(My own experience)
I run an electrical industry hard copy trade magazine called Electric.ie. It has a print run of 5,000 copies and we distribute it mainly through post (snail mail) and at wholesaler outlets. It is a small business. It pays the wages of two full time staff and a part-time editor. It turns over a small profit as well. We also had a website which had been a basic non-interactive site. We had facebook, linkedin and twitter accounts set up but doing very little with them. No income was generated from this. I realised that this needed to change. I needed to either employ someone from a digital background to do some work for us or to get myself trained up on digital media marketing. I chose the latter and got onto this current digital marketing course in DBS. I realised that we needed to START generating some income from this area of the business and felt that I needed to learn how to do it myself. This DBS course has certainly helped me with this. After a few classes, I decided the first thing to do was to set myself some targets for our website and our social media. So I set the following modest 6 monthly target. Targets: Spend: I allocated a small budget of €1,000 to do this. Website:
Social Media.
Time period: 1st October 2018 to 1st April 2019 Strategy First Steps: My plan was to get all the physical components ready first, so I did the following…
The idea was to use the content articles that is normally generated just for the magazine. Place them on our new website and send them out on a newsletter and on our social media. All with links back to the website. Paying particular attention to making sure that the headline is relevant and interesting to our target audience. The ultimate aim is to improve traffic enough to convince our advertisers that we have a digital strategy and that advertising with us means advertising in both the old traditional way as well as the new digital way. Next Steps: I introduced a new section on our price list for web banners for 2019. Every article that went into the magazine was now being put up on the website as well. I would then send it out on the social media as well. The newsletter is also being used to great effect. The results of all of the above steps have been beyond my expectations. The traffic from the social media being brought to the website is very substantial. So all of the platform traffic have increased dramatically. One seems to drive the other and vice-versa. Results: The two banners that were on offer to clients, a leaderboard and an MPU slot on a rotating basis have ALL been booked up for 2019. They were probably offered a little too cheaply, but the income from these in 2019 will be somewhere in the region of €6,000. I expect this to rise dramatically in 2020 as I progress with building more onto the website. Another fabulous spin-off is that some of our clients have a digital strategy in place themselves. When two of these companies saw what we were doing with their articles, they were so delighted that both of them committed to adverts and articles for all of 2019 in the magazine on the condition that we also run them on our website and social media as well. This brought extra revenue of over €11,000 to the magazine for 2019. I suppose this works as extra inbound marketing for them. Results versus Targets: Spend so far €500 Extra income so far €17,000 Website work is all completed and traffic has already been increasing dramatically. Social Media : LinkedIn now has 444 followers Facebook now has 291 followers Twitter now has 219 followers (Still two months left of the target period so well ahead of target) Conclusion: Although the above figures may not be huge compared to big retail type companies. Learning about digital media has allowed me to increase our revenue and add important extra revenue streams. I really do appreciate the work that DBS is doing with this Springboard+ as in my case they have made me realise the potential of the tools that I already have in my business.
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Colin SherlockStudent Number: 10512541 |