newsagency marketing

Newsagents interested in a hands on look at the newsXpress marketing group are welcome to consider attending the two conference on the Gold Coast in two weeks. The agenda offers practical sessions mixed with newsagent presented content as well as authoritative keynote speakers. While numbers are excellent, several spaces have been reserved for non newsXpress members considering the group to participate. Click here for a black and white version of the conference brochure.

The advertising agency creative team is busy putting together the TV ad for newsagents which we are funding.  We hope to see a first cut on Monday next week.  Thanks to generous offers from the Herald Sun and Lovatts, we are creating a print version of the ad to run in these publications.  It is a thrill to see these two suppliers get behind the newsagent TV ad initiative.

If you want your newsagency represented in the TV commercial I am producing to promote the channel, please send in a high res digital photo ASAP. One daily newspaper has offered to run a full page print version of the ad in several issues free as has a major magazine publisher. This supplier support for the advertising initiative is most welcome.

As I wrote six weeks ago, the 50% increase in the price of petrol over the last year is an opportunity for newsagents. We are the quintessential local business. We sell national brands locally. People don’t have to drive. We can help them sale fuel costs. Here is a more extended list of ideas on how we can seize the opportunity:

• Promote local shopping. With with nearby retailers and produce a flyer promoting how shopping locally saves on petrol, time and money. Prepare a follow-up flyer to promote how your prices re as good as bigger businesses further away – reinforce the petrol saving pitch again.
• Get together with local traders. Create a website to promote your local shopping. Promote the businesses, easy parking and how they can save on petrol by shopping locally.
• Study the numbers. Work out what an average shopper could save on petrol by shopping locally compared to driving to the nearest largest centre.
• Improve convenience. Look at how you can make shopping at your newsagency even more convenient and appealing.
• Delivering value. Offer a free delivery service for purchases above a certain value. Promote this around a theme save on petrol!
• Offer deals for volume. In some areas people will shop less frequently. Drive a deeper shopping basket by offering deals for a bigger spend.
• Local Marketing. Reconnect with households and businesses around your newsagency and remind them that you have locally what they might otherwise drive for – or that you can get it in for them.
• Comparative pricing. Make it your business to beat a major competitor on some popular items. For example, at our shop, our printer ink prices are better than Big W, Australia Post and Officeworks. While customers discover this and are thrilled, a small sign near the category could people not in the market for ink to trust us for other categories and shop locally more often.
• Save money. Do deal with a local independent petrol outlet. Offer coupons for discount petrol which they provide in return for them handing out discount coupons for use in your newsagency.
• Talk it up. At your next team meeting share some ways they can let customers know that shopping locally reduces what they spend on petrol.

While rising petrol prices present serious challenges for newsagents, they also present opportunities worth exploiting.

Donna and the team at newsXpress Kingaroy Mall engaged in local marketing at its best when they had Lady Flo Bejelke Petersen in to sign her new book containing her world famous Pumpkin Scone recipe. Being local is important to newsagents.  We see ourselves as a community hub so it makes sense that we seize opportunities to reinforce this, as the folks at Kingaroy did with Lady Flo.

Thinking about this today made me wonder how many newsagencies have a Lady Flo in their area and whether any move has been made to embrace the opportunity.  In my own situation I’ve neglected to research this.

With fuel prices the way they are, focusing more on local makes sense.

I am pleased and proud to announce a national TV campaign for newsagents to run on Free-To-Air (7, 9 and 10) and Foxtel, Austar, Optus pay TV networks on UK TV, Hallmark, Bio, W for Women, Arena, Discovery Travel & Living, E!, Fox Classic, History, Lifestyle Food channels over the last two weeks of September. For details of this campaign please click here.

The script for the TVC, to be voiced by quintessential Aussie male actor, is as follows:

From the goldfields of Victoria in the 1800s to today, newsagents have been the backbone of communities across Australia. 

Your local newsagent is a friendly place to find the day’s news, that special greeting card, your favorite magazines, stationery for home or business and a warm smile. 

From early in the morning, newsagents are open when you need them and ready with personal service bigger businesses have long forgotten.

Newsagents are people too.  They’re your neighbours and mates, a good Aussie tradition. 

Next time you want a magazine, a birthday card or some stationery, support your local newsagent and keep business local.

The reason I have announced the plans for the commercial is get newsagents to send me photos which can be used.  The people in our network – newsagents and their team – are our key asset and I want them to feature on TV.

I am working on a project for newsagents which requires photos of newsagencies – very specific photos though. What I am looking for if photos of newsagents, their staff of their family facing the camera, smiling either in the shop or, ideally, outside showing the front of the shop. They need to be photos you own the rights to. I am looking for one photo from each newsagency – the very best you have. In digital form only. preferably 2MB or better. I need them by Monday next week. Please email your photos to mark@towersystems.com.au.

I will announce more details on this project in the next two weeks.

AFL related products are great for newsagents. Here we are well into the second half of the season and AFL products are selling as well as ever. Cards, figurines, cards, magazines, cards, albums, kids magazine and, did I mention, cards. While cards are the killer product, most of the products are perfect at the counter as an impulse item. On pure sales results, the AFL is the most important sport in my newsagencies.

I was doing some tidying up yesterday and came across a copy of Marketing your Newsagency, a book I wote for D W Thorpe publishing in 1994. Thorpe published the Australian Newsagent & Stationer, the journal of record for newsagents through the 1980s and 1990s.

While not usually drawn to nostalgia, I did spend an hour leafing through the pages of Marketing your Newsagency – for the first time in at least eight years. I was surprised to read material relevant to the newsagency experience today. Of course, many retail marketing tips are timeless.

It was my comments about franchises which surprised me – I said newsagents ought to get together, re-brand behind a new name and with the disciplines of a franchise structure. While the challenges which existed in 1994 which led to me forming the view I put forward in the book remain today, groups of newsagents are responding and leaving others behind.

Some of what I wrote in Marketing your Newsagency is embarrassing to revisit as it reflected naiveté about some of the challenges newsagents faced at the time – I wrote the book two years before I purchased my first newsagency. However, it is what it is and for the most part, the marketing tips remain useful for any newsagent.

I might spend some time extracting the ideas which are genuinely useful today and repackage them in some form for the use of others. But that’s a project for another day.

I miss the folks at DW Thorpe and Australian Newsagent and Stationer.  It was good a good magazine.

Waterstones, the High Street UK bookshop chain, has launched an initiative to encourage budding writers who want their short stories published. Given the breadth of product catgeories covered by newsagencies, we could launch similar competitions for people to:

• Design greeting cards.
• Write for a magazine.
• Invent new stationery items.
• Design new gift wrap.
• Write Australia’s best letter.
• Find the best use for recycling newspapers.

The Waterstones competition is good because it focuses on their core product category of books and connects with a popular aspiration. Newsagents could take a similar approach with a competition and drive media attention on categories primarily linked to us. It is the kind of feel good story which could get a run on the right day.

If I had to choose one idea, it would be design a card. It works on a number of levels and given that we own around 50% of that market, such a promotion would serve us well.

Congratulations to Doug and Tracey Otter of Williamstown Newsagency for winning retail Newsagent of the Year and to Melbourne Central Newsagency for winning Distribution Newsagent of the Year at the ANF Convention dinner tonight.

With a Coles Online grocery delivery at the office this morning we received this catalogue for Pharmacy Direct, the online pharmacy business purchased by Coles a while back. Maybe Coles is finally leveraging the online pharmacy business through their broader business. The catalogue is a reminder to local pharmacists that the supermarket giant is committed to playing on their patch. It is also a lesson in how to leverage one part of the business for another – how many distribution newsagents leverage home delivery customers for other business?

This booklet from Coles promotes Mother’s Day activities and items they sell to support these. It’s good passive marketing. Coles produces one for each season – sometimes two seasons with the booklet flipped around when the new season kicks in (as they did at Easter). We try for something similar with our newsletter but it’s not the same since consumers shop a newsagency differently to a supermarket – we have not created the same checkout opportunity.

Newsagents did have something like this years ago – Nmag – it was well products but the content was too dominated by magazine related content and offering focus across other categories we sell.

Newsagencies have many connections with seasons and there is where a seasonal promotional publication like this would work. Take Mother’s Day – cards, magazines, gifts, even lottery products.