pro-actively go after advertisers, rather he is looking for reactive lead capture hence my amend. Don't you wish such magic bullet exist....
I think one thing that holds me back a little is that the main attraction of my site is the forums and with it being so open and the little guys being able to post what amount to free ads, it takes a little more to convince the major players paid ads are worth it. I'm also holding myself back some because, with alot of paid advertisers, I worry about the extra responsibility I have to take on to make sure everything is working all the time. It makes what started as a hobby seem more like a job!
Anyways, if I do start calling/mailing/faxing I think I might get a friend to do that for me. I'm not the best when it comes to "face-to-face" customer service -- even if it is over the phone. What's a good cut to give a good friend? Is 30% of what that advertiser brings in fair?
he is looking for reactive lead capture hence my amend. Don't you wish such magic bullet exist....
I have companies coming to me because they know that my site is niche, and they respect the content and the user base. If I had to knock on doors, I would spend far too much time for far too little.
"the market is beaten down" but yet you "have cutomers coming to you because of...."
very interesting.
for those that do not have such luxury or wherewithal, yet who believe they house a definable target audience, and who otherwise do not have considerable exposure to media buyers or webmasters, pro-actively identifing potential adveritisers is something that is extremely helpful, given other possiblities, especially considering identifying those already with a natural predisposition to buying your target audience on the web.
And if you are simply suggesting that it is futile to attempt to convice someone to advertise with you unless they come to you, I would say that somewhere ROI and good media buying plays into this equation, hence the shortcuts.
If one is uncertain that they can provide value to a potential advertiser than they getter get busy coming up with a new pricing model for there site which could extend to cost per acquisition.
What you don't do is sit back and wait..and hope your good enough.
Judging from my keyword referrals, there are many people searching for sites to place ads in my market. So never underestimate the value of an "advertise with us" page.
When I see an advertising page as a potential advertiser, I want to see a few key things:
1. Availability dates - can my ad be placed within the next week, or are the ads booked weeks or months in advance. And I want to know that this site is current and active.
2. Detailed advertising options spelled out - I want to know how much the ad spot is that i am considering. Autoresponder information is fine, but "email us for information" is a pain.
3. When should I expect a response, and when should my ad appear online?
4. No PDF rate cards - they are such a pain for me, LOL
As an advertiser, I was considering placing a very pricey ad on a large site - I didn't even get an email response to my inquiry for a little over 4 months. With that kind of response time, there was no way I would pay to advertise there with such lax customer service.
[edited]forgot to put the "no" infront of the PDF, LOL[/edited]
