Advertisers are publishers: 4 points to remember when selling digital media

So do you want to sell digital media?

How many of you have gone to online media shows and found yourself looking at the exhibitor booth signs and wondering:

A. I still don’t understand… what are these guys selling?

b. What do they do that is different from each other?

vs Is this something I should know more about?

Are media buyers confused too? It’s hard not to be when all the media vendors are saying the same thing: “We’re the best! We’re the #1 way to reach your audience. ROI? Yes, we did! We’re #1!”

Every day, hundreds of digital media marketers try to sell their offer by pointing out their unique domain in the marketplace (theirs? theirs?). They reach the right audience in the right way, and therefore they should be in the consideration set, right? They all count on agencies and advertisers appreciating their unique value. We all want it to be obvious “Obviously, with our brand and yours, we are the right place for you (your advertiser) to advertise.”

Well, they’re fine, for someone. But how should they communicate this effectively? All the reputation of your brand? That’s thinking outside the box.

The mistake most online media marketers make is that they don’t view advertisers as publishers, which is what they are. In fact, all people and all brands and even some agencies are online publishers. If you have a Facebook page (1 in 7 people on the planet), LinkedIn profile, Google+, blog or Pinterest account, you are a publisher. If you’re a brand with a corporate website, microsite, Facebook fan page, Twitter feed, etc., you’re a publisher. And, obviously, traditional online and offline publishers are publishers, as are retail and wholesale companies… even app developers: if you have a URL, you’re a publisher.

And all publishers want the same thing:

Traffic. People who come to our content. More and more visitors every day. Ideally, the cost to us for each new visitor, on average, is less and less. We want traffic that engages with our content and the metric we all use is: can this traffic be scaled and monetized? While not all digital assets are e-commerce, we want to monetize our traffic through “proportional or fractional” conversions. To explain: if I sell products or generate leads or signups, there is a value for each of these “complete conversions”.

But, if I want people to read my blog and tell a friend, that’s a fractional conversion. In fact, each commitment point is a fractional conversion. Even something as innocent as page views: what is it worth to us to get a visitor to go from the landing page to another page? What is it worth to us to get our average user to increase their time on the site from 1 minute to 2 minutes? How much is each Facebook like worth? How many downloads of technical documents are equivalent to one person buying our service? What is the actual monetary value we assign to each of these commitments?

If you’re selling media, you need to know the value and purpose of each of these desired engagements. Now, take that information and focus your pitch on matching your goals to these four attributes of your ad opportunity:

1. Over-indexing

2. Zero fee

3. Unduplicated audience

4. Loyalty

Let’s look at each one in detail:

1. overindexing refers to measuring the specific buying behaviors of your visitor compared to those of their peer group. What quality, WHICH IS IMPORTANT TO A SPECIFIC ADVERTISER, does your site or network achieve more abundantly or to a greater extent than your peer group of advertising competitors?
2. “Zero Participation” refers to advertisers who are in someone else’s ad vehicle but not your own. Sellers need to know this to find leads more strategically; Agencies concerned with understanding the digital landscape, advertiser separation, and exclusive categories need to know as well.
3. Unduplicated audience. In the same way that there is always a bigger fish, there is always a bigger net that also reaches the same goal as your site. So what part of your audience is more likely to be on your site than your competitors (including network ad inventory on sites that are part of the “larger” network).
4. Loyalty refers to the tendency for repeat visitors to an ad-supported site/network to arrive at the site via “favorites” (as opposed to first-time visitors who arrive there via search engines and social networks; check the reference in site visitors to see how visitors find your site), as well as interact with your content across all of your platforms. For example, do all of your small but loyal audience download your app? Do a high percentage of them view your site on a mobile device? Do they attend your events or follow you on Twitter?

No site or network is inherently better; The question is whether you can do a better job of matching your goals to your offer and backing up your claims with real numbers and credible research sources. If you can make that case, you will be number 1 in the eyes of the advertiser. Otherwise, you are number 2.