No place like home – local news reaches broad audience segments
Local news has one massive advantage over wide-reaching national publications: it truly knows who it’s talking to. Here, News Corp Australia’s Neil Robinson and Heidi Sayers explain how local – and the targeted advertising it provides – is here to stay.
Despite what some headlines would have you believe, local publications remain the glue that holds the nation’s communities together.
Take The Chronicle in Toowoomba, for example. The publication has 15 editorial staff – more than double any other local newsroom in the region. It covers everything from local sports stories to school news and local council updates to locals having their say on our political leaders. It’s alive and well both in print and online, reaching 78% of the population.
News Corp Australia’s Heidi Sayers speaks at Come Together in Melbourne
Then there’s the Townsville Bulletin, which continued to work through the Townsville floods to provide the vital information its community needed, even when 80% of the local area was underwater. Editor Jenna Cairney, whose home was severely damaged in the floods, slept overnight at the publication’s offices to ensure the local papers and vital information still got delivered to the community.
So what makes local newspapers such as these such a vital lifeline to their readers? As News Corp Australia’s Heidi Sayers explains, local publications provide a relatability that isn’t possible from national or international stories about broader macro issues.
“People have that personal connection with their local newspaper; there’s a level of trust, reliability and relatability there,” she says. “These are mastheads that speak to the ‘locals’, because they’re grounded in the community, and have the people at heart.”
For News Corp Australia, local means 140 regional and community newspapers from all corners of the country. Their highly engaged audience is an advantage, says Sayers, because it means they talk to highly targeted areas and highly targeted communities.
Targeting local areas is not only a powerful tool for the newspapers themselves but for the local businesses that advertise with those titles. This insight was behind the launch of Local Connect, announced at this year’s Come Together event hosted by News Corp Australia.
Local Connect uses geo-targeting to open up local digital communities, using location data to identify audiences consuming News’ content. This precise data means it’s no longer about postcodes alone, as Neil Robinson, News Corp Australia’s managing director digital solutions, explains: “By combining the News Corp first party data set with those of our carefully selected partners we can build a clear picture of consumer preference based on where they live and where they go. We can gain a deeper understanding of our audiences through rich location-based insights such as retail or grocery store preference, or which auto dealership they visit. Through this methodology we can enhance our local community newspaper offering with an online audience targeting offering that engages highly qualified audiences at scale”
Click to play: highlights of News Corp’s Come Together 2019 journeys
Robinson said Aldi recently used Local Connect to track local in-store visits from audiences who had seen Aldi ads on News Corp Australia’s network. “We drove a 50 percent increase in footfall to Aldi stores among lapsed-Aldi customers (who had not been seen at a store in the previous 30 days) through campaign exposure on our network.”
Local Connect sits within News Connect, News Corp’s audience targeting and campaign activation platform. The offering includes over 1,700 audience segments and counting, enabling brands to engage with 10.8m Australians based on what they read and watch, what they do, what they buy and what they feel.
For many local businesses, the idea of booking media through an organisation as big as News might previously have seemed intimidating. But with Local Connect, that is no longer the case. The platform allows for self-serve campaign booking, meaning anyone from your local tradie to a high street travel agent can now book their own campaigns.
The combined digital and print capability of News Corp Australia mean local businesses can start to compete against the more prominent players in the location they know best: their local area. “If you’re a local business, and it might be a hardware store, you’re naturally competing against some of the bigger brands,” explains Robinson. “We’re able to identify people who are going into competitor stores, based on location and target them with your message.”
“Furthermore if a client has their own customer data we can work with them to match their customers with News Corp’s audiences. This allows us to target those customers with specific messages across our network to help build customer retention, as well as deliver cross-sell and upsell messaging,” explains Robinson.
Local publications and the businesses they serve have an enviable relationship with their readers and customers. But to survive, they must embrace the power of local, and learn to exploit the benefits that come with knowing your audience. With targeted campaigns now available at the press of a button, Local Connect and News Connect make reaching that audience easier than ever before.
CONTENT SPONSORED BY News Corp Australia
Gee what an unfortunate article. For those of us in Western Australia, the last 24 months have seen the distribution halved for our local community newspapers distribution and many publications closed, with a huge amount of redundancies. Advertisers have not embraced the digital revolution when asked to rebook a campaign. Sure the flat economy has a lot to do with it, You would think Neil and Heidi would be acknowledging this, but I fear too many clients have already been burnt.
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