Erie (PA) Times News Garners New Advertisers and Revenues thanks to New Online Initiatives
The Challenge
With a daily circulation of more than 65,000, the Times-News is a family owned newspaper in a market that is experiencing major economic challenges due to losses of local industry. Newspaper management developed their web site department five years ago as a separate entity with offices located outside of the newspaper.
"We decided to brand the web site separately from the newspaper," says Chris Mead, president of Cyberlink, the division of Times-News that publishes GoErie.com. "We felt a line extension leveraging the Erie Times-News brand wouldn't differentiate the web product enough to achieve our demographic goal of a complementary audience. Another part of our community-portal strategy was to build and maintain web sites for the local chamber of commerce and other high-profile organizations."
Leveraging stories from the Times-News, plus additional content areas and breaking-news updates, Go.Erie.com serves nearly 200,000 monthly unique viewers more than nine million pages of information .
Recently, Times-News¹ owners mandated that more of the revenue responsibilities for GoErie.com were to fall on the traditional newspaper sales department. The newspaper¹s ad director, Gail Prather, met the challenge by appointing a small team of local ad reps to investigate the best ways to integrate GoErie.com¹s web products into its traditional daily offerings. This is where The Blinder Group came in.
"The newspaper sales staff were lethargic in embracing online sales in the past," Mead says. "We cajoled, trained, and begged but we just couldn¹t get the reps excited about taking the web to market. All of our sales were done by our single online sales person."
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Program Overview
A training program was created that would focus on positioning GoErie.com as an advertising solution, not a technology provider. Initially, ad reps spent two hours in a classroom setting learning that they did not have to "speak geek" or have an extensive technological understanding of web sites to sell the web to their advertisers.
They learned that GoErie.com could provide their advertisers a new, younger audience that could be impacted by the same messages that were in the newspaper ‹ more times and more often. Also, they learned that they did not have to understand how the web worked to sell it as an extension of newspaper advertising. By the end of the session, the reps reported that they felt much more empowered to be able to sell GoErie.com to their customers. Next, recommendations were made for the development of simple, easy-to-present online programs for sale to the local market. During a four-hour meeting of senior print and web managers, two sales programs were developed.
The first program was geared for larger newspaper advertisers who were spending money on competing media such as radio and local broadcast TV. The mission was to show these advertisers a method by which they could increase reach and frequency of their newspaper advertising by extending campaigns to GoErie.com.
The program centered on the sale of a new "in-story" ad position appearing on all pages of theGoErie.com web site. These positions would be offered to a limited number of newspaper advertisers. This online graphic ad would be designed to reinforce the message displayed within the advertiser¹s current weekly print ad and would have the ability to be changed each time the print ad changed. The online ad could also click to a web version of the advertiser¹s weekly print ad. A certain number of impressions were guaranteed on a monthly basis with a full year¹s commitment required for participation in the program.
The second program was designed to attract new service-related businesses to the newspaper, going after those companies that spent most of their ad budgets on local yellow page directories. Six separate service-related business categories were targeted. Each advertiser received a weekly 1-inch-by-3-inch ad that appeared within a print version of a new daily "Premier Business Directory." The same ad that appeared weekly in the newspaper also appeared online every day within a web-based "Business Directory." Each weekly directory was limited to 10 advertisers, each was required to make a 52-week commitment for participation.
Easy-to-present graphic-marketing materials were created for both programs to allow the sales representatives to easily show advertisers how the web portion of their ad buys worked. These graphic "sales sheets" looked like a computer screen, allowing reps to present the web without actually having to go online to do so.
The Blinder Group then returned to Erie to briefly retrain the sales staff and accompany them on "four-legged" sales calls to show them how to effectively present products to advertisers. The rationale of this portion of the training is simple. The best way to get a salesperson to change their attitude is to show them how it will bring in money.
Results
To date, both programs have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in new business for the Times News. "More importantly, the traditional ad reps are finally excited about selling the web," Mead says. "Our newspaper reps finally understand it¹s not about web sites, links, and the Internet. It's about a new place for advertising, plain and simple."
Ad Director Prather added: "We had to make the commitment to set up the right calls in order to make the program work. We even had a 'kick off' party with a skit to psyche up the reps. Now that the results are in, I couldn¹t be happier with the outcome."
Contact Information
For more information about the sales strategy of this program, contact:
Gail Prather, Ad Director, Erie (PA) Times-News
(814) 870-1893
gail.prather@timesnews.com
Chris Mead, President of Cyberlink of the Erie (PA) Times-News
(814) 454-8853
cmead@goerie.com
Lead Consultant for The Blinder Group:
Mike Blinder
(917) 865-4827
mike@blindergroup.com
The Blinder Group
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