Consulting Operations Suspended Indefinitely 04/05/2012
Effectively immediately, I will no longer be accepting new clients. After 16 great years on the road, my consulting operations have been suspended indefinitely, because I am going to work full time for a great family-owned newspaper company. It will be great to spend more nights with my family, and to only have one big revenue budget to meet each year, instead of several dozen. This site will come down soon, so copy and save anything you want from it. ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ Add Comment The source of this title is an article from journalism.org. It seems that the prevailing wisdom of the masses of experts may be wrong. Community newspapers may be a valid as our paying subscribers seem to think it is. If nobody read the newspaper anymore, I wondered what so many millions of paying customers could possibly be doing with them. It seems that I worried for nothing. They are indeed reading them. The article is based on solid information by Pew Research. What Else Can We Sell: By: Richard Clark, Classified Development “If people contact us, and they know what kind of ad they want to buy, we know how to take their money and process their order. Plus we sometimes get them to let us add a few extras to the ad.” That was the core plan for success in classifieds at most newspapers just a few years ago. Amazingly, it worked pretty well just a few years ago. Almost any new thing we decided to try was accepted, and revenue grew year after year. To grow classifieds in the current economic and technological environment, we have to add some things to classified departments that would have been considered “off limits” previously. We are talking far beyond letting inside Ad-visors handle display ads or add graphics to liners. Classified Development suggests keeping all of the good things in the current classified department, but adding a profitable new “inside sales” component, usually with additional new personnel. We live and die by our budget numbers, and adding anything new can be a risk. This means you have to be strategic about adding these new sales components. You may have someone on the current staff that can make the switch to true outbound selling, but odds are that someone with a different skill set will be needed. It is important to segregate these new reps from the old ad-taking operation as much as is practical for the department size. If you just hire someone off the street, hand him or her the phone book and say ‘good luck’, you are bound to fail. You have to get the right person, and you have to have a detailed plan for success. You should develop an annual budget plan for outbound sales of special pages and directories, along with contingency plans for substitutes. This means outlining an entire year’s worth of the “sig-ad” community pages, and selling them a year at a time as image campaigns. The best candidates for these ads are businesses that are not already your regular customers. The goal is to add revenue, not switch it to a different pocket. You will need to provide the sales rep with professional looking marketing sheets, as well as scripts or points-to-cover lists. Specialty directories will also need to be planned for a full year. Develop a “sample book” of wording and layouts for service advertisers. Most newspapers already have similar samples for birthdays and memoriam notices. One easy source for service ad wording samples would be the online service columns of various newspapers across the country. In addition to telemarketing for special pages and directories, you classified department (inside sales team) should become a one-stop shop for marketing solutions. This includes selling and developing simple affordable websites for small businesses. There are a number of low-cost vendors of template-based website-building software to choose from. These programs allow you to pick and choose the appropriate modules to drop into the website. The key is to do everything for the customer. These small businesspeople are busy running their small businesses. Don’t ask them to fill out a form and bring you photos. Interview them and fill out the form yourself. Go out and take the photos if necessary. If you don’t do it all for them, very few will ever get the information to you. You should start with two basic templates, a single page of various modules, and a tabbed page with a bit more sophistication. While you would require a one-year contract, there would be no set-up charge and no charge for monthly changes (you do the changes, not the customer). The pricing should be around $50 per month for the simple site, and $75 per month for the better site. Once the business has a website, you can sell them ads in print and online to drive traffic to the website. While you are at it, you can set-up a Facebook Fan Page for the advertiser to use. Naturally, you will want to familiarize yourself with best practices for setting up Facebook pages. Again, have the customer send you updates and handle it for them. It doesn’t matter that they should be able to do this themselves; you want the advertiser to say that they have someone at the newspaper that handles all of their online stuff for them. Think how many people can’t get the photos out of their digital cameras or mobile phones. Be happy to handle the details for them. While you are providing turnkey marketing solutions for local businesses, why not branch out further. Your inside sales team could easily sell: business cards, stationary, business forms, full-service photography, wedding invitations, specialty ad items, logo design, banners, flyers, and any other marketing materials that people buy. The companies that compete with you often order these items for the customers. You can order them at wholesale prices yourself. Mark them up 30% and sell them at retail while you have the customer there. If other companies can order and sell these items profitably, so can you. You have the advantage of being able to promote your specialty services with house-ads and filler-space in the newspaper, as well as any unsold page-views on your website. Just wanting to create new revenue streams from inside sales won’t make it happen. There are details to work out, and then more details. Still, if the old classified dog can learn a few new tricks, there are many bright days ahead. The primary goals of the classified department are to grow revenue and strengthen the franchise. There is simply no profit growth from holding on to outdated limits on what classified staffs are supposed to sell. Richard Clark's unique blend of "aw shucks" and "do it or die" delivery of classified advertising advice has brought success to well over 300 classified departments across America. His “Classified Development” program includes rate structuring, sales training and management coaching. To learn more about improving your classified numbers call 423-929-2243, or e-mail classifieddevelopment@yahoo.com. Common Questions about Free Ads 09/21/2011
The issues surrounding offering free ads for private-party items is far from settled at most newspapers. In my consulting practice I get the same questions again and again, and quite often management doesn’t like my answers. Those are the managers that want to hang onto the days when we had little or no serious competition, and could profit from private-party classifieds. At most papers true private party advertising hasn’t made a significant contribution to profits in a great many years. By true private party, I mean one-time sales of personal property by individuals. Any ongoing moneymaking activities, bulk items, or real estate would be excluded by this definition. The various free online sites have served as a “category killer” for profits from this area. This is similar to what happened to camera stores when discount stores started selling cameras at or below their costs. They just could not compete, and many went out of business for lack of a new strategy. Basil Smith, who invented classifieds in America back in the early 1900s, is credited with saying, “The paper that controls the private party ads will eventually control all of the classified ads.” This is still true today. Without a strong private-party stuff-for-sale franchise, readers have little reason to go to the classifieds on most days. This means that the question of whether the newspaper should offer free ads for at least some private-party classifieds is absolutely yes. Another common question is whether the paper should offer a limited ad, say three lines for three days, and then try to make some money on these ads by offering upsells. My answer is to re-read paragraphs one and two. Low priced private-party items should be primarily considered readership generators, rather than revenue generators. Without classified readers you have nothing to offer to your business advertisers. These free ads should be the best ads you can get. In actual practice, newspapers that try the free weak ad strategy don’t get the readership they expected, plus the small ads take up more ad-visor time. You want your ad-visors to practice building up the ad copy, not get really good at cutting ads down to the three-line level. Offer really good free ads, and run them for a week or two. These good ads for low-priced items will generate more readership and subscriber loyalty than most of the news items you will ever run. It is fine if these advertisers want to buy extras, but that is the icing, the readership is the cake. By having good free ads, you increase the likelihood that the ad will work, and that the advertiser will come back to you when a paid ad is needed. Weak free ads generate little readership, and prove to the advertisers that your ads are not effective when those ads don’t work. Allowing the free ads only for subscribers is a good idea unless the verification would be cumbersome. Allow three free ads per subscriber per week to populate these columns quickly and consistently with fresh offers. Require the free ads to include the phone number on the subscription account to largely avoid having subscribers use their free ads for other people. The price limit on items in the free ads varies from market to market, but the papers that are having success are offering free ads for items priced under $1000, or at least under $500. An actual count of true private-party items priced under these limits, and the price paid for those ads almost always reveals that there is little to no risk to revenues from this practice. Your classifieds will remain relevant to your readers. More readers mean more ads, both free and paid. Richard Clark's unique blend of "aw shucks" and "do it or die" delivery of classified advertising advice has brought success to well over 300 classified departments across America. His “Classified Development” program includes rate structuring, sales training and management coaching. To learn more about improving your classified numbers call 423-929-2243, or e-mail classifieddevelopment@yahoo.com. Note to Publishers: Please feel free to re-publish or link to this story at no charge, as long as you leave in my business plug at the end, and let me know you've done so. A copy of any printed piece, or a link to online reproduction would be appreciated. Thanks, Richard. Setting Priorities Correctly By: Richard Clark, Classified Development Clearly the toughest challenge faced by most Classified Supervisors is setting priorities correctly. Most classified supervisors get little or no training in time management. They take the reins of the new position and are bombarded with “zillions” of things that must be done right away. Most of these issues involve human resources, computer system, accounting, production, or other processes that have little or nothing to do with getting someone to purchase an ad. New supervisors are anxious to make a good impression, so they try to get all of those things done. Somehow, the business of creating ways to grow revenue gets lost in the act of managing all the processes. The problem is that classified supervisors get most of their day-to-day feedback based on how well all the processes are managed, rather than how much advertising is sold. Managers get into the poor habit of focusing primarily on the processes. All too often, the concept of using ingenuity to maximize revenues either takes a back seat or is lost completely. Ok, classified supervisors and managers, here’s the deal: “Your number one priority is to grow revenue!” Everything and anything else that isn’t directly focused on growing revenue hurts your sales performance. The other departments you work with are primarily interested on accomplishing their individual primary objectives. They will siphon off as much of your valuable sales time as you allow them to take. Their objectives are met, which makes them look good. Your sales don’t grow, and may even dip, and upper management wonders if you have the right stuff. You simply cannot let these objectives from other departments keep you from achieving your department’s primary goal of growing sales revenues. Does this mean that classified doesn’t have to do those “other” tasks? For most, of course you still have to do them. Be willing to work with those other departments, just not under them. The question is the priority. If something is missed because you are short on time, it has to be one of these “other” activities, and never any of your department’s sales activity. There is a steady supply of people that will do clerical and production duties for less money than most salespeople make. Good salespeople are the hardest employees for any business to find. It just doesn’t make sense to take away from sales time for clerical and production tasks. Keep your sales staff selling. If you have someone in your department that just can’t seem to grasp the concept that their job is sales, give that person all the non-sales duties so the salespeople can spend time selling more ads. Just to be clear, as a Classified Supervisor, you must accomplish your primary goal of maximizing revenue generation every day, or else you have failed. This is true no matter what else you may have accomplished that day. This means that Ad-visors always efficiently make the most out of every inbound call. Ad-visors make their renewal callbacks every day; even things are really busy. Clear plans, objectives and schedules for maximizing outbound calling for special pages, promotions and directories must be implemented. In addition to outbound calling for special items, the department must spend time staying in touch with existing advertisers that haven’t run recently. It doesn’t do much good to add new customers if there is a steady stream of them falling away. The same is true of advertisers that you find in other media that should be advertising in your classified products. There are many priorities in the classified department, but any that get ahead of selling more advertising are simply out of order. I once saw a sign above a business manager’s desk that read, “A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” This is pretty sound advice. Another department’s top priority doesn’t change your department’s top priority. If you will make this your philosophy, you can be sure you’ll be rewarded for meeting your primary goal. Richard Clark's unique blend of "aw shucks" and "do it or die" delivery of classified advertising advice has brought success to well over 300 classified departments across America. His “Classified Development” program includes rate structuring, sales training and management coaching. To learn more about improving your classified numbers call 423-929-2243, or e-mail classifieddevelopment@yahoo.com. Note to Publishers: Please feel free to re-publish or link to this story at no charge, as long as you leave in my business plug at the end, and let me know you've done so. A copy of any printed piece, or a link to online reproduction would be appreciated. Thanks, Richard. | AuthorRichard Clark's unique blend of "aw shucks" and "do it or die" delivery of classified advertising advice has brought success to well over 300 classified departments across America. His “Classified Development” program includes rate structuring, sales training and management coaching. To learn more about improving your classified numbers call 423-929-2243, or e-mail classifieddevelopment@yahoo.com. ArchivesApril 2012 Categories |
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