Texas Center For Community Journalism

Question:The national news says the recession is over, but obviously a lot of my advertisers haven’t heard about it.  They are asking, “Why advertise when business is bad?”  What can I tell them?

Answer: The recession may have “officially” ended, but the recovery is slow and shoppers are cautious.  Business is tough to get.

Here’s what we have to keep telling retailers, service providers, professional businesses and companies:  You have to maintain or increase your advertising spending during a challenging economic environment if you want get ahead.

Here’s the mantra we must keep repeating:  Business isn’t bad – it’s tough to get. You can actually increase your market share in down economic times if you take an assertive, well-thought-out, consistent and ongoing advertising program.

A reduction in advertising expenditures guarantees reduced profits, sales and lost market share due, in part, to three significant impacts:

1. Loss of top-of-mind awareness.
2. Loss of image in the marketplace and local community.
3. A change in perceptions held about the retailer, service provider, professional business or company.

Why should you counsel your advertisers to continue to advertise in a slowly recovering economy? To be successful — to grow and to survive — businesses need to have a constant presence in the marketplace. Customers have to know who the business is and what they do. And in today’s world, that awareness typically comes through advertising.

What strategy might you suggest to assist your client in seizing the opportunity presented by a recovering economy?  Try these:

• Stress benefits and talk value. Stress benefits and values, rather than just price, in your advertising message thereby reducing buying risk for your customers and potential customers.
• Capitalize on local awareness and familiarity. Your readers and advertisers and their customers should be familiar with your local businesses through past advertising campaigns. Leverage that awareness and familiarity to reduce buying reluctance while reinforcing the advantages of safety and security in shopping locally. The best advice and the best value … always come from someone you KNOW!
• Maximize competitive advantages. Help your advertisers seize the moment when their competitors may be cutting back or eliminating their advertising, by identifying and articulating what separates and makes them unique or different from others.
• It’s all about the long term.Coach your advertisers to implement the plan and preparation you helped them put in place when the business decline first began. With the economic certainty improving, remind them to continue looking to and designing the future, rather than seeking to reinvent the past!
• Don’t sell an ad – sell ideas and campaigns. Talk to advertisers about investing in a series of ads, within a timeframe, with a set aside or allocated budget, to meet an identified need, problem or opportunity with a desired outcome — rather than placing one-time, single-shot ads or promotions.

Helping the retailers, service providers, professional businesses and companies in your community create a public awareness of who they are and what they do promotes growth for your community, your retailer and your newspaper, both in print and online. 

The summer months will feature pre-convention skirmishes between the Obama and Romney camps, but all too often community newspapers largely ignore the national race to focus exclusively on local campaigns.

Too bad.  Tip O’Neil’s insight still rings true:  All politics is local. Every vote for the national ticket is cast locally.  Most national candidates have political roots first planted in local politics. And national candidates owe their current position to local organization and local successes in the early primary states.

So how can Texas community newspapers cover national races if those candidates never come to town? How do you localize a national election?

Start by picturing the Democratic and Republican campaigns giant icebergs.  If you have ever seen a picture of an iceberg, you know that it’s four-fifths underwater – no matter how big the visible part looks, most of the iceberg is below the water line. Presidential campaigns are like that.  The “visible” part is what shows up on the nightly news or in The New York Times or in prime-time TV campaign commercials – but the voters who elect candidates are your readers and the people who live in your community.

So what are the national presidential campaign stories you can find right in your own community? Let’s look at a few:

Campaign contributions. How much is your city or county donating to the various candidates?  Any search engine will give you as much data as you want, down to individual contributors.  You may want to start with the Open Secrets site, http://www.opensecrets.org/states/, which will let you search by Zip Code and compare the contributions in this election cycle with contributions in past years.  After you have some numbers, talk with local political experts about people’s willingness to give in a down economy.  If you have a nearby college, political science professors make great sources for stories like this.

Young people and politics.  During the last election, the Obama campaign made significant use of the youth vote.  Talk with high school teachers about what they are noticing about the political interest of their students.  Find youth sources – student government leaders, officers of political clubs, young people who volunteer for local campaigns – and ask them what they notice about their peers’ involvement in this year’s election.

The woman vote. Recent polls show women favoring the president and men supporting Romney.  Is that true in your community? Talk to Republican and Democratic women, as well as local politicians and political experts (teachers, professors).

The get-out-the-vote efforts.  As the election draws near, both parties will launch efforts to get their supporters to the polls.  What plans does each party in your town have to increase Election Day turnout?  Talk to an elections administrator to get the turnout figures on past presidential elections.  Talk to local experts about what factors typically affect turnout in your city and county.

Voter registration.  Get the voter registration numbers for your area and see how they have been trending over the past few elections.  Compare them to national and state figures.  Look at voter registration efforts in your city, paying special attention to organized efforts to sign up church members, minorities and young voters.  Which groups have the most active voter registration efforts? Ask them how successful they have been.

Special interests.  Look beyond candidates and parties.  What groups have active efforts to influence election outcomes?  Religious groups?  Minority groups?  Teachers? Women’s groups?  When you find a group trying to influence turnout and voting, find out specifically what they are doing and what they hope the results will be.  Find out how long they have been in operation and if this is just a local effort, as opposed to a part of a national effort.  And don’t forget to find out where they are getting the money to finance their efforts.

Localizing issues. When issues are being debated on the national stage, it’s easy to overlook what those issues mean on Main Street.  You may not have gay couples in your community lining up to be married, but the issue itself may be a hotbutton for many voters.  Gas prices certainly affect many commuters and low-income families and truckers.  And you can talk with local experts on the economy – business owners – about the impact of economic proposals from both sides.

Impact of the campaign.  Look for stories on how the national campaign is affecting your town.  Is there a local Mormon congregation?  How has the increased attention on Mormonism affected the growth of their local church or perceptions of Mormonism?  Is anyone from your town attending the national conventions or donating time to work out-of-town in the campaigns?  Who is spearheading the efforts for Obama and Romney in your town and what are they doing?

And that’s just for starters.  No matter how big your staff, get them together and brainstorm campaign coverage, perhaps beginning with the above list of ideas.  Since presidential campaigns come around only every four years, newspaper staffs don’t have the opportunity to fall into the routines of campaign coverage, as we do with police and court and education and local government beats. Be sure to include ad sales people in your meeting – they may have better ideas about economics stories than your reporters and editors.

One good way to kick-start your thinking is by taking part in a June 22 webinar led by Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues in Kentucky.  Al, a friend of TCCJ and a nationally recognized expert on community journalism, will share strategies you can use to localize national elections. You can get more information on the webinar at http://bit.ly/JLL1Th.

One more resource is TCCJ itself – we will be sharing ideas throughout the summer and the fall on how you can bring the election home for your readers.  We will also offer a convention news service that will localize the Republican convention in Tampa and the Democratic convention in Charlotte – if you have people from your city who are attending as delegates or campaign workers, we can get you a story on them just for your newspaper.

Theodore H. White, who chronicled many campaigns as a journalist and author, said that there is no excitement anywhere in the world – short of war – to match the excitement of an American presidential campaign.

He was right.  And community newspapers need to capture that excitement in our pages to build readership and bring the campaign back to Main Street.

The most useful tools in a salesperson’s tool box are questions.

Good questions get the customer talking and help the sales person uncover needs that their products can fill. Questions keep the customer engaged and help them to see the value your products offer. When I am interviewing a customer, I try to cover what I call the “5 C’s.” Here they are:

1. Company: how their business works
2. Customers: who they want to reach
3. Current Marketing: how are they trying to reach those people
4. Competition: who they need to beat
5. Challenges: what they worry about

The answers to the 5 C’s questions will give you everything you need to know to sell the customer and to develop an effective program to help them achieve their goals.

Here are my favorite 5 C questions:

Company

1. What led you to get into this business?
2. What are your goals for the next quarter? Six months? Year?
3. What do you see as your greatest strengths as a company?
4. What are the most profitable products/services you offer?
5. How do you want people to think of your business?

Customers

1. Can you describe your best customers to me?
2. How far do your customers come from to shop here?
3. What is a typical customer worth to you?
4. Is there a group of customers you have trouble reaching?
5. If I asked your current customers why they come here, what would they tell me?

Current marketing

1. What types of marketing do you currently use?
2. When you set up the current program what were your goals?
3. How effective is your program in achieving these goals?
4. Why do you think your current program is (isn’t) working?
5. Do you have a website? How do you invite people to your site?

Competition

1. Who are you competitors? Local firms? National chains?
2. How has competition affected the market?
3. What have you done differently to meet your competition?
4. Are there areas of your business where you face more or less competition?
5. If I asked you why I should deal with you rather than with your competition, what would you tell me?

Challenges

1. What keeps you up at night? What are the biggest challenges you face in running this business?
2. How is the market changing? What new challenges do you see in the future?
3. What steps are you taking to meet these challenges?
4. If you had a magic wand that could change anything about your business what would it be?
5. What strategies have you tried to alleviate this challenge?

We’ll be live-blogging “Uncovering the best local business stories” beginning at 9 a.m. on Thursday, April 26. Co-sponsored by TCCJ, the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, and the Texas Press Association, the workshop will feature Carlie Kollath, business reporter for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal; Chris Roush, business journalism professor at the University of North Carolina; Doug Swanson, investigative projects editor for the Dallas Morning News; and Linda Austin, executive director of the Reynolds Center. We’ll hope you’ll follow along on the live blog and join us on Twitter at the hashtag #bizj.

I am in the process of reading Walter Issacson’s excellent biography of Steve Jobs. Reading biographies of recognized leaders is an effective way to learn from their successes and to avoid the mistakes they made.

Steve Jobs understood that to build a great company he needed to recruit great people. He knew that having his friend and early collaborator Steve Wozniak on board was critical for Apple’s success. Wozniak’s genius for computer engineering was behind many of the company’s early products.

Wozniak turned down the offer to be a major partner and founder of Apple. The chance to be an executive and to become a very wealthy man could not entice him to leave his job as an engineer for Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs begged him to leave HP and even got Wozniak’s parents to put pressure on him, but “Woz” wouldn’t budge. Finally, Mike Markkula, a mutual friend, intervened and convinced Wozniak to join Apple.

How did he convince him to make the move? Markkula understood that Wozniak wasn’t interested in money and actually hated the idea of having to boss other people around. He knew that the only thing “Woz” cared about was engineering and designing new hardware and software. Markkula convinced Wozniak that eventually HP would force him to accept a promotion and leave the lab. He told him that at Apple he could exercise his creativity and do nothing but work on his own designs.

This approach convinced Steve Wozniak to make the move and, as they say, the rest is history.  This is an important lesson for sales people, sales managers and for anyone who needs to persuade others to make a change. We all have our own reasons for doing what we do. Taking the time to talk to people about themselves to gain an understanding of their individual needs and desires is the secret to motivating others.

Benefits are very personal things. What you see as a benefit may be meaningless to me. Any good tailor knows that to make comfortable, well-fitting clothing requires taking careful measurements. A good salesperson will use questions to take their customer’s measure before offering a benefit. A good salesperson knows that benefits are not “one-size-fits-all”!

I have good news for weekly newspapers looking for affordable, up-to-the-minute content for their websites or print editions.

For the first time, The Associated Press is offering a real-time news package for weeklies called AP News Choice. 

The subscription service gives weekly papers real-time access to AP’s state staff reports including sports and statehouse coverage; top breaking national/international news including politics; or topic-based reports ranging from agriculture to energy, education to religion. The online content is licensed to be displayed not only on a paper’s main website, but also on its mobile sites and apps. 

This service enables weeklies to keep their print and online editions fresh with news that enhances their already strong local franchises, tailored to the needs of their readers and advertisers. The state content includes all reports filed by AP’s correspondents in Austin, Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, El Paso, Lubbock and the Rio Grande Valley. The first AP News Choice subscriber in Texas signed up primarily for access to AP’s award-winning coverage of border issues and the drug war

Rates for the print option are based on circulation; rates for the online option are based on web traffic. 

We’re offering free 15-day trials of the service to any weeklies that are interested. All they have to do is email me at [email protected] or call 972-677-2270.