Addressing poor survey results and using good ones to your publication’s advantage with prospective advertisers.

By William Dunkerley

So you've got fresh new results from a recent survey. What next? Well, that depends. Let's take the worst case first. We'll assume the survey was done professionally and produced reliable results.

Poor Survey Results: A Reckoning

What if your magazine did not stack up well against competitors, and your demographics and psychographics are not really what advertisers are looking for? Then, indeed, what next?

The message should be clear: There is something wrong with your magazine. And whatever the problem is, you should find it and fix it before you invest a lot more time and effort selling new prospects and renewing iffy contracts. Your success rate will be suboptimal if you don't.

One of the most common problems that contributes to a poor survey showing is a lack of unity in purpose within. For example, there was a B2B magazine in the energy field, an economic area in which there are many subdivisions. Its audience development efforts were focused on one segment of the market. The editorial department, however, envisioned a reader profile with interests mostly in a different segment. That's what they aimed their content toward. And the ad sales staff was working off a prospect list that barely included either segment. They were looking at segments that had the most advertisers.

There was no unity in focus within the organization. This was basically the publisher’s fault. Each department was doing a good job of focusing on the audience they had in mind, but the problem was that they didn't mesh.

This comes down to basic positioning 101. To briefly explore that, let's use the example of the electronics component industry. The table below shows its basic segmentation:



In the telecommunications hardware semiconductor industry, market size by component, worldwide projection for 2021 in billion US dollars. (Data from a Statistica study.)

Do you want to cover the entire market? If so, are you sufficiently capitalized for that and the attendant level of competition?

If not, you need to look for the largest segment or subsegment of the market that you can realistically take on. Then focus your audience development, editorial, and advertising sales in tandem on that part of the market.

Another common problem arises if a magazine's efforts in audience development, editorial, and advertising sales are insufficiently strategized, or the staff level of professionalism is subpar.

These considerations present tough questions to be introspective about. But if your magazine isn't shining in your survey results, this is a necessary exercise to undertake.

That's how to handle worst-case survey results.

(By the way, one problem may not show up on a readership survey: if your audience size is too small to place you in the running. If you need to attract new readers, you won't find a solution by asking your own readers questions. You need to survey the nonreaders you want to acquire. It is their interests and needs you need to consider. That will help you to attract and retain them.)

Good Survey Results: An Opportunity

What if your readership survey results paint a favorable picture of your magazine? Now what's next? How can you use the newly acquired data to promote sales?

Presenting tables of survey results to prospects may not be particularly persuasive by themselves. But the use of favorable survey results in a sales presentation can add to your sales rep's credibility and tip the scales on a sale.

One key concern for any savvy ad buyer is whether your publication will help it reach prospective customers for whatever the company is selling. You may have competitors that make claims about that. "Our readers are very interested in products like yours," one might hear. Often that's just talk with nothing to back it up.

Armed with survey data, on the other hand, your rep can assert: "We have objective survey data that shows, compared to other publications, our readership has more decision makers when it comes to buying products like yours." Quote the statistics here, but try to weave them into a story if possible. Some believe that buyers will be more apt to remember a story than just raw statistics.

(Keep in mind that with the use of statistics like this, you are presenting a feature. That always needs to be followed by a related benefit. We'll deal with that in more detail in a later issue when we discuss sales presentation techniques.)

Being able to represent your publication as the go-to place for information relevant to a prospect's area of business is another key factor. In brick-and-mortar business, "location, location, location" is a common refrain. That's because location is where the prospective customers are. So if you can show that your publication is the location for buyers interested in a certain thing, you'll have an advantage. For instance, if you are dealing with a company whose business focus is electronic memory devices, you might say, "More readers rank our publication as the best source of information about electronic memory devices over publications x, y, and z. We have survey data to back that up."

These examples show the general idea: It is to use your survey data to show advertisers that your audience is a great collection of prospective buyers for them. Also, it is to show them that among their various choices of where to advertise, they will benefit greatly if they advertise with you.

One final point: Don't represent your survey data as being from an industry-wide survey. An alert ad buyer can call you out on that claim and question your credibility. The survey is of your own readership, not the whole industry. But that's okay. It is your readership that you are selling to the ad buyer.

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

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