Advertising Match Program Secures $75K & New Business for Paper

by Jamie Gianini | RJ Media Group

Case Study Highlights

• $75,000 in revenue for the paper
• 50% of revenue was from brand-new clients
• Helped local businesses during COVID-19 crisis
• Created enticing opportunity for hesitant advertisers

The Idea

The Record-Journal is a 15,000 circulation daily newspaper covering the Meriden, Connecticut area. When the COVID crisis hit our area, we wanted to create an opportunity to help local businesses continue their marketing and advertising efforts as well as maintain existing partnerships.

The Execution

We launched our Advertising Match Program (AMP) in May to help local businesses stretch their advertising dollars during this especially difficult time. For every dollar in advertising spent, local businesses receive a dollar-to-dollar match of additional advertising for free, up to $10,000. We were open to accepting almost any local business who wanted to apply.

We partnered with our local chambers of commerce and worked together to use the AMP program as a way to give back to our local business community. The chambers all shared it with their members, and we in turn promoted the chambers in our marketing of the campaign.

In addition to leveraging the chambers of commerce, we also promoted the AMP campaign through our email database, our website, print products, a targeted YouTube campaign, and targeted display ads.

The AMP application included four valuable lead-generation questions which provided our team with important information on the business and their needs. We asked about their current biggest challenges, which range of matched advertising they wanted, and if they’ve already worked with one of our media consultants. We also took this opportunity to learn how they heard about the program, which informed our marketing efforts.

The Results

In the first month of the promotion, we generated nearly 100 leads for our sales team. Interested businesses covered a wide spectrum of industries from CBD retailers to private schools.

The advertising we booked from our match program led to $75,400 in revenue. On top of that, 50% of this revenue came from brand new clients to our paper!

We found this to be a perfect way to connect with businesses that were hesitant to work with us. One client was so floored with the results from one day of their campaign, they decided to keep a continuous ad running with us!

With the uncertainty of what tomorrow brings, we’re maintaining fluidity with our timeline. We originally planned to run this campaign for two months, but with these unprecedented times, we’re committed to helping our community and have decided to run this campaign for an additional three months. We’ll re-evaluate at that point in time and, if it’s necessary, we’ll continue it then!