Leverage your online assets, look for reverse publishing opportunities
Even if you don’t have a daily print product, you can be wildly successful with online promotions. While it’s true that not all of your promotions will be promoted in print, you have plenty of digital promotional assets that can provide value to advertisers. Plus, digital marketing gives your audience a more direct way to engage with the promotions. Instead of seeing an ad and then having to go to a computer and enter a URL, all they need to do is click a link. Here are a few digital assets you should always be using to promote your promotions:
- Email: Email is the #1 driver of digital conversions, and you can grow a robust email list whether or not you have a daily product. In fact, we have consistently seen our partners across all media types and market sizes receive the majority of contest entries on the day they send out a promotional email. As you can see in the graph below, Quad-City Times actually saw 70% of submissions come in the day they sent out a promotional email.
- Website: You can do a lot more with your website than just feature your promotions on the homepage. You could promote your promotions alongside relevant content so that people with an interest in that subject will see it. You could also reach a more focused audience with your promotion by targeting your online display ads by age, gender, or location. Take advantage of rich media advertising for high-profile promotions to really make a splash. You could even employ retargeting to reach people even once they leave your site to remind them to come back and enter.
- Social: Use social media as an opportunity to not just promote your promotions, but also to really engage with your audience. Social media marketing is particularly important when you are running your promotion on a social media site. Learn more about how to write engaging Facebook posts for promotions in this article.
Of course, while you can use online assets like email, your website, and social media to promote your promotions and provide value to your advertisers, you can also use your print product to promote more major promotional initiatives.
Plus, since print product placement is more expensive and requires more planning and lead time, any print promotion you do is going to have a lot of value – just like when you sell your print product by itself! So be sure to adjust your promotional packages and pricing to reflect this additional value when you do sell a promotion with a print component.
Here are a few additional tips for getting a promotions program up and running, even without a daily product:
Create a promotions calendar.
The first step to making any promotions program successful is to put a team together, plan ahead, and set goals. This is especially important for publications without a daily product, since planning at least 3 months in advance will allow you to more effectively use your print product when it makes sense. A great place to start planning is with this Promotions Calendar & Month-by-Month Planning Template. As you are brainstorming, adjust for your frequency of publication, and try to line your promotions calendar up with your editorial calendar whenever possible. (Are you publishing a Healthy Living edition in January? Add a sweepstakes to win a gym membership for a year.)
Use sweepstakes to grow your email list.
Sweepstakes are the perfect promotions to start with, since they are easy to execute and will help you quickly build up a robust email database that will help you make your bigger promotions more successful later. To maximize your database growth, include a pre-checked email opt-in on every entry form, and feature the sweepstakes in any newsletters you already have to ensure it reaches the largest possible audience. Remember that the quality of your prize directly impacts your ability to capture emails. The higher the value, the bigger potential audience who will want to enter.
Schedule 4-6 major promotions throughout the year.
While sweepstakes are quick-and-easy promotions that you can be running all the time, it’s a good idea to add depth to your calendar with several larger promotional initiatives, like ballot, brackets, or photo and video submission contests. These promotions can be especially valuable if you align them with your editorial calendar. Are you featuring a craft beer initiative in May? Complement it with a beer bracket promotion. Running a Pets edition in the Fall? Add a Cutest Pets contest. Promote the contest in one print issue, and then highlight in the winners in the next. Not only does publishing the winning photos generate excitement in your audience, but it also gives you a chance to feature your sponsor again, and provide them with more print promotion.
Look for reverse publishing opportunities.
While these larger promotions have a higher barrier to entry, they also generate more engagement and provide potential reverse publishing opportunities. You could publish content from a photo contest in your core product, or even create an entire special publication insert around the content and sell advertising into it.
Engage your audience with quizzes.
Between issues, you can keep your audience engaged and interacting with your content with quizzes. Personality and trivia quizzes are fun promotions that are wildly sharable and easy for your editorial or sales department to put together.
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Julie is the Senior Customer Success Manager at Second Street and a former client in local media. Her best advice for driving the most success with your revenue and audience engagement strategy is to include promotions in every business initiative.