Cart before the horse or horse before the cart? We are SO done with the print vs digital debate already……
Today the successful business model is based on the continual development of evergreen and fresh content that engages your audience. The focus now is on how to best leverage ALL your distribution channels to reach your nichey peeps. You have tons of digital content now, so why wouldn’t you use it to your full advantage to drive print revenue?
Leveraging online assets to increase print sales requires a new mindset.
The fact is print still generates a large part of revenue for most publishers. So we interviewed Joe Mathes, VP of Delta Publications, Inc. to learn more about using existing online assets to increase print sales. It starts with helping advertising clients understand how the whole big bundle can give them the results they want.
Joe: “As print publishers we still have an effective and dynamic advertising platform with which to promote our digital offerings. Our print products and all of our other organizational assets give us tremendous credibility and leverage in our markets. And that gives us the inside track when it comes to digital.
So when we bundle print advertising with digital advertising, we create added value, added credibility again and a nice little media mix. In my company, print actually drives the bus on every digital initiative we roll out.
Translated, that means print is really the best promotion we have for our digital products. Our print products help engage our readers in our digital products. In many cases, the print we bundle into our digital packages makes the sale justifiable in the customer’s eyes.”
Can you share some creative ideas for using digital to sell more print ads—to those advertisers who don’t believe print works anymore?
Joe: “I believe that print is still the queen on the chessboard and digital is the young princess. We have sold a lot of print advertising by offering a shiny new digital advertising opportunity.
Here’s an example: With the launch of a local Automotive Vertical and Employment Vertical in our market, both were bundled heavily with print in most cases. We also use mobile SMS very effectively to engage advertisers who don’t think print advertising works and that nobody is reading print publications.
Other examples: We have bundled print advertising with new apps and we also created a “deals” site which has an option for advertisers to pay for their print advertising with deals vouchers, just to name a few.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated from the original.
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About the blogger: Diana Landau is the Content Wrangler for Niche Media. A former sales director and corporate marketing hack, she has now found nirvana in writing and wrangling quality content. Diana is a food, wine, art and SF Giants enthusiast…who sometimes gets carried away.
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