Gatehouse "Hears the Street"
Ask advertisers what they want and you shall receive market feedback
As Gatehouse Media headed into 2011, revenues were lower than expectations. President and COO Kirk Davis implemented an innovative project that allowed the company to quickly “get into the mindset" of advertisers across 300 properties: He asked every publisher to personally contact ten key advertisers. Davis e-mailed us how the project worked, and results, in his own words:
Our publishers were asked to personally meet with ten local clients and have a conversation with them about their business, trends and what they thought about us. This was not intended to be a sales call, although we came away with many sales ideas.
The questions our publishers asked were:
What do you think of the current economic and business environment?
How do you feel about 2011?
How are all the new interaction points with consumers impacting you (i.e. social media, mobile, digital)?
How do you think about them with regard to your business?
How are you thinking about marketing and advertising to your customers over the next year or two?
Are you planning to spend more or less overall our (insert your local brand name) products, print and online reach a larger share of the market than any other media.
How do you think about or view our business these days?
Why are you spending less with us (assuming this is an account that has reduced their spending with us)?
What role can we play for you to help you navigate the traditional and new media world in order to assist you in growing your business?
This concept, which originated from our CEO, Mike Reed, is not the kind of formal research one can buy, although we recognize the value in in-depth research studies.
The effort served us on several fronts. First, the feedback I received from publishers was that this exercise sensitized them to the challenges confronting small businesses, and hearing how we could help. When you hear this feedback first-hand - and it’s not all positive - it resonates with a great executive like no corporate memorandum ever could. I refer to it as our ‘hear the street research.’
Our publishers thanked us for the push, and make no mistake; it was formal.
Generally, speaking, there were some recurring themes:
1. Businesses were more optimistic about the second half of the year, despite a slower than expected start to the year. Fuel costs have become an issue for them both personally and professionally.
2. Businesses acknowledge a desire to start participating in more advertising, but feel overwhelmed about the options. They desire a road map.
3. Many are participating in social media because they think they should. It is not a big factor yet in improving business. By the way, we certainly don't discount the growing influence of social media, but adoption isn’t quite as pervasive in small, more rural markets.
4. Many small businesses worry that if they don’t adapt to new media offerings, they’ll be disadvantaged in competing with large retailers. We found that some of our advertisers, a small portion were doing exceedingly well balancing their traditional and new media spend and growing as a result.
5. Small businesses want to maintain their spending, but they worry about the fragmentation of their media spend, and how that will affect their results.
6. There’s a perception that we are expensive in print and that online advertising is inexpensive. Obviously we need to do a better job conveying our value proposition
7. The deals space has created much intrigue, and a few of our customers had already experienced a successful campaign (some with us, and some with other deal platforms).
8.There is a perception about our industry’s health that clearly speaks specifically to the importance of talking about out total audience reach. We have to do a better job articulating total audience reach, which in our markets is at record levels.
9. As for customers spending more with us? “Tell me why we should spend more. “ Of course, there are some good reasons why we should garner more local share, but again, we have to articulate our case much better.
10. Finally, small businesses would like more help from us: tools to measure ROI, more ideas, help with new media channels and co-op, and expect to see us promoting our business so they feel better about spending with us.
11. Clearly, our advertisers require a wide array of expertise. We are already far along in developing certification programs for our news and sales organizations.
More than anything, the feedback we received in over a hundred surveys will further inform our internal training, promotion, pricing and customer awareness. We were grateful that our publishers took this initiative so seriously! They did a terrific job
Overall, we see major opportunities to provide more solutions for our customers. Customers are ready to hear them. We just have to keep it real and understand the value we bring and really deliver it.
Many thanks to Kirk Davis, COO, for sharing this project with us. This is an easy way to connect top management with the market right away, and come away with some "to do's" to save or just better serve major local advertisers.
The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and MediaExecsTech, developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine, to showcases perspectives from around the world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.
