5 Marketing Tools Publishers Can Create to Drive Revenue

In parts 1-4 of this series we talked about 4 different areas in which publishers can drive revenue, both in print and online, including:

• Digital Advertising Opportunities for Businesses
• Digital Revenue Opportunities Targeting your Audience (Readers)
• Traditional Print Advertising Opportunities
• Offline Revenue Opportunities

Today, in part 5, we’ll cover revenue opportunities for selling marketing tools to local businesses and then wrap up the series with opportunities for selling marketing services in part 6.

Regardless of its size, every business needs to have a marketing plan. But what exactly does that mean? For the sake of our discussion today, let’s say that it simply means you need to have a plan to attract customers to your business and get them to spend money with you. With that in mind, they’re typically two schools of thought on how to accomplish this which are inbound marketing and outbound marketing. Today, we will be talking about how publishers can take the best parts of each and combine them in a set of tools that helps local businesses execute their marketing plan.

Simple Websites

The core of any inbound marketing strategy is a website. A good website highlights the values of the company, includes all the relevant product/service information, presents their contact info and has a solid call-to-action (CTA) that will generate leads.  While many business will have more complex website needs (check back tomorrow for information on how to offer web design services) many local business simply need an effective and nice looking site to collect and show off reviews, share sales and coupons and generate new business. As a publisher, you should already be collecting a lot of the information necessary to create such a simple website building tool through your advertising initiatives (directory listing info, events, coupons , etc.) and you can leverage that to offer turnkey websites that are tightly integrated with your publication.

Listing Management Services

One of the most important aspects of any local marketing campaign is making sure your business appears in all the appropriate directory listings like Yelp, Yellow Pages, Google Places, etc. As a publisher you should also offer a directory, so it begs the question, what makes yours better? First, the fact that you're a local publisher gives you an significant advantage because you can do things such as include links to those business within articles you publish on your website. This will generate a significant amount of SEO value for both you and the business. Second, you can offer what’s called listing management services. This is basically a tool that allows business to keep all their listings in sync while also taking advantage of your directory. The tool would essentially update all the other important directory pages every time they update their listing on your site which will save them a significant amount of time and effort.

Business Blogging & Co-Marketing

When you think about inbound marketing, the first thing that is often discussed is whether or not you should have a blog. The reason for that is simple. The more pages you have on your website, the more chances you have of getting found when someone searches for something on Google. Blogging is the easiest way to accomplish that. Of course, the next most common thing you hear is "I don’t have enough time to blog regularly". Business blogging & co-marketing is one solution to this problem. By allowing people to post blogs (another version of an advertorial) on your website you can do a couple things. First, you can help them promote their business by sharing their articles with your audience. Second, you can allow them to share in the creation of blog articles with adjacent businesses. For example, if you’re a plumber you would also benefit, at least indirectly, by sharing information from electricians with your audience. This is what we call co-marketing. This tool should allow businesses to select other articles that have been posted by related businesses and post them on their site in order to supplement their own content. They’d also be able to share their own articles without worrying about losing their SEO value because any article that's shared would reference the original article.

Reviews Widgets

The truth of the matter is reviews are an important part of any local marketing strategy and while people should have the ability to leave reviews on the publishers directory, they are much more valuable if businesses can also share them on their website. Therefore, a reviews widget is a must.  You can also use this tool to differentiate the different listing levels in your directory. For example, you may only show 4 and 5 star reviews in the widget for listings that have upgraded. This provides a further inventive for businesses to upgrade their listing, thus driving additional revenue.

Mobile Apps

Similar to simple websites, you could also offer a mobile app experience as a service. There are too many nuances to consider here but suffice it to say that mobile apps are all the rage right now and if done thoughtfully you could provide a mobile app experience for your community that all business can participate in for a small fee. One such example might be a dining guide app which are quite popular in larger metropolitan areas.

There are many great independent tools that help local businesses do all of these things but they lack one key thing; the personal relationship with the business. Publishers are already having conversations with local businesses and can use this opportunity to make sure they are meeting all their marketing goals and not just their advertising objectives. Further, when you are able to combine inbound marketing and advertising (outbound marketing) in an automated way, you will be able to offer business an incredibly powerful marketing suite that nobody else can replicate.

What other ideas do you have? Share them in the comments below (and don't forget to come back Monday for the final post in this series).