Evolving Opportunities with Deals, Promotions and Contests

Live from the Local Media Association/Blinder Group/Florida Press Association Revenue Summit

By Al Cupo, Vice President, Local Media Association

Matt Coen

From the Session ‘Evolving Opportunities with Deals, Promotions and Contests’
Presented by Matt Coen, President, Second Street

Promotions
Online promotions will continue to grow and will outpace other forms of online advertising in the next several years. Promotions are all about the ability for people to interact with businesses in their market; it’s what the advertisers want.

Benefits of a successful online promotion include:

• Increases awareness / builds audience
• Generates ad revenue / develops sponsors
• Collects email addresses / grows user database

Promotion Opportunities to Consider:

• Sponsored contests (football winner picks, wedding contests, cutest kids, pizza payoff, lucky dog photos, etc).
• Client-centric agency contests tied to advertisers’ Facebook pages. The local publication makes these contests work by providing a turnkey program to individual businesses that includes design, promotion and tracking services.

Deals
The ultimate interaction...people walk into a client’s business and buy products/services based on available deals. While not new, existing deals programs can be fine-tuned to grow revenue. Deals remains one of the best ways to build an email database in the local market. One way to build revenue and email addresses is to simply increase the number of days that a deal stays live.

In one case study, a publication doubled their revenue by extending a daily deal to a weekly deal.

Coupons
Represent another great way to build interaction between local shoppers and your advertising clients.

8 Steps to Succeed with Promotions

1. Define Your Team
   
   • no ‘one size fits all’ - build to meet demand
   • internal accountability
   • can not be a ‘side project’
   • must have a dedicated sales rep / staff
2. Understand Your Goals
   
   • list objectives
   • do you want to grow specific advertising categories?
   • do you want to grow your database?
3. Target the Right Advertisers and Be Creative
   
   • a sports outfitter for Kids’ Fishing Photo Contest
   • a home store for Ugliest Sofa Contest
4. Build an Agency Model
   
   • make it easy for clients to run contests
   • turnkey solution for design, promotion and results tracking
5. Integrated Marketing Approach
   
   • online (web & mobile)
   • all print products
   • email and texting campaigns
6. Track Promotional Revenue
   
   • develop a budget and work the numbers
7. Build and Engage an Email and Social Database
   
   • collect and use all email addresses and Facebook ‘likes’ from every client’s promotions in future marketing campaigns
8. Plan Ahead by Developing an Annual Promotions Calendar
   
   • different promotions throughout the year – seasonal, holidays, sports seasons, etc.