Newspapers – Own Your Own Backyard

We have been working for the past two years with several major newspaper groups in applying our marketing technology that has worked so well for brands to help newspaper reinvent themselves.  You can see the full strategy outlined at OwnYourOwnBackyard.com and it is all powered by our technology suite LivePlatform (name could be better).

It boils down to a few key concepts:

Newspapers have been successful because they help to connect buyers (subscribers) and sellers (advertisers).  Newspapers acquire and create interesting content to put around ads, and these ads  help drive business to their advertisers, which keeps them investing money in their media.

Localized product and service search is an opportunity in every market. This is not dominated by Google, but rather by niche players in every market. When you are buying a car, you go to AutoTrader.com (not Google), when you are buying a house you go to Realtor.com (not Google), etc. And no one owns the market of true localized search for retail or services.

A local newspaper should OWN this in their market – what we call Own Your Own Backyard, and at the same time service the businesses in that market around their suite of marketing services.

Newspapers are uniquely positioned to execute this based on the power of their brand and their sales force – two vital components to making this a success.

The full strategy and we are doing it today is detailed at the sites referenced above.

Business Basics

I have been in multiple client and prospect meetings the past few weeks where the conversation boiled down to distilling the basic concepts of our products and what we do.

We advise clients on the separation of a businesses’ content and their ads (across any and all forms of media). So instead of “creating an ad”, you are managing key business information (first and foremost), and from that business information you can then create marketing and communications materials across over 45 forms of media to promote your business, products, services, people or events.

Taking this approach results in 1) significant cost savings (70-90%) vs. traditional production means, 2) significant time savings and 3) flexibility, speed to market in creating marketing materials at a global, regional and local level.

The basics of business (which threads throughout our products) –  Businesses exist ONLY to sell product(s) or service(s).  And they can sell more product or service ONLY through communications. They need help communicating, and they will pay for services to help them do so efficiently and effectively.