This post is the business-side equivalent to “Growing audience through print and online collaboration.”

Many publishing businesses are finally seeing the light when it comes to print and online sales. Maintaining separate  sales groups encourages internal competition (the bad kind), cannibalizes  profits and delivers poor results to clients. Having an integrated sales team, or at least a sales team that’s incented to play nice together is key to success in the new publishing universe.

Once the playing field is even, a sales team can sell each product on its individual merit. Selling packages of products that work in conjunction with one another will increase the amount of revenue generated per sale, improve the client’s ROI and earn repeat business.

Here’s an example of a common sale by one or more reps selling different media for the same company:

An advertiser buys ad placement that will appear in several issues of a magazine.  He knows the ads will be seen by a percentage of the readership. It’s largely a branding exercise and may or may not work, but it’s a calculated risk. The advertiser also buys a banner campaign on the magazine’s web site. While the ad has the same look and feel as the print ad, that’s where the similarity ends. The ad links to his web site and at the end of his campaign, someone tells him how many times the ad was seen and how many clicks it got.

There are separate costs associated with advertising in each publication, there are some times even separate sales people who service the account. At the end of his campaign, the advertiser isn’t really sure if he got his money’s worth. Is a .5% click through rate good? He got more traffic to his web site this month, but to what magazine ad can he attribute the traffic? In the long run, the advertiser may decide to cut one or more items from future ad buys. “Maybe I don’t need that banner ad.”  “Maybe one print ad is enough”

Now let’s look at the same buy but sold and planned in collaboration:

The advertiser runs a series of print ads offering a free widget for those who visit a specific url. The url changes for each print ad. The publisher creates a splash page and the redirects necessary for the print campaign. The splash page is linked to from the magazine web site.

Banner ads run on the magazine web site with a similar look and feel to the print ads and link to the splash page as well.

The splash page reinforces the message that appeared on the display ads. A form on the splash page collects user data, and a tracking code placed on the page collects other information. The page is optimized for search and includes keywords that relate to the campaign.

The advertiser pays one package price with the different campaign elements broken out on the invoice. At the end of the campaign, the advertiser receives a detailed report including: the amount of traffic that came in from each print ad; the number of clicks from display ads; the amount of organic search traffic that reached the page; the number of total unique visitors to the page; the average time spent by those visitors; and a database of contact information from those who filled out the form.

If the sales rep(s) has done her job, the advertiser will understand the branding value of the campaign. With the report, the advertiser will receive more concrete numbers and leads to help evaluate the campaign.

Campaigns that include multiple media sources perform better, and leave a longer lasting impression with the audience. Supplying these kinds of results to clients encourages future ad purchases and more robust relationships. In the current economic climate, which of the two publishers above will the advertiser choose to drop when his marketing budget gets cut?

Tagged with: online • print • Publishing • sales

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.