Recently the Detroit Free Press announced that it’s going to cut print editions and focus on its digital offerings. The reaction in the stagnant newspaper industry (which I know well, having spent more than a decade in it) was shock. The reaction among digitally-savvy consumers: It’s about friggin’ time!

Honestly, the paradox that is newspaper management–”We must change! But we don’t want to actually do it! So what should we do?!”–is one reason I left the industry. Yet I still have a soft spot for something that used to be my raison d’etre. I want to give some advice to all other daily news publications, speaking as someone who was once one of them. Hopefully, they’ll take some of this to heart and manage to survive 2009 and beyond.

Maintain a relationship with your readers. One reason that newspapers won’t give up the ghost is because of that small but fiercely loyal group of senior citizen readers. Back in the day (that includes when I was an elementary schoolkid, cutting out articles for Current Events class) newspapers strove to be the voice of the community. And the community more or less respected their authority, even if they fiercely opposed an opinion or article from time to time. Today, that relationship between reader and paper is different–especially when most people don’t read the paper from cover to cover anymore.

With SMS or email, you can make the news more customized for the reader. He or she can sign up to receive alerts on stories about “entertainment” or “sports” or “local crime.” The reader will feel like The Daily News Journal really gives him or her the information she or he was wondering about anyway. Plus, SMS or email marketing messages can be easily customized to address the subscriber by name, making them even more personal.

Offer value. There are a great many newspaper subscribers whose main focus is getting those Sunday coupons and sales fliers. Now, they can get coupons via email or, even better, SMS. So why not have the ad sales department at a newspaper start up digital couponing? The advertiser can pay to have their coupons offered in The Daily News Times’ subscription-only coupon messaging service. Consumers would sign up for this service, free of charge to them, to receive coupons for local restaurants, the mom-and-pop cafe, the town’s major shopping mall, etc. National ad sales bureaus could also sell the opportunity to major household or entertainment brands, and work with local newspapers everywhere to distribute these coupons as well.

Milk the multi-channel. Newspapers already own a print medium! So they should use it to their advantage. Most papers reserve a few column inches in which they run “house ads” promoting the publication. So they should use these to promote the shortcode to which they must text in order to subscribe to The Daily News Tribune’s news and coupon alerts. Papers can also promote an email address for consumers who prefer to receive this kind of information via email. Mobile marketers in all kinds of other industries know the effectiveness of a multi-channel campaign. Newspapers are sitting on a gold mine.

Major features can still run. For, like, decades I’ve heard that “the younger generation” hates reading and as a whole are illiterate. That’s not true–they’ll read what interests them, whether a zine by their favorite hardcore band or the sports pages plugging their friend’s Little League team. So please, please don’t dumb down articles or pander to readers by writing what you think they want to hear! Instead, promote the heck out of the news feature or series on which a reporter spent a lot of time and effort researching and writing. Use SMS or email as teasers: “What do the mayor and Hugo Chavez have in common? Find out Sunday in The Daily News Herald!”

It’s almost unbelievable that newspapers haven’t already been doing all this. The newspaper’s struggle has been lengthy, turning to consolidations and JOAs and skeleton crews to survive, and seeing increasingly fewer readers for their efforts. True, cynics might say that the papers’ lack of quality content is to blame. But these days, getting the information into a medium consumers want is just as important.

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm

“I’d rather you text me”

Unlike 2009, digital marketing is no longer in its infancy.

We all hope to keep providing you readers food for thought on the industry all through the coming year!

-Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm

“I’d rather you text me”

According to a recent study by eMarketer, the majority of college students pay little or no attention to marketing emails. However, email still remains their second- most preferred way to communicate, after text messaging. While this study mainly applies to college students, it got me thinking of the importance of relevance in messaging.

The deluge of marketing emails hitting inboxes ,paired with unrelenting spam, makes it hard for messages to get through to the brand audience—as we can see from the survey above. Taking the reins of your email marketing today can mean increased attention to your brand for generations to come. Not doing so means losing the very generation that email should be able to reach. Action has to be taken by all email marketers out there, to ensure that good marketing gets through.

The solution to effective email marketing , according to many companies and consultants in the field: Relevance. This word is often spoken, but the confusion lies in it being defined in too many ways. For some, relevance is equated to proper segmentation; for others it may involve dynamic content; and still others may focus on data collection and metrics as a key factor in achieving relevance. Before even considering email relevance, the first thing you should do is take inventory on attitudes in your organization about your email marketing itself.

Email marketing is well-known for its ROI, and as a relatively inexpensive channel, is often and easily abused. Looking at email as a channel where you can unload a mass of messages for quick impact to your bottom line would be cheating yourself. Email is not just randomized contact on a mass scale- it directly touches an individual on the other end, and can have a major impact on how your brand is recalled. Think of the brands whose emails you receive everyday: Google, Apple, Amazon… which ones do you read?

Learn more about email relevance…stay tuned next week!

Wishing everyone a happy and prosperous 2009!

Shaneli Ramratan, Director of Marketing, mobileStorm

We’ve all heard the dire predictions of what 2009 will mean to marketers and make no mistake about it, the news isn’t great. I won’t bother with a rehash of what others have reported because, quite frankly, it’s too depressing to do so. What I offer instead is the proverbial silver lining in this dark, gloomy cloud we’re facing: Digital marketing.

While traditional marketing budgets have shrunk over the past few months, digital marketing has proven to be a much more resilient form of communication in this same time period. In fact, most analysts are predicting at least a slight uptick in overall spending in digital marketing, notably email and mobile marketing, but nothing close to what had been initially projected before the economy was finally deemed to be in a recession.

Still, there are many reasons why companies should not only maintain but increase their digital marketing budgets in 2009, especially within the SMB (small-to-midsized business) space, to take advantage of its unique properties. These include:

Price
Digital is still by far the cheapest of the mass forms of communication. TV and radio rates have not fallen nearly as far as expected, despite the weakened economy; print is in a death spiral and increasingly not a safe play for a decent ROI; and outdoor/out of home is still a niche play at best.

ROI
Digital marketing wins this in a landslide as well. Other forms of mass communication simply do not or are not equipped to give the level of insight that digital can when it comes to ROI. Digital by its very nature is trackable, with more and more sophisticated analytics becoming available on almost a daily basis to even the smallest of companies.

Reach
Digital penetration rates are now as high as more mature forms of mass communication, especially mobile phones, which should reach 100% penetration over the next few years according to most studies. Mobile marketers have only begun to scratch the surface of what is possible and although email marketing is much more established, it too still has potential growth opportunities. This is especially true in the SMB market, where there are many affordable digital marketing platforms from which to choose.

Segmentation
Not only can digital provide companies with a way to reach a mass audience, it also works extremely well in terms of market segmentation. Digital marketing is a natural for “narrowcasting” and customization of the message, which isn’t economically viable in the other forms of mass communication. With a solid digital marketing platform, the message can be tailored to a specific audience or even an individual consumer in a matter of moments.

Control
As any seasoned marketer knows, keeping and maintaining control of a marketing campaign is vital to its success. For a small company, this is even more critical because of tight budgets and lack of internal resources. With a digital marketing platform, such programs can be created and managed by even a single individual, while still maintaining the polish and feel of a much larger, more sophisticated marketing firm or company.

The bottom line is that 2009 is going to be rough on pretty much every business, with marketing budgets shrinking in kind. However, savvy companies, big and small, will recognize and embrace digital marketing as a key objective for the coming year. After all, just because the economy stinks doesn’t mean marketing will cease all together. Companies will simply have to be much more selective and expect real results, which is exactly what digital marketing can bring them.

What other unique benefits does digital marketing offer companies? Feel free to list your own and/or discuss the ones noted above. Your feedback is always welcomed.

Steve Chipman, Chief Operating Officer, mobileStorm
Analog thoughts in a digital world