Selling Display Ads for your News Site? Seek Advertisers with Budgets, Not Checkbooks

When I ran a local weekly (sometimes bi-weekly) publication day in and day out, we did a lot of advertising sales. A few times per week, we would stand at the whiteboard on the wall and look at potential advertising for the next few weeks of print issues, along with some we thought had digital potential and some we thought could be good for a contract.

Likewise, each sales rep had a list of prospects and current customers they were looking to sell, upsell, renew or entice into something new. It was a grind – 50, 100, 150 prospects, 30 daily touches: emails, phone calls, meetings, drop-ins, networking functions, fundraisers, luncheons and more.

Today, when I coach smaller, digital-only publications and startups, I’m often tempted to say something different, like, “Go knock out some digital display ad sales, and then move on.” It’s easier said than done, but my point usually concerns the nexus between traffic and potential revenue.

Because many of these publications have relatively low traffic, display ad sales on the website are unlikely to represent a major revenue stream. Instead, digital revenues will come by realizing success at all three levels of the digital reader funnel – advertising to casual visitors at the top, advertising to newsletter subscribers in the middle and selling memberships or subscriptions to VIP readers at the bottom of the funnel.

It’s still important to make that top-of-the-funnel sale happen. But I suggest you look for ways to make it easier on yourself. This brings me to one of my standards when I discuss ad sales: seek advertisers with budgets, not checkbooks.

What sort of advertiser has a budget? Local art and history museums. Convention and visitors bureaus (Many have requirements to advertise outside of a certain radius of their town or municipality.) Local parks and recreation departments. State tourism departments. Colleges and universities. Professional theaters and touring companies. Credit unions. Some sizeable non-profits. A few larger local restaurants, especially with more than one location. Car dealers, regional technology companies, law firms, hospitals and clinics, and major employers. Political candidates who are running for office, and sometimes political leaders who are in office and need to advertise constituent services.

What sort of advertiser has a checkbook? Smaller restaurants and bars. Local retail. Smaller non-profits. Individual professionals. Local venues. Community theater. The arts supply store.

I like advertisers with budgets for a whole bunch of reasons, but three stand out in this context:

1. They plan to advertise. You don’t have to convince them that advertising is a thing. That’s why they have it in the budget.

2. Once you’re in their budget, you tend to stay as long as you perform adequately.

3. Once they make the decision to work with you, they tend to advertise more consistently. See (1.) and (2.).

And, as a bonus, they’ll often have their own artwork.

Advertisers with checkbooks can be the opposite – they have to be convinced to advertise, they’ll change their mind quickly, and they’ll be less consistent, with a tendency to advertise when they’re busy (and have cash flow) or only during certain times of the year or only when your publication offers certain types of content.

If you’re a small-ish digital publisher doing 50-100k pageviews per month (or more—this could scale), I’d recommend investing some time in reaching out to advertisers with budgets, setting meetings with their marketing person, their general manager or their executive director, and discussing the marketing needs.

For evergreen, longer campaigns that build awareness and reach out to your audience with invitations and offers, you can create a package that gives them constant exposure for $500-$1000 a month for a 12-month contract. Knock out five deals like that, and you’ve added $2500-5000 a month or $30-60k per year as a “leg of the stool” of your revenue. 

Since it’s budgeted, you might also be able to get that money quarterly or annually, especially if you offer a prepayment discount. And that sort of workload could be something the publisher on a small team could handle—at least for starters—or some deals that the founder or development director could knock out without needing a sales team… yet.

Then, if you do have advertisers with checkbooks, you can offer your newsletter as an option for them to buy a few weeks’ worth of advertising at a time or to buy ads when you’re doing more touristy content, or whatever it is. That’ll require different packages and pricing and more sales effort.

But if you’ve gotten in the budget of a handful of blue-chip advertisers in your market, it’ll make those next sales a little easier to close—after all, you’ve got some social proof that advertising with you is a good idea since some of the big guys are doing it—and you’ve got a little revenue from advertising already that makes you feel like you don’t have to chase small sales day in and day out—like we used to at my weekly!

Visit the Digital Revenue Playbook for Local News Publishers for more ideas on generating revenue for your local news publication.