Your Website Needs a Place in Your Sales Plan

Your next advertiser may be willing to spend money with your station without buying a traditional spot schedule. Does your website give your sales team something worth offering?

Borrell Associates’ updated forecast projects digital will capture 75% of local advertising spending by the end of 2027, reaching 80% by 2030. It expects local digital advertising to grow 6.7% in 2027, while traditional advertising declines 3.5%. These are national projections, but they give station managers a clear reason to review what they’re prepared to sell.

Those digital dollars won’t automatically find their way to your website. My takeaway for radio stations is that your website needs an audience strategy, defined advertising products, and a place in your regular sales conversations.

1. Build Something Worth Sponsoring

A website filled with outdated contests and syndicated filler gives advertisers little reason to invest. Useful local content creates a stronger starting point.

Choose something your staff can maintain consistently: a weekend events guide, high school sports coverage, local business features, or community interviews. Then build a sponsorship around that feature with clearly defined placements and promotion.

For example, a weekly events guide could include a website sponsorship, newsletter placement, and on-air mentions directing listeners to the guide. You’re giving the advertiser an understandable connection to something people use.

2. Stop Treating Website Ads as Free Extras

If website exposure always gets thrown into a radio buy, you’re teaching advertisers—and your sales team—that it has no independent value.

Create a simple digital inventory list. Include available placements, mobile presentation, campaign length, creative requirements, pricing, and reporting. Your account executives should be able to explain each opportunity without calling the webmaster.

Packages can still combine radio and digital. Just identify what each component contributes and what the advertiser is buying. Price those opportunities around the audience and exposure you can realistically deliver.

3. Make Room for Different Advertisers

Borrell’s research also describes a changing business landscape, with growth favoring service businesses and the average establishment becoming smaller. That suggests stations should look beyond their familiar retail prospect lists.

Think about home service companies, professional firms, and other businesses that need local awareness but may not be ready for a substantial broadcast commitment. A focused digital package could provide an entry point.

Make your “Advertise With Us” page useful to those prospects. Show actual opportunities, explain who they reach, and provide a short inquiry form. “Call us for advertising” leaves too much of the story untold.

4. Give Video a Useful Home

Borrell identifies online video as the fastest-growing advertising category, projecting 10% growth in 2027. Its definition includes connected TV, YouTube, and social video, so this isn’t a forecast specifically for videos on station websites.

For your website, a practical starting point is a short local interview, community preview, or clearly labeled sponsored business feature. Give the video a dedicated page with a useful headline, supporting information, and a relevant next step.

That gives your sales team a concrete example to show advertisers. Start with a format you can produce reliably, and define production and distribution costs before selling it.

5. Make Results Part of the Product

Before launching a campaign, agree on what success means. Is the advertiser looking for visibility, visits to an offer page, inquiries, or registrations?

Report the measurements you can verify, such as ad impressions, clicks, and tracked form submissions. Measuring purchases or inquiries on an advertiser’s own website requires their cooperation and appropriate tracking. Don’t promise attribution you haven’t set up.

Also test the entire experience on a phone. An unreadable ad or a broken destination page can undermine a campaign before the advertiser receives the first report.

Start With One Sellable Package

You don’t need to introduce ten digital products this month. Choose one useful content feature, define its audience, establish a sponsorship price, and decide how you’ll report performance. Assign someone to maintain the content and someone to sell the opportunity.

Borrell’s forecast describes a growing digital market. Your station’s task is to develop a specific offer that earns a place in an advertiser’s budget.