Local media’s go-to-market blind spot is costing revenue

While local media companies are stuck in transactional selling and reactive fulfillment, SaaS companies scale through a structured, metrics-driven go-to-market strategy. It’s not luck or a flash in the pan; it’s a discipline. A framework. A playbook. And it’s one local media really needs to learn from.”

Todd Handy is a growth architect and transformation strategist who’s helped reshape the digital media, AdTech and SaaS landscapes

Local media has a GTM problem. Ask most local media executives to define their go-to-market (GTM) strategy, and you’ll likely get a list of products (“sell more video,” “grow audio inventory,” “embrace programmatic”) or a revenue goal (“reach X revenue by Y date,” “drive X% growth”). What you won’t get is an overall vision — a true roadmap including a framework and playbooks for how their organization drives growth, retains customers and scales value.

That’s a problem.

“GTM” isn’t even part of the media industry vernacular. Media companies often lack a designated GTM owner and have no structured alignment across sales, marketing and customer success (which can be a challenge in a media company). There’s a dearth of shared metrics that guide revenue performance and track progress and gaps. Most media companies still operate on a transactional model: sign up an advertiser, sell an ad campaign, deliver impressions, provide a post-campaign wrap-up report, rinse and repeat.

The absence of the above results in high advertiser churn, low renewal rates, poor revenue predictability and constant pressure to close new business just to hit budget. When asked what percentage of advertisers return quarter over quarter, most media companies don’t know the answer. When asked for customer acquisition cost (CAC), lifetime value of a customer (LTV), or churn rates, they don’t know where to begin. It’s not part of the media industry’s toolkit.

So, they rely heavily on new business to combat the churn. I know and have worked with market managers at multiple media companies who routinely deal with 25-30% monthly revenue churn. Can you imagine? Before the month even begins, they must get 25-30% more than their monthly budget just to hit their month.

Honestly, local media companies don’t necessarily have a new business problem; they have a retention and monetization problem rooted in an outdated GTM model.

At the same time, many of these organizations are adding new products, technologies and digital capabilities without evolving their GTM strategy. This creates more noise, more confusion and often more friction for their internal teams and advertisers alike. Instead of unifying around shared key performance indicators (KPIs) and a cohesive revenue engine, teams remain siloed, reactive and disconnected.

Without a clear GTM strategy and structure, media companies struggle to:

• Package offerings in a way that generates monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
• Align their teams around advertiser outcomes, not product/campaign fulfillment
• Measure what matters to predict revenue health or risk
• Build durable, scalable advertiser relationships

I am proposing a new path forward, one inspired by the companies that have mastered predictable growth: those in the SaaS (software-as-a-service) industry. The goal isn’t to copy their technology, but to apply their operational discipline and GTM best practices to the local media business model. To learn from what they do to scale.

What SaaS companies get right

SaaS companies aren’t known just for their technology (or their foosball tables, beanbags in the breakroom and free meals), they’re admired for their sustained revenue growth. While local media companies are stuck in transactional selling and reactive fulfillment, SaaS companies scale through a structured, metrics-driven go-to-market strategy. It’s not luck or a flash in the pan; it’s a discipline. A framework. A playbook. And it’s one local media really needs to learn from. In the next article, we’ll discuss the specific things SaaS companies get right and how they apply to the media industry.

Future articles will lay out: the exact metrics that power this model, how to start tracking them, and an “audit” to help you understand where you are and what you need to do to make the transformation to “SaaS-ify” your media company. I’ll also lay out what you can do to begin building this system and driving real transformation.

Todd Handy is a growth architect and transformation strategist who’s helped reshape the digital media, AdTech and SaaS landscapes. He’s led revenue, marketing, customer success, operations and transformation for companies including Deseret Digital Media, Beasley Media Group, MarketStar and Tout. As founder of Disruptive Impact, he partners with companies to reinvent their business models using proven frameworks and dual transformation principles. A frequent keynote speaker and LMA board member, Todd offers fractional leadership and advisory services to drive measurable, recurring revenue growth. Reach him at todd@disruptiveimpact.co.