marketing

We brought in our spruiker (Brian) today to promote the $22 million superdraw and the discount social stationery in the photo. Brian also promoted New Woman and the free umbrella, New Idea and the free pedometer and Burke’s Backyard and the free tea lights. While the superdraw and stationery spruiking worked brilliantly, as I expected it would, promoting the magazine giveaways worked better than expected. Sales spiked thanks to connecting the three giveaways. Our feeling is that it worked well because of the quality of these specific giveaways.

We’ve used several spruikers over the years. Brian is the best. He is professional and robust without getting customers offside. He’s our preference every time. Part of the success to the magazine promotion today is due to the connection of his pitch with our customers.

In case you’re wondering about the $5 social stationery sale – part of the landlord make good for the upheaval caused by the construction is a free outpost. Rather than extend current product into the mall we brought in this social stationery range and have sold over 1,100 units in three weeks.

Our instant scratch lottery ticket promotion last Friday increased sales by 80% on the day. It’s a sales kick benchmark we hope to pass next week when we run an over the counter promotion with an iPod as a prize.

Australians are not great at the over the counter upsell. In newsagencies this is, in part, due to how business the counter is. But it’s also because we’re not that pushy. While I don’t want to make my newsagency like those awful Coles and Woolworths / Safeway petrol outlets where you are virtually berated into purchasing junk candy, I do want us to interact more. Our iPod giveaway will focus on this.

Between our counter, our newspaper stand and our card display is what we call the dance floor. This is our highest traffic display area so we change the display regularly and actively promote categories which would otherwise be visited by destination shoppers.

The dance floor is great for displaying promotions such as the hot stationery deals promotion we have running at the moment. We pick up impulse sales and remind everyone that we have keen prices on stationery.

When this campaign comes down in a week we will replace it with our Mother’s Day offering. While the weekly or fortnightly change is time consuming, it is the best way to demonstrate to our customers that our business is moving and that we have deals. Newsagents are thought to be expensive so anything we can do to counter that is a win for us.

Evey newsagency needs a dance floor and they need fancy footwork to make it work.

We’ve papered our store with posters for our Friday 13th instant lottery promotion. The prize is a sexy HP printer.

The promotion of the HP OfficeJet Pro printer gives us a chance to also promote our range of ink and toner.

Easter is an odd season. We’ve had our greeting cards out for a month and they have been selling consistently – we’ve needed extra stock to cover the demand and we should finish the season up 20% on last year. We’ve had our Easter Eggs out for three weeks and sales have really only kicked in this week. It’s been a busy three days. We’ll beat last year but thought going out early we might do even better.

Easter is a great feel-good season – especially when you have access to the well packaged Darrell lea product. The margin is tight but having an exclusive offering makes it worthwhile. I am surprised more newsagents don’t chase the brand. The bright packaging allows us to tell a good retail story.

We’re cracking product open today and giving a small egg to every customer. Saturday is our Easter Egg hunt … hmmm, that could be interesting.

The Herald Sun AFL cards promotion is generating a sales kick of more than 25% compared to last year. Even though there have been some challenges getting stock it’s a good and welcome campaign which drives such a traffic boost to your store. I’m just glad I am not in Adelaide where News Ltd prefers BP over newsagents for such promotions.

At a coffee vendor on George Street in Sydney this morning I noticed they cut the zodiac from the Daily Telegraph and stuck it on the coffee machine where people line up to collect their daily grind. I noticed it because there was a group of people reading how their day would go. What a great add on with coffee!

Up the road a few places a coffee shop has an offer where you could win a free coffee in the afternoon based on the roll of dice. They’re not as busy as the cart.

Of the two marketing tactics the first is more interesting to me. It makes the wait for coffee more interesting and it adds value to those interested. The second feels like lazy marketing. It’s got me thinking of what we can do at our lottery counter for those who find themselves waiting.

How’s this for cool receipt marketing? The customer buys printer ink and an offer prints automatically with their receipt. The discount is effectively on the third item purchased. We’re not sure if we will run with 25% or a bit less – we’re still working on that. While we have done receipt marketing before, we are now targeting more carefully. For us it’s free ad real-estate.

Valentine’s Day is one of those seasons which happens at the last minute. We all dress our stores and wait with crossed fingers hoping shoppers engage. As part of our preparations, Darrell Lea has made good use of our window:

This is one of the ads we have just started running at our 3loves free online dating website. 3loves is one of four social media sites we are building to drive traffic to Find It online classifieds.

Find It is being launched in partnership with newsagents – newsagents will earn commission when we start charging for advertising. We have contracted to profit share with newsagents.

By clicking on the newsagent ad at 3loves people get to the Find It database of newsagents.

We have only just started running banner ads on 3loves. More banner ads for newsagents will be added over the next two weeks. We will be tracking how many people click on the ads and search for a newsagency. This link is another reason newsagents need to place their free business ads on Find It – currently there are 1,000 newsagents listed. Only a few have loaded photos. Check out the listing for Beechworth Newsagency and my business, newsXpress Forest Hill.

3loves is achieving close to 2,000 visits and 8,000 to 10,000 page views a day. The current newsagent ad will be on a third of all pages viewed. To my knowledge this is the first time the generic newsagent shingle has been advertised online in this way. The benefit is only there for Find It newsagents as they are the ones listed when visitors click the link.

With 4,200+ profiles now online, 3loves is growing well. The interaction between people with profiles is about day to day stuff and not just dating. Having a newsagent message in the background during this contact helps us promote the channel and our local community focus without bigger business noise drowning us out.

The Valentine’s Day product which seemed like a good idea at the time.

Karma Sutra chocolate, how could this NOT be great for Valentine’s Day? We saw the samples and laughed. Yeah, a bit edgy with the designs but fun. And chocolate, who doesn’t like chocolate?

Plenty it seems. We’ve had our Karma Sutra Valentine’s Day chocolate out on display for two days and the complaints are rolling in. Some sales too, but more complaints. I am guessing that our complainers have not looked in some of our cards.

Below is a photo so don’t scroll down if you’re likely to be offended.

We picked the product as a point of difference from the usual Valentine’s Day fare. Those who have bought it like it for this reason.

Worst case if it does not sell is that we get to eat it.

Hastings Newsagency in Victoria has distributed a promotional newspaper around its area. It’s brilliant. Inside are local stories mixed with stories about products and services connected with the newsagency. It’s an excellent initiative and a perfect example of local area marketing. They even got some local businesses ton support the newspaper with ads.

Using the newspaper format connects well with what a newsagency is known for. It’s the kind of local marketing newsagents need to use to compete with the majors and to deepen their community connect. It’s great.

This newspaper campaign is an idea worth copying. Well done Hastings Newsagency.

How great would it have been to have this fella in our stores leading up to Christmas and the launch of the Happy Feet movie. He could have been the prize in a giveaway. His presence in store would have been a magnet for the kids and kids at heart. The little penguins can be landed in Australia for just over $1. I reckon they’d retail for $9.95. The big fella could be landed for around $200 – the expensive stuffing is the killer.

This is an example of how we could better tie in with blockbuster movies and events – using stuffed characters and similar items for in store promotion and offering smaller versions for sale. It takes planning and being in the know about upcoming events.

It’s too late now for the penguin but the mainland China based manufacturer I spoke with yesterday already knows what they will focus on in 2007 based on planned movie releases.