There is a lot of data gathered by the RAB and others about how radio can boost print advertising. This is a good way to grab a slice of your advertiser’s print budget, cutting into the dollars that go to whatever semblance of print still exists in your area.
Sure, in a desperate effort to save themselves, newspapers have gone online, but they are late to the party and lack the promotional punch of radio.
How would you like to put the last nail in the coffin of your local regional newspapers and control print budgets as well as your own?
The answer, as I have mentioned before, is publishing your own daily email newsletter. If you are using a WordPress platform, the solution is simple: get The Newsletter Plugin. The $99/year upgrade automates the whole process by taking all of your news stories from your website that have not been published previousl and sends them out on a daily basi.
Now, instead of fighting apples with oranges—I may have mixed metaphors there, but you get the idea—instead of trying to grab your advertisers’ print budgets and divert them to radio, with your own emailed newsletter you have something that has better measurability and more prominence than your local original paper, is likely to be published more frequently (most local papers are now weeklies), and is powered by the promotional reach of your radio stations.
These days it’s pretty easy to get circulation figures on area newspapers. I did this recently for a client in a small market, comparing the print guys with the specific, verifiable subscription numbers of the radio station’s daily newsletter.
County weekly #1: According to official advertising and rate disclosures, the paper has an estimated total circulation of 5,772 (with pre-printed insert distribution around 5,200).
County weekly #2: The publication does not publish or publicly report audited circulation figures. However, as an independent community weekly in this market size, local weekly newspapers of its tier generally operate with an estimated circulation of around 1,000 to 3,000 copies.
Your newsletter: You are sending to 2,693 confirmed subscribers every day. That’s 13,465 total impressions per week, about twice the combined circulation of your two local papers.
Now here’s the fun part: you have a powerful promotional vehicle that your print competitors do not: your radio station. You also have the website, which is way better than what your print competitors have online. (when I checked, one of their websites was down and the other is virtually unreadable—just a graphic of their paper that is unreadable and unscalable.)
Your radio advertisers should be advertising in the newsletter as well. In addition, the newsletter opens up a whole new channel for you: those people who have been resistant to radio but still spend money on print. You have a compelling argument for those advertisers to switch their budgets away from the papers.
I am not a big fan of selling numbers, because they really don’t tell the whole story, and they work against radio, which is less measurable. (Actually, no advertising medium produces meaningful numbers – for print, especially, they can only measure the number of people who get the publication, not the number of people who actually read or note the ads.)
By the way, in last week’s issue, we featured an article by Pat Bryson describing a research study showing that radio works best on a subliminal level.
Add an e-newsletter to your media mix and learn more about the advantages of radio combined with your newsletter. It’s a winning combination that will make you money!