Michigan Online Marketing- A Better Marketing Plan for The Detroit Free Press

It's been a week since the Detroit Free Press went to a hybrid online/offline model, and it's a decent idea but unfortunately for the paper they missing out in a big way.  Here's how they explain their new model:

"Detroit Media Partnership Chief Executive Officer Dave Hunke, who also is publisher of the Free Press, said that starting in spring 2009, both the Free Press and the Detroit News -- also operated by the partnership -- would deliver to homes only on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, the heaviest days for advertising and the most popular papers for readers"

If I was consulting for them here's a few things that I would have them do to provide a better service to their customers and their advertisers as well:

Capture email addresses and build a list- This could be done in a variety of different ways, but it needs to be done!  The advertising space that they could provide in a broadcast email would be of tremendous value to big money advertisers.  Since a customer could put links directly to their site in an email, they could track the effectiveness of their ads and instantly calculate their return on investment.  This would very effective for a company that can write good web copy since the Free Press could build a big list very quickly.

Send daily newsletters via email- People have not changed the amount of content that they consume, they just changed how they consume it.  As of today, the only way to find out about new articles is to visit Freep.com.  While this may seem strikingly obvious, the Free Press could develop a new 'daily delivery' method utilizing mass email.  As a consumer of the Free Press' content I don't always think about visiting their site on a daily basis, an email would serve to remind me that they have content that I might find interesting.

An Effective Model for The Free Press

One great program that I use often is Google Alerts.  A Google alert is a way of having news emailed to you as it happens or as Google 'discovers' it.  Basically, you go to the Google Alert site, type in a keyword and they email once a day with new information that they have found in the last 24 hours.  Overall it's a great way of keeping track of things that interest the consumer.

If the Free Press would adopt a hybrid model of this service they could ensure that a person will come back daily for their content.  For example, if I was interested in the 'Arts section' of the paper, they could email me a short snippet of their latest articles and have a ‘read the rest of the article' link that would take you to whole article online.

Another good example would be the 'Classified section', they could send all of the jobs that are related to a consumers career field on a daily basis.  This new service could be paid for by the advertiser as well as provide additional, separate income for the newspaper.

This type of service would be very easy to setup and could also be automated so that they wouldn't have to spend a lot of money maintaining the system.  Imagine how the news consumer would enjoy their own 'Customized newspaper' on a daily basis.  The only thing missing would be a butler to deliver it for them!

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