Advertisers are Publishers: 4 Points to Remember When Selling Digital Media - Steve Bookbinder-Digital Media Training

How many of you have gone to online media shows and found yourself looking at exhibitor booth signs and wondered:
a. I still don't get it…what do these guys sell?
b. What do they do that is different from each other?
c. Is this something I should know more about?

Are the media buyers confused, too? It's hard not to be when the media sellers are all saying the same thing: "We are the best! We are the #1 way to reach your audience. ROI? Yep, we got it! We're #1!"

Every day, hundreds of digital media sellers attempt to sell their offering by pointing out their unique grip on the market (Theirs? Yours?). They reach the right audience in the right way and therefore should be in the consideration set, right? They are all counting on agencies and advertisers appreciating their unique value. We all want it to be obvious – "obviously, with our brand and yours, we are the right place for you (your advertiser) to advertise."

Well, they are all right – for someone. But, how should they communicate this effectively? Tout the reputation of their brand? That is offline thinking.

The mistake most online media sellers make is that they don't think of advertisers as publishers, which they are. In fact, every person and every brand and even some agencies are online publishers. If you have a Facebook page (1 in 7 people on the planet), LinkedIn profile, Google+, blog or Pinterest account, you are a publisher. If you are a brand with a corporate website, microsite, Facebook fan page, Twitter feed, etc., you are a publisher. And, obviously, online and traditional offline publishers are publishers as are businesses like retail and wholesale…even app developers – if you have a URL, you are a publisher. And, we publishers all want the same thing:

Traffic. People coming to our content. More and more visitors each day. Ideally, the cost to us for each new visitor, on average, is less and less. We want traffic that is engaged with our content and the measure we all use is – can this traffic be scaled and monetized? While not every digital asset is e-commerce, we want to monetize our traffic through "proportional or fractional" conversions. To explain: if I sell products or generate leads or subscriptions there is a value to each of these "full conversions." But, if I want people to read my blog and tell a friend, that is a fractional conversion. In fact, every engagement point is a fractional conversion. Even something as innocent as page views: What is it worth to us to get a visitor to go from the landing page to another page? What is worth to us to get our average user to increase their time on site from 1 minute to 2 minutes? What is each Facebook "like" worth? How many downloads of white papers equals' one person buying our service? What is the actual monetary value we assign to each of these engagements?

If you are selling media, you need to learn the value and goal of each of these desired engagements. Now, take that information and focus your presentation on matching their goals with these four attributes of your advertising opportunity:
1. Over indexing
2. Zero Share
3. Unduplicated Audience
4. Loyalty

Let's look at each in detail:
1. Over indexing refers to measuring specific buying behaviors of your visitor's compared to those of your peer group. Which quality – THAT IS IMPORTANT TO A SPECIFIC ADVERTISER – does your site or network reach in greater abundance or to a greater degree than your peer group of advertising competitors?
2. "Zero Share" refers to advertisers who are on someone else's advertising vehicle but not yours. Sellers need to know this in order to more strategically find leads; Agencies concerned with understanding the digital landscape, separation of advertisers and category exclusives should know this too.
3. Unduplicated Audience. In the same way as there is always a bigger fish, there is always a bigger network that also reaches the same target your site does. So, what part of your audience is more likely to be found on your site than your competitors (including the network's ad inventory on sites that are part of the "bigger" network)?
4. Loyalty refers to the tendency of repeat visitors on an ad-supported site/network to come to the site by way of "favorites" (as opposed to first time visitors who get there via Search Engines and Social Media –check the referring codes on site visitors to see how visitors find your site) as well as engage with your content across all of your platforms. For example, does your small but loyal audience all download your app? Do a high percentage of them view your site on a mobile device? Do they attend your events or follow you on Twitter?

No site or network is inherently better – the question is can you do a better job of matching their goals to your offering - -and backing up your claims with real numbers and credible research sources. If you can make that case, you will be #1 in the advertiser's eyes. Otherwise, you are #2.

Steve Bookbinder is CEO of Digital Media Training. DMT is a leader in delivering training which treats sales as a competitive sport and changes behavior needed to help sellers consistently win. Steve has delivered more than 500 keynote speeches at national sales meetings, conducted more than 3,000 training workshops and trained, coached and managed more than 35,000 sellers and managers from leading companies around the world for more than 20 years. Steve can be reached atSteve@dmtraining.net.

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