Your Listeners in Dollars and Cents

There are numerous ways to position your listeners to potential advertisers. To the experienced media buyer, a sales rep often uses ratings and cost per point. However, when dealing with direct advertisers, it’s advisable to refer to your listeners as consumers.

Here you have options. The most obvious is by using your cume to talk about how many consumers your station reaches. More bodies means more consumers. That can be effective. However, sometimes it’s difficult to make that conversion from listener to consumer.

We at Research Director, Inc. have found it is even more valuable to convert your listeners into dollars and cents. Instead of telling them how many people tune to your radio station, you can easily show them what your listeners are spending in their category. How is this done?

One way is to take your qualitative data and show the advertiser how many listeners you have that fall into a particular category. Then ask the advertiser what the average listeners spends. Multiply the qualitative cume by the average amount spent. An advantage of this strategy is that you are including the potential client in the process. That translates into buy-in from the clients themselves.

However, as a marketing specialist, you can easily meet with a prospective client and show them that your listeners will spend $X amount in their category according to:

• Year
• Month
• Week
• Day

By using Nielsen Audio’s Retail Spending Power reports, or Research Director, Inc.’s customized and branded Spending Power presentations, you can estimate how much your listeners are likely to spend. Both are based on your station’s cume, and the dollar amounts are specific to your market – this second point is important to legitimize the results. Consumers in Miami will spend more at boat dealers than consumers in Denver.

Whether you are using the Nielsen Audio reports or Research Director, Inc.’s presentations, be ready to explain the figures and how they are calculated. Often the numbers are so big that they seem hard to believe. Determine how much the average person spends in a particular category and multiply by your station’s cume. At that point you can provide the potential advertiser with an estimate of how much your station’s listeners are likely to spend on their products or services.

Finally, don’t just walk into the advertiser with the computer printout. Always create a professional, easy-to-understand presentation. Outshine the competition with both your knowledge and professionalism.