How newsagency marketing groups support the broader newsagency channel

Continuing my week-long series on newsagency marketing groups, today I’ll outline how newsagency marketing groups support the channel beyond the individual businesses the serve.

The newsagency channel in Australia is the last great independent small business retail channel in this country. In small towns and in cities our businesses provide a valuable service and a heartfelt connection to something uniquely Australian.

Many of us newsagents claim a local community connection is a vital point of difference for us. Equally, many newsagents rely on being connected to the newsagency channel for support and to leverage their point of difference.

It is likely that every newsagency business in Australia relies on and values being part of the newsagency channel in one way or another – whether we each know this or not.

Marketing groups support the newsagency channel in a range of ways:

1. Supporting GNS.  GNS is newsagent owned. Groups that support GNS support newsagents and their shareholding in GNS. GNS supports newsagents through its supplier funded marketing of newsagency businesses.
2. Spending within the channel. Through supporting suppliers who reinvent in newsagency businesses there is a circular flow of cash that comes back to benefit newsagents.
3. Loving your business. By helping newsagents to fall in love with their businesses by enjoying them more can release optimism from which the business benefits.
4. Facilitating networking. One of the biggest assets in the newsagency channel is newsagents themselves. By encouraging positive networking a marketing group can help newsagents harness the value and power of friendship, teamwork and collaboration.
5. Understanding cornerstone products. With one eye on the future, an engaged marketing group can help newsagents ensure they leverage value and support cornerstone products such as newspapers, magazines and greeting cards – three categories for which our channel is known yet which newsagents often neglect to their detriment.
6. Offering a training path for employees. Our channel is the entry point for many school leavers as well as some returning to the workforce after many years absent. A marketing group can offer a framework through which newsagents can nurture these people to be benefit of the business and the channel more broadly.
7. Strategic leadership. Through strategic plans, newsagency marketing groups can show newsagents a path along which businesses can walk a path to a viable future in this changing world.
8. Active representation. Engaged newsagency marketing groups help newsagents in their back rooms with industrial relations advice, lease advice, insurance advice and other business management advice – making businesses stronger and through this the channel stronger.

Beyond supplier deals, seasonal marketing and other more obvious benefits, newsagency marketing groups can bring a considerable value to the newsagency channel that benefits not only member businesses but the wider channel. From this all newsagents benefit.

Footnote: Regulars here would know I am a shareholder in and Director of newsXpress. Prior to that I was a member of Nextra and a shareholder in my later years with them following a capital raising. Prior to that my newsagency was a member of Newspower.