The Best Data in Life Are Free
(Internet Research Resources)

by Dave Zornow

Here are excerpts from my May 1997 column for Cable Avails magazine. For the complete story and lots more on the business of buying and selling Cable Television locally and nationally, call Cable Avails at 303 837-0900.

If you’ve ever found yourself repeating the sales mantra "know thy customer," the Internet offers a wealth of resources where you can learn about your clients and your competitors. There are plenty of free and useful facts on the net, but there’s just as much stuff which is irrelevant and useless. Here’s a review of the best places to go on the World Wide Web for information to improve sales presentations.

The Internet Means (New) Business
Start your next new business pitch with a web search of related trade associations with home pages. These sites can give you a quick primer on your customer’s business and provide insight into how each trade group markets themselves. Use search engines like Yahoo, Infoseek, Excite, Lycos and Alta Vista to locate client sites and search for news updates for each industry.

In addition to facts and figures, the Web can be a valuable source of corporate logos and other graphics to customize sales presentations. What once was a tedious task of scanning, re-sizing and manually pasting client logos can now be accomplished by right-clicking on a graphic in Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. Including a customer’s artwork is a simple way to add a professional touch to a sales presentation with a minimum of effort.

Basically Cable
Although there are thousands of places on the web that provide information which can help your ad sales effort, here are a few of the sites most likely to provide useful material for sales calls:

The Tangled Web
The U.S. Government offers more information resources online than you use in a lifetime, but it comes at a price: sometimes it can take a lifetime to find the one fact you need. The Bureau of the Census lets you seek data for cities and counties, childcare, college and other subjects in a helpful alphabetical index. Summaries of spending data for hundreds of consumer categories are available from The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey..

Some sites offer their own search engines to quickly find articles which match your criteria. For example, American Demographics offers a searchable database of marketing and media articles that have appeared in their magazine at www.marketingtools.com. You can also check out USA Data and the Reuters New Media site for samples of data from vendors and suppliers who service the media research community.

Checking up on the competition
Competitive data about newspapers, spot TV and radio can be gleaned from each trade association’s web site. For example, to learn about the 17 percent decline of adults who read daily newspapers between 1970 and 1995, visit the Newspaper Advertising Association page. The Television Bureau of Advertising's web page lets you track how network cable’s share of television advertising has grown (from less than one percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 1995). You can find studies of radio and TV usage at the National Association of Broadcasters and information about the benefits of spot radio at The Radio Advertising Bureau. In addition to being a source of competitive research, visiting the competition where they live also shows you how each media tries to position themselves in the market.

If all of these codes and letters make your head spin, you may prefer to surf the sites through web pages that include directories of other web sites. Point your browser to www.ceoexpress.com for a page of pointers to daily newspapers, financial markets, phone and Internet listings, TV news sources and airline reservations web pages. Two sites, Stonehouse Systems and Virtual Media Resources, include comprehensive lists of links to media and marketing web pages. Dial www.awool.com for a marketing resource locator by race, language and lifestyle segment, or try the Advertising Media Internet Center for a list of research suppliers and data sources for media buyers. Agency users can also register at www.buymedia.com for an online directory of all radio and TV stations within each DMA.

Most companies with an Internet presence haven’t seen much of a return on their efforts so far. But you can make the most of their investment by using trade association, media and marketing web pages to add relevant facts and figures to your next presentation.

Copyright 1997, Dave Zornow

Questions? Comments? Please write to me at diz@bellatlantic.net.