130+ newsagents gathered on the Gold Coast earlier this week for the second national newsXpress conference of 2016. From Sunday afternoon until Tuesday afternoon these newsagents any plenty of suppliers talked business and socialised in pursuit of mutual success.
At the conference, newsXpress launched several initiatives for newsxpress members including:
- A new cloud based free business intelligence platform enabling individual newsXpress stores to benchmark their year on year performance (revenue, GP, transactions, average sales value of top items per department) against that of other businesses in the group – real time.
- A national newsXpress branded TV campaign for November pitching exclusive products from a sought after brand – at no cost to newsXpress members.
- Expansion of the already successful e-commerce strategy delivering online sales for newsXpress members with the launch of three additional websites, which are already live. These brand-fronted websites leverage a live, real-time, data feed from newsXpress stores to online, enabling online shoppers to shop local shops with certainty. Online shoppers search by intended purchase brand far more than the retail business brand.
- A new retail season to drive in-store traffic for products through which participating businesses can expand their appeal.
- A new nationally co-ordinated in-store event strategy to attract new shoppers.
- New product categories to expand the appeal of newsxpress businesses beyond traditional.
- A newsXpress branded gift card – professional, plastic and presented in a wallet to help businesses capture revenue when the gift choice is not obvious.
In the main conference session, the newsxpress Profit and Loss statement for the 2015/16 financial year was presented. This is done each year at the conference in the second half of the year.
The conference also included an insightful presentation from experts at Pacific Magazines in a presentation unlike anything from a magazine publisher at any newsagency conference in the past.
Three suppliers presented who do not supply other groups in the newsagency channel, sharing traffic generating strategies – two of them announced newsXpress exclusive products for 2017.
Optimism was everywhere with plenty of talk of transformation, reconfiguring businesses and finding space for new opportunities.
From 8:30 to 12 noon on Tuesday an open forum was run that included comprehensive training on the latest best-practice approach to using social media to drive new traffic. This session was of particular value to those not currently using social media successfully.
To help members get to the event newsXpress provided travel reimbursement up to $500. There was no cot for participation.
I mention all this here as, for me, the conference represented the world of the future of our channel – talking about traffic generating strategies, working with suppliers who do not usually supply newsagencies and seeing technology advancements that unite the newsxpress channel in a unique and commercially valuable way for locally owned stores.
Yes, I am a Director of newsXpress. In the past I have been a member of Newspower and a member of and shareholder in Nextra.