onlinemarketingforlocalbusinesses-thefishermanssecret.pdf (102 KB)

About The Author: Johan Horak is a South African based WEB 2.0 Marketing Expert helping local and small businesses to create online marketing and cultivation pools to ensure that they, as fishermen, become trusted expert. In order to achieve this, he helps small business to adapt, expensive and wasteful offline advertising into effective relationship marketing, using free online marketing tools and easy-to-accomplished techniques. He combines, off line advertising with websites, blogs, twitter and other social media… to create long lasting cultivation pools of willing spenders. Johan also provide – one of one – remote support and he teaches small business people on how to use these free online tools. His objective is to ensure  that small businesses are equipped so that they become independent of these so called web experts. Contact Johan at +27 21 786 4028, email johan horak @ gmail . com or read more at his blog.

Posted via email from The Fisherman’s Secret

Image by be OH be via Flickr

Allow me to recap:

You know that Coffee News is a small business opportunity allowing work from home moms, dads and others to publish a weekly one-page newspaper. This newspaper is distributed to local or community restaurants. The content consists of ‘news to amuse’ and takes less than 8 minutes to read. On the left, right, front and back page edges of the paper are 32 business-card sized ads where local businesses promote their business.

Currently more than 8 million people read this newspaper across the world every week. This is a significant publication with a reach stretching 52 countries.

My questions:

Are we utilizing the true power of Coffee News?

Why not add value to this amazing publication?

This is my suggestion:

1. Create a reason for readers to subscribe to an online newsletter via a blog
2. In addition to the paper version publish a shortened e-version with different news.
3. Create Google Adwords like ads for the local advertisers and publish it on the edges of the e-newsletter.

Just think about the opportunity:

• We have a captive audience having fun getting a Coffee News newsletter weekly.
• We have small business advertisers who get more exposure
• Coffee News marketing agencies can add more value to their sales pack.

What are the negatives?

Let me know what you think…..

1. Coffee News is a very inexpensive form of advertising in your own local area. And it targets people who either live in the area (friends and customers) or those who have already driven into the area.
2. Coffee News allows advertisers to be a constant reminder day by day,week by week, in their own trading area,without having to pay double or triple for the added exposure, to keep in touch with small minority of their customers who may come from other parts of the city.
3. Provides a highly positive, fun-loving atmosphere for your ad, which by it’s unique design, is also included as part of the fun and conversations. Coffee News gets people talking and thoroughly enjoying themselves, and since the pleasurable experience of eating or drinking coffee is subliminally associated with the ads themselves (which are only read during restaurant visits),the ads put you, the advertiser, in a "good guy" positive light. Willing and ready to buy.
4. Provides the inexpensive repetition of ads needed to establish buyer patterns – weekly exposure with additional exposure through second and more readings. (Restaurant clients are free to take a copy to share with other friends or put it back in its holder for the next customer to enjoy).
5. You  don’t find big and small potatoes” All advertisers are seen as equals, in a fun-loving group, rather than individual advertisers – big and small as in newspapers. All ads compliment each other and add to the results received by all. This "shopping centre" type approach to uniform sizing and style characteristics of ads acts to sell a very positive view of the advertisers and his products/services. The fact that the ads are all the same width and are laid out down the sides of the paper, it does not allow a "big potatoes, small potatoes" type of mental judgement about the advertisers.
6. Reinforce the message: When Coffee News ads are used in conjunction with other advertising – TV advertising for example -the Coffee News advert becomes a re-run of the TV commercial in the reader’s mind. For less than a fraction of a cent per reader, that particular advertiser had 5,000 people visually see his commercial, thus substantially increasing his TV results.
7. Exclusivity. All advertisers are given exclusive rights to advertise their business category in their issue of Coffee News. For example: Only one local doctor or plumber will at anyone time advertise  in a local edition of Coffee News. Competitors must go onto a waiting list until space is available. As such,advertisers who join up early are in the best position of keeping their Coffee News unavailable to their competitors.

Image by be OH be via Flickr

I was asked the question above and will try and explain:

• Advertising’s success depends on how many times you can repeat an advertisement in the face of a potential client; therefore a new edition of Coffee News is printed every week with new content. Because of that many of your readers become regulars. Now. Remember the ads stay the same week after week. Let’s get back to the readers. Because the content change weekly they go to their favourite restaurant weekly and get the new Coffee News. And every week they get to see the same ads over and over. This other publication gets printed monthly. Therefore people will only read it once a month. And the advertiser gets limited or no repetitive exposure.
• When you sit in a restaurant reading the newspaper you want the reader to take action and support the advertisers. Let’s say you are a pharmacist advertising in Coffee News. Then the reader can get his meal, go next door to the pharmacy because Coffee News is published for a suburb in a suburb. Let’s say a pharmacist advertise in the other publication. The reader may be sitting one hour away from the pharmacy because the other publication distributes, not only monthly, but regionally. With Coffee News even your small local businesses can and will advertise because the readers and the restaurants are next door.
• Coffee News is a media publication and you know what that entails; printing, content writing, distribution and selling of ad space. With Coffee News you, as the publisher, will have all your time to focus on marketing, distribution and printing. You don’t have to spend endless nights of your time researching and writing content, because all the content is written for you, weekly and send to you six weeks in advance. (The other publication cannot spend all their time on marketing because they have to write content).
• Coffee News  has a very unique design and layout that’s copy righted. Some of these unique design points are based on sublimal ideas. These unique techniques are shared with Coffee News owners.
• The fact that Coffee News is a one pager may seem irrelevant but when you know that the ads are on both sides and edges of the newspaper then you agree that the ads are always within eyes way. With any other publication the ads can become irrelevantly-out-of-site.

There are more differences but this is enough for one day.