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What you’re missing when you try to sell ads to national chains

You’ve tried to sell advertising to the manager of the store that’s a part of a national or regional chain.

And you’ve been told, “I don’t make those advertising decisions here.  I’ll give you the contact information for our regional office.”  You emailed and you called, but you either got no reply at all or were told that the store’s advertising commitments had already been made.

So you’re left wondering:  What do I have to do to get agencies and major accounts to pay more attention to my paper, here in small-town Texas? 

The good-news answer is this:  It is possible. But you need to have a presence on Standard Rate and Data Service, published by Kantar Media. It is simply the Media Buyers’ Bible.

Publishers listed in srds.com get daily visibility with active media buyers and planners. Advertisers have for years wanted to reach local markets that are connected to their community. Thanks to third party data (like the info in Circulation Verification Council readership studies), media planners are more comfortable than ever working with community publications.

How do publishers in small markets tell their story at the right time to the right person on the other side of the country? Successful ones make sure their info on SRDS is accurate and up to date. When you make it easy for a media buyer to find you, only good things can happen.

How do you get your paper listed in SRDS? First, you might want to have a look at what the data shows for a buyer interested in your market. I recommend my good friend David Crawford at Kantar media. [email protected] will get you started. He can give you login credentials to view the database and answer your questions. He can also send you the form to fill in your info to submit to SRDS and that will get your listing live.

When viewing the data for your market, you will discover that some media seem to be ranked higher (and are therefore more visible than others).  A paper that is audited by Circulation Verification Council (CVC) gets that added benefit because CVC automatically submits data to SRDS when the audit is completed and they purchase that elevated listing. For CVC info contact [email protected]

More on CVC in an upcoming blogpost.  But for now, look into an SRDS listing.  It’s free, and it’s the only way to get noticed by national media buyers.

By Dick Colvin

Dick Colvin has made a career of working with newspapers. With his background of dailies, weeklies, free and paid papers, his sales and marketing sessions have trained hundreds of people in the past 40-plus years. He also directed two different newspaper associations over the past decade.