Conducting a self-assessment to determine where your ad strategy may be coming up short.

By William Dunkerley

Having the prerequisites for effective ad sales is very important in producing good results. Last issue introduced three:

Essential Prerequisite 1: Your publication must be effective at generating sales or other benefits for its advertisers.

Essential Prerequisite 2: You need to have expert knowledge of the marketplace you’re selling in.

Essential Prerequisite 3: Within your market, you need to know what the various product or services categories are and the relative amount of ad dollars being spent in each.

In line with that, we presented a method for assessing the marketplace by analyzing ads run by your competitors. See the graphic representation of a sample analysis here.

Now it's time to do the same analysis on your publication, a self-assessment. Are there categories in which your sales are strong? Are there other areas where the competition is getting a larger share of the business?

If so, there are usually two major factors that explain that. One is that you may not be focusing sufficient sales attention to advertisers in that category. The other is that your magazine may perform poorly for those advertisers.

Fortunately these are both things you can influence. If your sales force is just not spending enough time on advertisers in a certain category, bring that to their attention. If they are having any difficulty penetrating that segment, listen to their experiences and work with them on problem-solving.

But if those advertisers are using other publications instead of yours, the problem is more complex. To understand that, it's good to review the basics of publishing economics. For that purpose I like to use a life cycle analogy: the life cycle of the advertising dollar, which is illustrated in the following sketch:


The economics of successful publishing.

You'll see that it starts at the top with a group of companies who are the advertisers. They spend dollars to advertise their products or services.

A publication receives this advertising revenue and, with it, develops an editorial product. The publisher then circulates that product, the publication, to readers.

The readers buy the publication out of an interest in its content. They read the publication. While doing so, they see the advertisements and, in turn, purchase products and services from the companies that advertise.

The companies receive revenue from these sales. Their businesses flourish. They continue to spend money advertising. And the cycle starts all over again.

This is a simplified model, but it makes an important point: Success comes from the advertising dollars successfully passing through the various stages.

What if it doesn't? Any number of mistakes can cause advertising dollars to leave the cycle and not complete it. When that happens the economic vitality of the cycle is lost.

Writing for the wrong audience, selling space to the wrong advertisers, marketing subscriptions to the wrong readers -- all these can interrupt the cycle and spell economic disaster for the publication.

The self-assessment described earlier will tell you if part of the problem lies in your publication's content mix. The other part concerns whether the acquisition of new readers is being properly focused. Indiscriminate reader acquisition can result in creating an audience that is not going to be responsive to your advertisers. And that's the point of this article: When you attract new readers, it is very important that you attract the right ones.

Next time we'll look at research techniques that can give you insights into your readership. With those new perspectives you can plan a course for acquiring readers that will produce good results for advertisers, and make your publication a must-buy.

William Dunkerley is principal of William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, www.publishinghelp.com.

Add your comment.