Radio’s Local Business Advertising Toolkit for Digital
Radio digital sales surpassed $2.1 billion in 2024, as revealed in the 13th annual benchmarking report on digital sales. It’s been a growing and healthy revenue stream, enabling radio to gain more ad dollars from companies. With increases forecasted in 2025, it’s never been a better time to ensure you have all the tools you need for local business advertising.
What tools do you need for success? It’s a mix of people, processes and technology. When your station has all three in sync, amazing things start to happen to your digital revenue numbers.
Local Business Advertising Tools to Upskill and Empower Your People
Your sales team needs the best tools to feel confident in selling digital. Digital advertising is always changing, from targeting capabilities to ad types to consumer sentiment. It’s crucial your sellers stay up-to-date so they can recommend the best tactics and advise businesses on how to build an ideal audience.
Most stations do provide education to salespeople. Often, it’s inconsistent, unengaging or lacks insights. It creates more frustration instead of helping them hone their skills. The toolkit necessary for learning involves diversity, such as on-demand video resources, fresh content to spur ideas and tackle objections and regular roleplay in meetings.
Importantly, digital advertising training should be consistent in its themes, building on concepts mastered. With the right partner, your sellers can achieve their upskilling goals and always have access to new material.
The other part of helping sellers be the best at local business advertising ties into process and technology. Sellers want to sell. They don’t want to spend hours on proposals that require them to use multiple applications. Every wasted minute on administrative tactics keeps them from generating revenue.
When these inefficiencies and disjointed systems combine, sellers feel exasperated. It’s not the kind of environment that fosters loyalty. Sales is already a high-churn profession, and younger generations entering the workforce have no patience for bloated workflows.
Consolidating systems into an ecosystem that’s modern and intuitive makes a salesperson’s life easier. They’ll be able to make more calls, deliver more proposals and book more meetings.
Improving Processes Helps Radio Win More Local Digital Deals
The second pillar crucial to accelerating digital sales success is process optimization. Consider all the steps and workflows that your sellers must complete. There are likely inefficiencies present in pricing, proposing and ordering.
A good first step would be to audit current processes to identify the bottlenecks and gaps. Then, determine how to address them. These could include:
Using multiple systems to create proposals for all ad buys (radio, O&O and third-party digital)
Challenges with systems not being able to exchange information or have a workflow integration (e.g., traffic systems and digital platforms)
Manual work necessary for trafficking ads for radio spots or digital
Advertiser approval delays
An inability to flight ad campaigns and change or schedule creative
Every deficit in the longer workflow of selling advertising represents time wasted. You can make gains here in two ways. First, make sure all sellers are aware of your processes and how they impact productivity. The second is applying technology for digital that actually works for radio.
Technology Is Critical in Local Business Advertising Sales
The third element for success is technology. You have many options, but most systems for proposing, ordering, reporting and invoicing digital are not radio-centric. That means there’s a disconnect between its capabilities and your needs.
Technology isn’t a problem solver unless it supports your people and processes. If it’s ineffective, adoption will lag. In an ideal world, technology would enable:
- Cross-channel proposals
- Streamlined ordering and trafficking
- Seamless ad execution with premium, high-quality inventory
- Integrated billing and payments
- Advanced analytics
Key to this perfect scenario is digital advertising software that fully integrates with traffic systems. That way, radio spots and digital don’t live in siloes. They are completely connected, improving efficiency and visibility.
When stations put a solution like this in place, operational performance improves. It can also provide sales managers with detailed reporting on sales activities and forecasting, so transparency around selling is clear.
Building Your Local Business Advertising Toolbox
With these tools, radio can expand its market share of local digital advertising spending. With more businesses likely to spend more on it this year, you can be in the perfect position to boost revenue.
For more helpful resources, we recommend:
E-Book:
Is Selling Digital Advertising Profitable for Your Station? Uncovering Obstacles and Optimizing Revenue
Ready to Build Your Toolkit with Marketron?
Marketron NXT is the only third-party digital advertising platform designed for radio. It integrates with our traffic suite and electronic payments platform. With NXT, you gain more than software. Access on-demand training, a library of resources, a team of local digital experts and more. We’re helping the industry grow and evolve while ensuring radio remains rooted.
Explore NXT and all it has to offer by requesting a demo.
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