Use Less to Get More: Mark Barry on Marketing Strategies for Smaller Papers

Mark Barry, circulation director of The Day in New London, Connecticut, spoke to API on his experience developing a marketing department at a smaller paper. He will lead the session "Finding New Advertisers by Finding New Customers" at API's Unleashing the Power of Market Intelligence seminar, June 25-28, 2006.

API: What are the challenges from moving from a larger paper to a small paper?

Mark Barry: There were several, but they weren't all negative. First of all there wasn't a traditional marketing department here, so with a traditional marketing department that might have a research manager and speaks for resources that are needed - that didn't exist, so there were a lot of marketing fundamentals that needed to be established and nurtured. [It was a] ground-up evolution because when there isn't a kind of a infrastructure for purchasing data or for licensing software and a process for getting those data into the hands of sales reps, it's a lot of work.

API: What were some solutions that you developed?

MB: The first step was really deciding what battles to fight for internally. When you don't have a marketing department and you need one and you know there's a critical element of who is going to be doing your promotion work and who is going to be handling your data and your research capabilities, you need to make a decision. I chose to focus on the data end. Without a marketing department, I first put a contract together with a local ad agency to handle promotional work with someone I had known who had a lot of newspaper knowledge. Contracting with an outside agency enabled us to work on our data issues. We could try to be more formal in doing a major market studies every 2 years and sticking to that schedule.

The second step was hiring a top-notch research manager. When we started the marketing department, the first position that I added was the research manager. This person was a top-shelf research manager and was able to hit the ground running and take care of executing a major market survey. The department is now developed. We have a promotional arm and someone who's taking care of research work.

Now it's time to fight for data. We started fighting for business-to business data. The challenge here is that we don't have enough money. It took some new dollars to be able to hire a new employee. We also knew we need some new dollars to purchase some data. So the relationships we all have here with key individuals in the building are very important. Working with our other departments to fund a little bit of the business data, we're able to join what dollars we have in the budget and share in the cost to get it through. We were able to work with the IT department and the publisher of our weeklies. So the IT department likes the data because they'll have some clean data that helps the company keep its data standardized. The weekly department likes it for the same reason and also for prospecting new business.

API: How can these strategies be applied to other smaller newspapers?

MB: A lot of this has to do with people. You need a plan for what you want to generate. I would recommend not thinking, "Well, we don't have the resources of a larger paper," but really thinking about what are the two or three critical things that you really want to be doing. Is it possible to pull this off? Who are the people who can really help make this happen? In our case it was going out and knowing people and tapping into our resources and people who we may have encountered in the past. When I moved to Philadelphia I had met someone stayed in touch with someone in Hartford who I then contacted about helping me with promotional material when I moved back to Connecticut. The other component is how you interact with other people around the building. How can the marketing department devise a way to make it appealing to other parties, to be able to sell them on why these data are appropriate for them? If you work well with people and understand their needs, you can get what you need.

API: What do you like most about smaller newspapers?

MB: I like this size newspaper because you can really wrap your arms around things. You may not have the same number of people working in the division or the IT department may be challenged a little bit more if it's a small IT staff, but I think that there are more opportunities in smaller newspapers to become involved with different departments.