Basic newsagent marketing

Marketing outside your newsagency is essential to growing the business. Too often I see newsagents rely on existing traffic or natural growth to boost sales. The latest Create Art flyer from newsXpress will bring new customers looking for quality art products at good prices. Some of these new customers will stick. The flyer is part of a broader year long marketing strategy designed to drive traffic, sales and depth of spend across multiple categories.

Major retailers spend a minimum set percentage of turnover every year on marketing. The Australian on Thursday had a story about Woolworths increasing its annual spent to $100 million, up 16% on the previous year. While newsagents cannot compete in quantum, they can compete by establishing a marketing budget which is a percentage of turnover. They can then balance the use of that budget across appropriate activities.

The Create Art flyer is a good example of cost effective marketing. Developed by the supplier exclusively for newsXpress, the store level cost can be zero or small depending on the number of flyers engaged and how they are deployed. The key is regular promotion of the business, using compelling offers for different categories, outside the shop.

Smart newsagents will increase their marketing spend across multiple departments in the face of tougher economic circumstances. Good execution will be rewarded with insulation against any downturn in our retail niche. Doing nothing externally sets the business up for average year at best or a drop is sales at worst. Given that rent, wages and other business costs increase annually, chasing growth is the only option.

I have some questions for newsagents reading this:

1. What percentage of your turnover do you allocate to marketing?
2. Is the marketing budget spread across your top four departments?
3. Is the marketing spent on activity outside your store to pull new traffic?
4. How do you track the success of the marketing?
5. When you send external marketing do you engage in-store with a message and theatre to reflect the offer sent out?
6. Is there a plan to your marketing at least six months out?

The risk is that newsagents and other small business owners see external marketing as too hard, that they cannot compete with the $100 million spend of the likes of Woolworths. There are many newsagencies which offer proof that you can compete. It is a challenge but as small business owners we are more local, flexible and connected than our big business competitors. Individual businesses can use this to their advantage. Groups of newsagents such as newsXpress can use their size to their advantage – as the Create Art flyer shows.