Allocating time and energy towards marketing is essential for the long-term sustainability of local news organizations. Marketing touches everything and everyone, not just those who work on advertising, subscriptions and donations — it bleeds over to audience work, community engagement, products, events and more. You need to convince your audience that your local coverage is not only important because of this grand, often intangible idea of the role of journalism in this country, but because it’s valuable and useful to their lives and communities. And while it can be tough to prioritize marketing with limited resources, you can still make room for small but impactful steps.
Tailoring your marketing language, writing SEO-friendly headlines, engaging people at the right time to drive them through your audience journey and reviewing qualitative and quantitative insights to inform your decisions — all of those things are needed to achieve financial sustainability.
Last week, I spoke with Tim Griggs, CEO of Blue Engine Collaborative, to get more marketing advice for local newsrooms. Tim is the former head of revenue products at The New York Times, where he was responsible for growing the digital subscription business and all other digital revenue products. He also served as publisher of the Texas Tribune. Read the main takeaways from our conversation and the full interview below.
Key takeaways:
- ☕️ Think about your newsroom as a coffee shop:
- Producing great content is not enough. For example: When you think of a local coffee shop, more than quality is needed to get people to visit or become regulars. You have to develop ways to get people to find you and to come back, and that takes marketing. I defy you to find a coffee shop that spends nothing on marketing — not just paid marketing, but that doesn’t spend time on it. That coffee shop is likely to go out of business really fast.
- 🪜 Break down marketing into small steps:
- Marketing can include a lot of tasks, so think about it in audience funnel stages (reach/discovery, engagement/loyalty, conversion and retention), to avoid feeling overwhelmed.
- You can be “liberated by smallness.” Take the infinite number of things you could do, and break that down into a small number of things you can accomplish right now.
- Build a habit of moving with agility, and start as simple as a basic audit. Prioritize things that have the most likelihood of moving the needle.
- 🚫 Don’t chase trends:
- If you’re constantly trying to predict the next thing, you are taking your eyes off all the things that you can do right now. Use the resources currently at your disposal, and be ready to apply those same skills and approaches to new opportunities.
- 💻 Prioritize SEO:
- Smaller local news organizations often leave a lot of eyeballs on the table by not implementing good SEO practices. Even simple things like how your site is structured and tagged and how you write headlines are often not addressed in the way they should be.
- 📈 Use available data and analytics:
- Gather qualitative and quantitative insights, including analytics, feedback, surveys and user testing.
- Use those insights to understand what’s happening in the market, what problem you can solve and how to solve it.
- ❗️Own the marketing strategy:
- While small organizations often don’t have the luxury of a marketing team, you need somebody who thinks about it and owns it. Over time, you want to go from no one to someone, to many, to everyone. But if you are trying to go from no one to everyone in one move, it won’t work.
- 💸 Tailor your value proposition, ask often and make it easy to pay:
- Smaller organizations are not asking people to subscribe or donate often enough. There’s a little bit of a tendency to feel sales-y. Instead, we need to find ways to ask more often and assertively.
- Don’t use the same general value proposition. How often do you see a value prop that says “support local journalism”? It’s not convincing anybody. Create an audience-focused proposition that emphasizes why it’s beneficial to the individual.
- Make it easier for people to give you money. Create a better digital experience to avoid a high abandonment rate.
- 🤖 Use AI in your marketing efforts:
- Use generative AI to help you with the first draft of marketing materials in the same way that you could be using them in the first draft for reporting. Language improvements are always really interesting. For example, ask for ideas on how to make this subscription offer subject line better.
A CONVERSATION WITH TIM GRIGGS
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
Kamila Jambulatova: Why is marketing important for local newsrooms’ sustainability?
Tim Griggs: Producing great content is not enough. It hasn’t been enough for a really long time. It requires a tremendous amount of intentionality to deliver this. Pick your favorite local institution — for example, your local coffee shop. Yes, people want coffee, but that is not enough to get people to visit your coffee shop or become regulars. The challenge that a local coffee shop has is no different than the challenges of a local news organization. People have to find you. You have to have great quality. You have to develop other ways to get people to come back and develop a habit or routine. And that takes marketing. I defy you to find a coffee shop that spends nothing on marketing. Not just paid marketing, but doesn’t spend time on it. That coffee shop is going out of business really fast, right? Yet, for us, we just assume that that’s not a necessity, but it is.
KJ: What advice do you have for small teams trying to prioritize better marketing practices?
TG: I tend to think about marketing in audience funnel stages, to take it away from this big capital “M” marketing, which can sound scary for small news organizations, and to try to break it down into smaller parts. You start with discovery, things we have to do to get people to find us in the first place. The second category is developing known audiences. What are all the things we could do from a marketing perspective to get people to build a habit of connecting with us? Then there is a more traditional subscriber acquisition and retention—the zillion things you have to do to get people to support you financially. Breaking things down into something that small organizations can chip away at can be helpful because you are not overwhelmed by marketing as this giant thing.
KJ: How can local news organizations make this work feel more doable?
TG: That’s what our approach at Blue Engine is centered around, the idea of being liberated by smallness. How do we take the infinite number of things we could do and break that down into a small number of things we can do right now? And having a backlog of ideas that’s always evolving, a list of things you should be chipping away at. Think small first, build a habit of moving with agility, and start as simple as a basic audit. You also want to prioritize the things that have the most likelihood of moving the needle. What can your small news organization get started on now that is not complicated?
KJ: Are there any trends that local newsrooms should be paying attention to?
TG: If you’re talking about small organizations, it’s more of a question of what avenues are at your disposal from a marketing perspective that you can leverage. If I’m just getting started, I want to start with what I can do that has an opportunity cost (as in, just my time rather than a dollar cost) before I start thinking about trends.
For example, there’s a reasonable chance that we will see something that looks like search that might be more AI-driven or chatbot-driven. But if you’re constantly fearing or trying to predict those next things, you are taking your eyes off all the things that you can do. Use the things at your disposal now, and be ready to apply those same skills and approaches to new opportunities. Think of yourself as a fisherman; as the fish move, you don’t just sit there, you find the fish elsewhere. Think of SEO. Smaller local news organizations often leave a lot of eyeballs on the table by not implementing good SEO practices. Even very simple things like the way your site is structured and tagged and how you write headlines, all those nuts and bolts are often not addressed in the way they should be.
KJ: How can news organizations use audience data, both qualitative and quantitative, to better inform their marketing approach?
TG: We think of four ways a news organization can get insights. One would be data and analytics that come from anywhere, such as your site, your newsletters, social platforms, search, etc. That’s the most obvious one. Then, there are the quantitative insights you can get from a survey. Another one is the qualitative insights you can get from talking to people. You might want to go right to focus groups, but that’s a level of formality that’s often unnecessary. The last category is just user testing, watching people interact with your product. We always encourage folks to audit the experience yourself too. But generally speaking, if you work at a news organization, you’re not a good proxy for your audiences. You’re just too connected to it. You’re probably a bigger news junkie than the vast majority of people that consume your content.
Ultimately, the more we can do to better understand your current and prospective audiences, the better. How many people should we be reaching? How many people are we reaching? How many are deeply connected? How many people pay us? That’s the funnel analytics way of looking at it. The more we can understand our audience’s pains and problems that they want to solve, the better because then we can actually start to do the work. This is where marketing and journalism become the same thing — how do we help make this community a better place to live by understanding what the problems are? Another way that can help even in smaller organizations is segmenting our audiences in many different ways, like geography, interest, demographics, psychographics, etc. The more we understand about our audiences, the better we are at targeting them and serving them.
We often ask news organizations what they’re trying to accomplish. For example, one organization wanted to be number one in the market. Okay, but that’s not that interesting. What’s happening in the market? What problem needs to be solved in the market? How can you use data, analytics, qualitative insights, etc., to understand the problems and then set out to solve them?
KJ: How can news organizations better use data when thinking about audience funnel/journeys?
TG: There are tactics we can deploy to deliver better performance at different stages. For example, you might find that you are doing a good job of attracting lots of audiences, but doing a really poor job of keeping them. So, we have a mid-funnel challenge. What do we need to do to get people to come back to the site one more time, read one more email newsletter and listen to one more podcast? Imagine yourself getting narrower, narrower and narrower with what you’re trying to solve — that’s when you can actually think of ideas to solve it.
For example, maybe we’re having difficulty getting people to sign up for our email newsletter. Now, that’s narrow. What’s the goal? Are we going to try to double our email newsletter volume in the next six months? Okay. What can we do to double our email newsletter in the next six months? Let’s take a look at the options to sign up for the newsletter. Is it prominent enough? Is it simple enough? Is that experience frictionless enough? Are there ways that we can do that off-site? Are there ways that we can do that within the newsletter itself? Are there ways that we can do that on the site? What would it look like if we prioritized email signup on every site page and made it super prominent and frictionless? That’s the journey of going from the funnel as a concept all the way down to a laundry list of tactics we should be experimenting with or testing to deliver performance in that one very narrow area.
KJ: What advice would you give to small teams trying to prioritize better marketing practices?
TG: You have to have ownership. If we go back to the coffee shop analogy, you can’t have no one who thinks about how to get more people to come into this coffee shop. Now, it would be great if you are big enough organization to have one person who thinks about how to get people here, and you have somebody else who thinks about how to create great coffee, and you have somebody else who thinks about how to increase monetization, but we don’t always have the luxury of that. But at least you need to have somebody who’s thinking about one of these stages. We need to think small, but we need to have somebody who owns it. Over time, you want to go from no one to someone, to many, to everyone. But if you are trying to go from no one to everyone in one move, it won’t work.
KJ: Can you give advice for driving subscriptions or donations in the current climate?
TG: This is a huge question. But since you’re talking about smaller organizations, let me give you a couple of things that we see a lot. One is not asking often enough. There’s a little bit of a tendency, especially in some smaller organizations, to feel sales-y. We’re concerned about asking too often. Instead, we need to find ways to ask more often and assertively.
I also see newsrooms using the same general value proposition for advertising and sponsorship and subscriptions/memberships/donations. How often do you see a value prop that says support local journalism? It’s not convincing anybody. So homing that value proposition in a way that is audience-focused, not us-focused is important. Be crystal clear about why that support, whether membership or subscription or donation, is good for the individual.
The third one is to make it easier for people to give you money. So often, you have to jump through too many hoops. And the abandonment rate is high. This is true with e-commerce of any type, not just our industry, but. it’s particularly high for us. And in part, that’s because the value proposition isn’t clear. The experience is bad. I’m trying to give you money, and it’s too much effort.
KJ: What advice would you give for re-engaging zombies/sleepers?
TG: We are doing a five-part series on subscriber or member retention, and the recent one was about zombies or sleepers. The trick is to build habituation and showcase your value long before you get to sleepers or zombies. If you can get to a point where people are paying for something they don’t know they’re paying for, you have to be very careful about interventions because you don’t want to necessarily poke someone who will just turn around and cancel. So, predicting that behavior first is better. Intervening to reinforce the value of the subscription or the membership or re-engaging with those folks is the best way to go.
KJ: How is AI affecting journalism marketing efforts?
TG: I’m seeing more opportunities where we could be evolving or finding efficiency gains. Things like using generative AI to help you with the first draft of marketing materials in the same way that you could be using them in the first draft for reporting. Language improvements are always really interesting. For example, give me five ideas on how to improve this language or make this subscription offer subject line better. You can use it as a sounding board.
How do we use AI to help us think more creatively? One really interesting example is a friend of ours, an entrepreneur working in a very small site in Europe, who uses AI to create skyline images done in the style of particular artists and then sells those as merch. So now we’ve gone to the creative application for the business of monetization of journalism, not just for the doing of journalism. There’s a lot to be explored there that we’re just getting started on.
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