Opportunities to Drive Revenue

We are constantly looking for new ways to help you generate revenue through your Best Of. With that in mind, we introduced features to help you do just that:

• Groups Page Ads, Category Interstitial Ads, and Entrant Page Ads
• Enhanced Featured Entrant Pages
• Ad Tracking

All of these features allow you to increase the value and price of your sales packages and provide trackable and deliverable metrics to your advertisers.

NEW Sales Packages

With all these new opportunities, we’ve given our sample sales sheets an overhaul. Each sales sheet now includes these opportunities, adjusted pricing, and ad examples so your advertisers can easily see the benefits.

We also crafted a BRAND NEW sales sheet for Title Sponsorships! Use this sample sales sheet to secure a huge sale for an exclusive title sponsor within your Best Of.

Check out all of our new sales packages here!

Prospecting Best Practices

According to data collected by Borrell Associates, 78% of advertisers prefer to buy advertising with a rep – whether it be in person, or via email/phone. That means interaction with your advertisers is #1. They want and prefer to interact with a sales rep when purchasing advertising.

Now here’s the challenge. If your ballot has 200 categories with 10 businesses per category, that’s 2,000 prospects, and we know this is not scalable. So the focus here needs to be targeting prospects with a scalable approach and to be open to innovation in your strategies.

Prospect the Top Business Categories

The first step in this tactic is to pinpoint the top revenue driving categories:

From there, focus on three characteristics of businesses in these categories:

• Competing in Multiple Categories

These are businesses who fit in more than one category, like a contractor who can be in Best Contractor, Best Window Installation, Best Screen Enclosure, etc. Audit your ballot from last year to determine which business fit. These are businesses that you can pitch a larger package.

• Competitive

These are businesses who have ego or a fear of missing out. The need to be the best and want to stand out from the rest. They will purchase larger packages so they stand out on the ballot.

• Historically Purchased

These are the tried and true relationships that will be the easiest to sell. They’ve had good experiences with you in the past and will want to secure their position in your coming ballot as well.

Now that we’ve pinpointed which businesses will drive the most revenue with the least lift for your team, next we need to look at targeting growth. Take a look at your sales totals from last year to get a baseline of your top categories. Next, what does increasing these top categories by 10%? This in itself could be adding 10k+ to your YOY revenue.

And now the next question – how do you reach that goal?

• Get one more business in each category to purchase a package
• Increase investment of packages (with new ad placements/featured entrant pages)
• Get 1-2 businesses in each category to move up to a larger package
• Look at where you can offer new types of packages

One-to-Many Outreach

One-to-many outreach, or an inbound marketing approach, allows you to attract advertisers in a more passive way than one-to-one interaction. The driving force of this approach is Best Of content like graphics, marketing tips, and a media kit that draw in business owners.

All of this content you create should be gated behind a form so you can capture these leads. Once you’ve captured their email address and data, you can then target them with curated email campaigns sent through out the phases of your ballot with your sales packages, driving even more prospects to your team!