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As a small business owner, you need to be a lot of things to make your business go—but you don't have to be a marketer alone. Join host Dave Charest, Director of Small Business Success at Constant Contact, and Kelsi Carter, Brand Production Coordinator, as they explore what it really takes to market your business. Even if marketing's not your thing! You'll hear from small business leaders just like you along with industry experts as they share their stories, challenges, and best advice to get real results. This is the Be a Marketer podcast! New episodes every Thursday!
Today on episode 56, you'll hear from a managing editor and publisher who's been sharing good news for over 22 years. This is the be a marketer podcast.
Marie:Be a marketer.
Dave:I'm your host, Dave Charest, director of small business success at Constant Contact. And I help small business owners like you make sense of online marketing. And on this podcast, we'll explore how to find the time to be a marketer. Remember, friend, you can be a marketer. And at Constant Contact, we're here to help.
Dave:Well, hello, friend, and thanks for joining me for another episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. Today's guest is Marie Gilmore. She's the managing editor and publisher of the Osprey Observer. Started over 22 years ago, this hometown paper grew into 4 local editions the Osprey Observer is what the Osprey Observer is what you used to know as your local hometown paper. It covers local people doing good things.
Dave:So how did Marie end up starting her own newspaper? Well, sometimes those personality tests tell you exactly where you're supposed to be. Let's pick up the conversation there.
Marie:When I was in high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. And I went to the guidance counselor's office and did a personality test, and she came down, sat me down and said, will you like to read, write, research, and talk to people? That sounds like journalism. And we didn't have the privilege of a high school newspaper, so she put me into internships at a daily newspaper, at a weekly newspaper, and at a daily newscast. And I ended up working at that daily newspaper.
Marie:It still publishes to this day. It's called the Calgary Sun, and it gave me the inspiration to go into journalism school and college. And I just fell in love doing something different every day. The phone's ringing, the typewriters typing because at that time, we were still typing on typewriters. The reporters calling in with urgent news, the buzz of the editors in the newsroom rushing pages back to the print press, and the press is cranking at 11 PM.
Marie:And out the back door pop all these newspapers and off the trucks go to deliver the daily news. So it was just so exciting. I was a copy runner. I was just a grunt, you know, delivering coffee and passing pages between editors and getting yelled at a lot. But I fell in love with it.
Marie:So I moved to Florida in 1996 when I got married to my husband. We settled in Florida, and I started working for the Tampa Tribune, the St. Pete Times doing freelance articles for them. And then I worked for a daily newspaper in New Tampa, and I was working till 3 and 4 in the morning learning everything about publishing newspapers. So when we moved out to Southeast Hillsborough County, it was a subdivision called Fishhawk Ranch, and it had 750 homes.
Marie:Today, there are 10,000 homes in the same community, and we still live there. So this is where we chose to raise our family, and I was pregnant with my first son who's now 23 years old. And my husband said, if not now, when You know, go ahead and do what you've always wanted to do. Take the vision of everything you've learned in your industry and put it together, and we created the Osprey newspaper. And 4 editions, and 22 years later, here we are still putting the good news.
Dave:Yeah. So, I mean, was that something you always wanted to do? Was like, I'm gonna start my own paper. Is it that that was the thing? Or
Marie:I always thought I'd work for a daily. You know? I really love the buzz of the newsroom and the speed and the phones ringing. I really always thought I would work for a big newspaper. I was gonna be a news reporter for a big paper.
Marie:But once I started a family, working till 4 AM didn't appeal as much anymore. Working every night and every weekend didn't seem quite as exciting anymore. And because I did it for somebody else, I kind of took the best of all the worlds I had worked in and put together a package of a lovable hometown paper where we go to press by 5 PM.
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:And you don't have to work nights and weekends, and you can absolutely raise a family and still be a part of the community at the same time.
Dave:So walk me through this process a little bit. What was it like to just, I mean, grow this paper?
Marie:It was absolutely crazy. So the very first edition was 750 copies, actually photocopied out of mailboxes, etcetera, in my neighborhood, and I knew the owner. And I borrowed the community's HOA golf cart, and I literally dropped it off door to door. So I was the paperboy. You know, I was the everything.
Marie:So I laid it out, I sold the ads, and I delivered it. And I just went out to businesses who were in the community. My lawnmower, a local trainer who is still advertising to this day, shout out to Rob's Fitness, who's been advertising for 22 years. But I said, hey. Newspaper fish out.
Marie:And they said, oh, yeah. Growing area. All the money is out there. Yes. Yes.
Marie:Yes. People just jumped at the opportunity to get into that community. So the 1st month was 750 copies. The 2nd and third month, I actually partnered with another newspaper to deliver. And by the 4th month, it had grown enough to go to a commercial printer, get printed on broadsheet, tabloid newsprint, and work with the US Postal Service to be mailed directly into the mailboxes, which we are still to this day mailed into over 60,000 USPS mailboxes per month in our community.
Marie:So that has become the most consistent eventually, and take it in
Dave:the house. And in there, you'll find
Marie:an Osprey observer. So, eventually and take it in the house, and in there, you'll find an Osprey Observer.
Dave:So walk me through a little bit of this because I have to imagine okay. Sure. As you're creating this, I mean, at this point, are you doing the reporting as well? Are you doing all of that? And then there's the whole other side of it because it's a free newspaper.
Dave:So, right, I'm gonna assume you're looking for sponsors, local spot like, those types of things to make this thing go. So, like, are you doing everything at this point, or how are you getting this stuff done?
Marie:For the 1st 4 months, absolutely, I did everything. I sold the ads. I did the layout. I did the reporting. I did everything.
Marie:By month 5, my first partner in the business, my first hire was an ad rep. And I called the lady I had known had been in the advertising arena at a small paper locally and we've become friendly. And I said, hey, what are you doing? She said, oh, nothing. I'm kinda retired.
Marie:I said, hey, I'm I'm starting this paper in fish out. What do you think? It's gonna be delivered to the mailbox. She said, hold on. Let me make one phone call.
Marie:If my friend buys an ad, I'm in. So she called her friend. He bought a half page full color ad on the back page of the paper, and she went from there and sold ads. Now we have 6 different ad reps that sell different territories of our community. That's not my favorite part, the selling of the ads, because I would give them away if we were sponsored by you know, if Elon wants to come in and support local journalism, you know, we will absolutely happily publish our information for free.
Marie:But in the meantime, we have to sell ads.
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:And we our advertising 100% supports our printing, our delivery, and we have 14 freelance writers who write for us. We have 6 ad reps, and then we have our office team. So we just grew exponentially from that point with one addition. We started with 1 ad rep and 1 writer, and then the next person we added was a billing manager because it's important to keep that in
Dave:Mhmm.
Marie:Order. And then as we expanded 2 editions, then 3 editions, then finally 4 editions, which we're very happy in this place of one edition per week and 4 editions per month and 4 communities per month, we have the staff who can support that.
Dave:Was it always in your purview that it was gonna get this big, or was that a surprise to you?
Marie:It was a 100% a surprise. The fish aug edition went from that 750 homes hand delivered to 14,000 homes and more community yeah. Within about the 1st year. And so after that point, communities were still asking, and that was just based on people saying, hey. Come to my neighborhood.
Marie:Hey. We need good news like yours. Hey. Come to our area. We sort of covered Southeast Hillsborough County is a bedroom community of Tampa.
Marie:We're all considered unincorporated Hillsborough County, but our areas where the post office delivers is Lithia, Valrico, Brandon, Riverview, Apollo Beach. So we are small towns within one major town. If our town was incorporated, we'd be a city of about a 130,000 people. Mhmm.
Dave:But in
Marie:the meantime, we're kind of these geographical areas. So we sort of took the high school zones. So every community that goes to a certain high school would sort of be a community
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:Because they all have something in common. They shop in the same stores. They use the same services, and the kids go to the same high school. So we do a fall football preview, and we do all the high school varsity football teams and do profiles. And so that's kind of how we designated our territory.
Marie:So our additions are Bloomingdale Fish Off. Then the next week, we go to Riverview Apollo Beach, the following week to Valrico, and the following week to Brandon Winthrop. And for those people who live out here, there are known geographical areas that designate the territory that you live in.
Dave:Got it. Okay. Before we even get to so the growth of this thing, but, like, did you ever have any like, did you have any doubts about doing this as you were getting started?
Marie:So no. We were having so much fun, and you did ask about if I ever imagined how large it could get, and absolutely not. I just wanted to have enough of a newspaper to have fun
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:Do what I wanted to do, and take it from there. But, again, so communities in new territories were asking for newspapers. So when we had our Bloomingdale fish hawk edition situated with 14,000 homes, the Riverview territory was growing. And they were asking for the paper. They said, we don't have news like this.
Marie:We have things to cover as well. And so we gave them a newspaper, and then more communities were asking. We gave them a newspaper, and finally, Brandon Winthrop. And what we do that kind of makes us special is we don't deliver to every single home in Brandon, for instance. In the Brandon territory, there are 32,000 homes.
Marie:We carve out the top 14,000 with the post office, USPS, you know, every door direct mail. We do the statistics, and we're targeting a single family homeowner in a master plan development with an average household income of $75,000. So we're looking for those readers who have a little bit of disposable income that are gonna fix up their house, that are staying in the community. We would love to go to everyone, and that's why a lot of the additional things that we do that I'm sure we'll talk about try to stay in communication with those people, but we've carved out those demographics that are very appealing to our advertisers.
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:And then we only publish as many pages as what the advertising for each edition can support. So we only grow as quickly as the territory grows, and every edition is a different page count, and every edition has different news in it.
Dave:Or what have you found to be and maybe this has changed over the years, but what is the most challenging thing about running this paper?
Marie:So I definitely will say the challenges have changed throughout the years. I would say in the 22 years, I would say there are no less than 20 competitive publications that have come and gone throughout the years. You know, glossy magazines and feature type profile magazines and things like that. And we've just stayed the course. We laser focus on what we do.
Marie:We provide customer service. We try to provide all the best services for our small businesses, and we just have to stay laser focused. In the last, let's say, since 2020 and the shutdown, the pandemic was very challenging for our advertisers. We are a 100% supported by local doctors, dentists, orthodontists, retailers, restaurants. And all of a sudden within 72 hours, 60% of our advertisers were shut down by law.
Dave:Yeah. Well, how do you navigate that time period then?
Marie:So it was very interesting. So I will say Zoom became our friend.
Dave:Mhmm.
Marie:I had never heard of Zoom prior to the pandemic. It wasn't on our radar, but we now have weekly staff meetings on Zoom. I have conducted interviews on Zoom. We actually do our summer internships with our high school and college students over Zoom now. So Zoom is part of our daily, you know, our daily workday, and we had never heard of it.
Marie:So we also took all of our staff and made anyone who want to work remote. We upgraded technology, and now they're still working remote if they didn't wanna come back to the office. So we have 4 or 5 people in the office, and everyone else works absolutely remote and very efficiently. We have a very dedicated team, so we're very fortunate. As a community newspaper, we were always essential business.
Marie:So we could always operate because we were communicating with readers. So what we did is we immediately pivoted, and we contacted all of our advertisers. And we said, if you are shut down, we are going to give you the option of holding your advertising until you're able to open back up or run your advertising at a 50% discount to give your readers a message, to give your customers a message of, if you have an emergency, call us. We'll be back stronger than ever. You know, something to that.
Marie:And about 80% of our advertisers took the discount and kept advertising throughout their shutdown, which we're very appreciative of. And we immediately assigned one reporter to do a series of stories called living in COVID Mhmm. Which was what businesses were doing to cope and to change. We had an amazing local brewery, Bullfrog Creek Brewing. They immediately started doing drive by pickups.
Marie:So you would order online, drive by, pick up your 6 pack. And I'm not technically a beer drinker, but they started brewing root beer and cream soda.
Dave:Oh, wow.
Marie:Because the kids were homeschooling. Sure. I would run by, preorder, run by, pick up a 6 pack of root beer, and the kids got a real treat of doing root beer. A photographer in our community went around and did driveway COVID family photographs. So he would distance on the sidewalk, and the family would stay up by the house.
Marie:And he provided free portraits for families because we were all stuck together inside for so long. So everyone who got creative and did things to survive during the pandemic, we were happy to give them stories and coverage and keep communicating with our readers.
Dave:Yeah. So, I mean, right, like, the COVID and what's happened there is kind of an obvious one, right? Where in terms of everybody's kind of had to adapt and change the way they do business. And, like, I mean, we're on Zoom right now. Right?
Dave:Like all of that. And so I guess from I think there's a whole other element here of and obviously, you'll be able to speak to this, like, just in terms of like a newspaper. Right. And just having to deal with the digital aspect of everything. And so I guess, like, maybe walk me through a little bit, like, how have you seen things change?
Dave:And is there anything that you've had to do to adapt to those changes?
Marie:Sure. A 100%. So we've seen a lot change in the 22 years since we've been here. I can remember we used to have so much more competition.
Dave:Mhmm.
Marie:So we used to have a daily that had a regional weekly, and the regional weekly had a monthly feature magazine. And The Daily doesn't exist anymore. It's the Tampa Tribune that was bought out by the St. Pete Times and then immediately stopped publishing. The regional disappeared, so they don't have a brand and news anymore for our community.
Marie:And then the St. Pete Times dropped their publishing. They still publish online a newspaper 7 days a week, but only 2 days a week is it printed. So the Tampa Bay area no longer has a daily newspaper per se. It has a digital newspaper 7 days a week, but a printed newspaper twice a week.
Marie:So in that essence, we are printing a newspaper once a week. So we're printing almost as frequently as the daily at this point, and we're going to every mailbox within our demographic zone. The statistics used to be 1 in 9 households was receiving a newspaper by subscription. Now I would venture that that number is probably 1 in 50 if it's even accurate.
Dave:Right.
Marie:On a Sunday morning up and down my street, my house is one of 2 that I see that still get a Sunday paper. But it's because I'm a newspaper person. I wanna read everything.
Dave:You know? I love Right. Right. Right.
Marie:I love reading the newspaper. I separate my sections, and I have a process. I don't enjoy the digital read of the daily newspaper as well. Too many sections, too many pages. That being said, we have certainly had to adapt to technology.
Marie:So we still have a great demographic, a great population in our area that likes to read the paper. We're monthly in your mailbox. We're asking you to take 20 minutes and read your local paper. And because everything pertains to you, it is interesting and people will take the time. But we also recognize that there's another generation of our people that have a very short attention span that need to be engaged in a different way.
Marie:And so, therefore, we have a strong social media page. We love to use our eblast. Every 2 weeks, we send our Constant Contact eblast, and we have for over 17 years used our Constant Contact e blast to communicate with our readers. We have Twitter, Instagram. We already have a podcast.
Marie:We're on YouTube. We try to do live videos here and there. We don't try to call ourselves a video production company, so they're not necessarily always polished and excellent, but they're fun to do.
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:And if we can do it, we wanna engage. And so what we present to our local businesses, most of our support, most of our paid advertising comes from local small businesses that the public relations and the marketing and the branding opportunities they're going to have aligning with the Osprey Observer is far greater than the support they're gonna get anywhere else. And we're there to help them succeed. It doesn't benefit us. We all live and work in this community.
Marie:It does not benefit us to lose our little mom and pop ice cream shop. You know, that's who we need to support. And they can afford an ad in the paper, and then we support them with all the other features.
Dave:So I wanna kinda get into this. Right? As you're thinking about the things that you're doing now and doing today, so I guess I guess the first question is if you take a moment in time right now, like, what are your top priorities when it just comes to the business, the paper, marketing, all of that? Like, what's your list of things to focus on right now?
Marie:So list of things to focus on right now is pretty much helping our small businesses overcome objections they have to paying for print advertising and flipping that into SEO marketing. So we get our local mom and pop ice cream shop, for instance, and they don't know what SEO marketing is. They don't understand how to do it. But a slick salesperson can go in and convince them that they need to pay x, y, z per month to get thousands and thousands of people to see their shop. And we go in and say, yes.
Marie:You can get thousands of views, but if they're not in a 3 to 5 mile geographic targeted area, they're not coming to your mom and pop for ice cream.
Dave:Mhmm.
Marie:You know? Whereas, I can guarantee that 14,000 of your neighbors are getting the newspaper, and those are your direct customers.
Dave:Well, I was gonna say, I think you probably have to deal with 2 from a sales perspective. Like, yeah, you know, you're getting people to be like, oh, the paper. But, like, the storyline is, well, the papers are dying. Right? And so, like, how do you I guess, you have to overcome that challenge when it comes to talking to the business owners that you're speaking to.
Dave:But I guess then you've also got the the plus of well, they probably know you already. Right? Because they are in that community, and they see it. So they can see it. Because, like, I feel like, you know, I've had conversations with business owners before and talking about, like, taking out a local ad in the paper.
Dave:But I I guess I'm trying to figure out, like, what is as you're talking, I'm because of the hyper localness, like, I think that's what's making this work. Whereas if you're with a bigger paper, one, you're probably paying more. They've got a larger overhead. Like, it's just the financials don't work where you've got this, like, hyperlocalness that feels to me makes this thing even possible. Right?
Dave:Am I off on that, or am I close? No.
Marie:You're you're really catching on on kind of our niche and how we've never really fit in with the traditional model
Dave:of newspaper.
Marie:And it was interesting because at the same business expo, a young man who did the speed networking, you know, the 2 minute speed networking, and it was a lot of fun. And he said, I worked for Gannett for 10 years. And he goes, how are you surviving? And because he's kind of in the know, I kind of told him our business model that we're direct mail, so we're not subscription. We have a specific demographic, and our ad price for a small business starts at an eighth of page, which is the size of a postcard for $100 per month.
Marie:Yeah. And he goes, why didn't you teach this to every newspaper in America before we lost
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:70% of our hometown papers? And so during the pandemic, we won grants from Facebook, grants from Google. We were running grants left and right as local hometown newspapers because 70% of them have disappeared. 70% of our hometown communities, small areas, don't have a local paper. So as it stands, because we cover good news, I don't have a journalist down at the county courthouse.
Marie:I don't have a journalist down town at every county commission meeting. We just don't have the resources for it. I would love to. And so we're lacking as a community, as residents, as a culture. We're lacking the watchdogs who keep track of decisions being made on our behalf that are easy to pass by us and go, wait a minute.
Marie:When did that tax pass? Or what what happened to that project? Oh, well, we talked about in a public forum, in a public meeting, but there was no one there to report on it. So we had our 1st fire station open in our community 2 years ago. In 13 years, Hillsborough County has not opened a fire station, and we were the only media outlet in attendance.
Marie:There just aren't that many reporters left to go around, and it's kind of detrimental to news, to news coverage. And so for me, looking forward, our biggest challenge is just staying relevant, current. And like you said, our reputation is great in our community. Everybody likes us. We sponsor a lot of things.
Marie:We get involved in things. We're still boots on the ground. We're members of 4 local chambers, and we stay engaged and try to get to know the new businesses coming into town. But a lot of time, we hear from corporate entities. We don't do print advertising anymore.
Marie:So we try to explain to them that, yes, we are a printed product, but we're also a business partner.
Dave:We're a
Marie:public relations business partner. There's few things we can do. We have press releases. We run business profiles on our businesses. We're an editorial partner with our businesses.
Marie:We also put every single story online on our website, ospreyobserver.com. We have a flippable page and then the stories get embedded into our website. So talking about SEOs, we have 100 of thousands of hits every single month because we're so content rich
Dave:Right.
Marie:With all that data. People are finding us all the time, and we're trying to encourage them again to succeed. We wanna help these small businesses. And the direct mail aspect is really what's saved us and kept us very top of mind for some of the larger corporations because they're like, yes, we want those mailboxes.
Dave:We
Marie:know how expensive direct mail is.
Dave:Okay. So walk me through, I guess, when you're thinking about marketing, I guess, take me through what are the because I feel like there's a couple of sides to this. Right? So there's readers, there's advertisers, there's probably more that I don't even know about. So, like, how do you think through marketing, and what does that look like for
Marie:you? For marketing for the newspaper?
Dave:For the Or
Marie:for a business, like, when we walk into a business?
Dave:Well, for the newspaper first. Right? I think you've got different audiences here that so but it's ultimately stems from the newspaper. Right? So how do you think about this is where I'm getting I'm confusing myself.
Dave:Right? Like, how do you get to in the hands of the reader, And then how do you also market the other side of it, which is the advertisers to be want to be in the paper that you're getting into the hands of the readers. Right? So and whatever else that looks like.
Marie:Yeah. So I'll we'll do 2 tier
Dave:response here. So for the
Marie:paper, you're right. Even with 20 2 years of reputation in the community, we're still branding and growing the Osmoobserve brand. And so we're very specific and very intentional with our team. So in the local chambers, we are represented with auction items, sponsorships. We all wear embroidered shirts, Very important to wear name tags.
Marie:We brand a lot of swag and pass it out in the community. We do a lot of things. We do great American teach ins, and we present, make sure every kid leaves with newspapers and swags and notepads that say official reporter and pens, and the kids get a real kick out of it. And then our through our social media. We do a lot of branding, marketing, and PR through there.
Marie:So we are building the brand of Osmoobe Observer absolutely with everything that we do in the community. And then for our small businesses, when we walk into a new mom and pop, the first thing we are is bright eyed and bushy tailed. We're so excited. Oh my goodness. There's something new in our community if it especially if it's food related.
Marie:We love new foods. You know? New restaurants, new foods. So I'll give you a great for instance, we have a new mom and pop coffee cart. They do lattes and coffees and things like that, and they did a ribbon cutting with a local chamber.
Marie:So the ad rep said, you know, they really don't have a budget to do a lot of marketing. And I said, I get that. Starting a small business with a mom and pop is really difficult. I said, how about this? We bring them to the Oscars of our office.
Marie:We'll tell all our readers through social media that coffee's on us today. We'll have people come. Maybe some of the businesses will need a coffee cart for an event. No matter what, they're gonna be on a nice boulevard and get some name recognition, and we'll put them through our social media channels. We'll throw them in our e blast on Constant Contact, and we'll get them some press.
Marie:So no matter what happens, we're gonna give our readers some coffee, which fits right along with the newspaper. You know?
Dave:Yeah. Of course.
Marie:And then we're gonna give this small business press. They're gonna remember us. We spread a lot of goodwill. They're gonna remember us. And if and when they succeed, they're gonna say they got their start at the Osprey observer, and that is the story told over and over and over again.
Marie:There's no bad words in the community about things we do because we'll give free press to any charity fundraiser, people doing good things, you know, raising money for cancer or for any cause. If there's an event, we're happy to donate a silent auction prize. We're happy to do a story, give it a little bit of press, and try to just make an impact as much as we can. We've also, in 22 years, learned a lot of people. So unfortunately, for our front office staff, we put an ad in a few months ago that said, have any question, call the Osprey.
Marie:So Oops. We had people calling, you know. Yeah. Well, how do I find an animal rescue? How do I do this?
Marie:Well, we pretty much have contacts in all arenas of our community. So there's very few things that they could call and ask that we can't, in some way, connect them with. You know? So we're always happy to help. And Jen's like, did we have to put that in the, you know, out there in the community that you know?
Marie:So we've become the white pages for or yellow pages in that matter for whoever needs something. You know? We're here to help. We know the good businesses who treat people right out here.
Dave:So when you start thinking about, I guess, how you're looking at success and making it work, are there particular things that you're looking at in terms of, like, metrics? Right? Like, what are you looking at to know, okay, this is successful. And even if it's not a number, if it's something else, like because sometimes it's not. Right?
Dave:So, like, what does that success look like to you, and how are you tracking towards it?
Marie:Sure. So my measure of success is I've had the opportunity over 22 years to raise 3 boys. I have only boys. So 3 boys have been raised with the privilege of being able to keep them each home for 1 year due to the business. In fact, I have a 23 year old, a 19 year old, and a 9 year old in 4th grade.
Marie:And so the 9 year old was able to stay in the office with me for a whole year. And I had pack and plays and bumbo seats and high chairs, and I got laughed at because I would bring them to every chamber meeting and annual dinner that there was. But I had that privilege of keeping him with me for a year, and then thank goodness we both needed the structured day at the daycare. So and now he's in 4th grade, but I did have that opportunity. So having the privilege to raise my family and then the University of Tampa Business Students did a big strategic plan study of the business plan.
Marie:And they came out and they identified different areas where we could expand into our 5th and 6th and 7th edition.
Dave:Mhmm.
Marie:And at the end of the day, we looked at the team we had and publishing 1 newspaper per week and the capacity of staff it would require to expand to those territories would have been growth. And we're pretty happy at 4 additions per month. And, you know, between the pandemic and everything else, we kinda had to take a step back and think about how much is enough and how much do you need. And so I've been able to raise my family, put my kids through college, live a fairly happy life, and I love coming to work every day. We've got a good team of staff, and everybody appreciates the flexibility of working for a small business because family first.
Marie:A kid calls, somebody's sick, run, you know, and, again, because we go to press at 5 PM, there's never really that emergency of, oh my gosh. I gotta stay at work till midnight or 1 AM or 2 AM. And, you know, my husband used to bring me food at 3 and 4 in the morning because I was still working on that paper that had to get depressed. But due to technology now, you know, we upload and we send it off to the commercial printer, and we used to have to run the CDs, you know, in the middle of the night to the 24 hour presses. But things have adjusted.
Marie:And life is good. Life is really good. So I you know, the thing I would like to do is become more successful and compensate the team more who is worth every cent
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:And be able to really feel appreciated. They're appreciated in time. They're appreciated in treats and thank yous, and we do a ton of team building in the community. But I would love to make them really, you know, really feel well compensated for their efforts. We have a great team who wants to be here, and they appreciate working for their hometown paper.
Marie:And they're dedicated to their community, And we try to do as much as we can to appreciate them for that. So we kind of run you know, we're still running on slim margins, so there's not a ton a ton of, you know, kind of perks as as it was if we were working for Google or Apple and you hear of, you know, everybody getting spoiled at big corporations. We don't have beanbag chairs and swings out back and a cafeteria and and a, know, barista making a coffee. But we have a Keurig.
Dave:We have a
Marie:Keurig that's unlimited coffee. You know? Whatever you want. And then we do a lot of fun things as a team. So we have the opportunity this week in our community is the sun and fun air show with the Thunderbirds are coming to town.
Marie:And so we have opportunity to partner with them. And so we've got tickets for the team. They always get first dibs on things like that. We go to Florida Orchestra as a team and we did the Beatles show this year and we enjoy each other's company and we have fun doing it. It's all about raising good people and being a part of our community and making an impact where we choose to raise our family.
Dave:Yeah. So I wanna talk a little bit about, you know, where does Constant Contact come into all of this?
Marie:Yeah. I'd love to talk about that. So we realized after a few years, we've been publishing 22 years, and I'm pretty sure we've been a member of Constant Contact for about 18 years or more. We're very consistent in our campaign. So we looked at it.
Marie:And even 17 years ago, we had to think about how often, how frequently to talk to our people. So we cultivated our emails list by events. We used to do a lot of community events, a lot of expos, a lot of booths. And if we don't do so many anymore, you know, post pandemic, there's not as many events like that. And now we look at it's Florida.
Marie:Is it indoors? Yeah. You know, we don't wanna do the outside bouncy castle boost quite as much anymore. But we used to give away prizes, and we would have people sign up. And they knew they were signing up for our newsletter.
Marie:And we'd say, listen. We're in your mailbox once a month. We'd love to be in your inbox twice a month. And so we go every other Friday, and we give them sort of a reminder of current events. There could be activities or events in our community that we missed in the printed newspaper because we're 4 monthlies.
Marie:Sometimes things come up that we missed. Therefore, we have the opportunity to put them in our eblast. So we still have that chance to communicate with people. And then for our company, we always have partnerships with great things with tickets. So we always do a giveaway at the bottom of every Constant Contact so we could have a lot of communication in there.
Marie:But at the bottom, there's always a way to enter to win something. So right now, one of our latest eblast is enter to win a free week of summer camp. And what we have is a summer camp guide. And then all of our summer camp advertisers, we do a sweepstakes. Mhmm.
Marie:A contest, a fill in contest, and people choose all the camps they would like to win a week for. We'll pick a winner, and that winner will buy them a week of camp. It could be up to $500, but we'll go to the camp, and we'll buy them a week at camp. And so that's a great prize. So we do a fantastic holiday sweepstakes.
Marie:The prizes are usually between $35,000, and one person comes in and picks up 30 baskets of everything you can ever imagine from all of our partners that wanna advertise with us at the holiday time. So we try to do all these things to engage our readers. It's one more method that, again, we understand we're monthly and we're gonna miss things. But can we communicate you with you every 2 weeks, every other Friday, not too often, but just enough to keep you engaged with the Osprey Observer. The other thing that I try to explain to my small businesses when they open is, yes, social media is great.
Marie:Yes, you should collect a text message if you're a restaurant or retailer. However, email is the strongest piece of information you're ever going to collect from a customer because everyone has to clear their inbox. It might not be today. It might not be immediately when they receive it, but you can't stand it when those little bold, unread emails are staring right at you. So at some point, that is going to be your most consistent form of communication with your clients.
Marie:And so it's amazing to me how a lot of our small businesses have passed that opportunity to collect that data, and they just sit and don't understand why nobody's coming in. And that's a chance for a retailer especially to say, hey. It's a slow day. We have room for a haircut. We have room for a massage today.
Marie:Come on in. The social media channels, which have been fantastic for communication, but if you're not up on all the algorithms and the SEOs and how to boost posts, it's not gonna go anywhere. Nobody's gonna see it, and you're gonna just wonder why it didn't get any traction. The other thing I kind of realized during your talk was all the other channels are trying to earn more dollars for your promotion.
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:And with Constant Contact, I am a client, so I've already paid for my membership in the Constant Contact. So you're encouraging and driving our campaigns to be successful. And so the excitement I had was bringing Jen who does our eblast designs. And some of the different things that got me so excited were testing out 2 headlines
Dave:Mhmm.
Marie:With 1 campaign
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:And seeing which one sort of tracks better with the audience. That is gonna be something really exciting to say, hey. Do they want keywords? Do they want, you know, demands? Do they want engagement?
Marie:Do they want win win win, you know, tongue in cheek things? What kinda gets more opens? You know?
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:Do our people have a sense of humor?
Dave:Well, what I'm curious. What are I guess, you know, what are are there any notable results that you're seeing from using Constant Contact?
Marie:So we get hundreds of entries for our contests each and every 2 weeks. So every 2 weeks, we run a contest. So this particular one is for the sun and fun air show with the Thunderbirds. And we've gotten 250 entries, and it's interesting because contesting as a small business in Florida is interesting a Facebook algorithm program that we pay for called contest for pages on Facebook, and they take care of all the legality side of it for the entries. So we do that through social media.
Marie:Through Constant Contact, what we do is we actually promote the contest, but people physically have to then email in an entry. So we're asking them to do some hard work. It's not as easy as a click through.
Dave:Right.
Marie:They physically have to go enter. And so for me, to get 250 entries and we're gonna get one winner is absolutely incredible. That's a lot of, you know, entries. When we used to do contests in the newspaper and do mail ins, we were lucky to get 25 entries mailed in when they would have to fill it in and put a stamp on it and send it in. So we're very happy with the results, and we're constantly trying to grow and build that audience because I do think it's a strong way of communicating.
Marie:And if we need to get information out to our readers or to the community in a quick way, that is the method we will use.
Dave:So you're doing a lot of these great things obviously to engage with your readers and the people that are connected to your email list. Are you doing anything else there as well? Like, are you communicating with sponsors that way? Are you sharing news, like, in the digital form through the email as well? Like, I guess, what are the other things that you're doing with or not doing with Kansakate?
Marie:So we can do better. Okay. And that is something that also why we wanted to come and hear you speak and sort of make a connection with someone at the constant contact level, and we did. We did with our local resident, which is Stephanie Alonzo, and, actually, she's in the local paper. We actually printed her.
Dave:Yay. So
Marie:we'll have to get you a digital edition, but she actually follow she actually followed directions. Yeah. Post event, we sent out an email to all the people we met. We said, here's the link to our free press release. Please submit a 100 words, and here's how we can help you.
Marie:Here's some free things we can do for you. And she immediately responded and sent us in her headshot and a little bio, and we were happy to put her in the paper. And we have plans to meet with her and discuss how we can work more with what we have through our constant contact relationship and what we're missing.
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:And so I think your idea of engaging with our actual advertisers, with our clients, with our businesses is strong. Yeah. And that's where we should be making sure that they all know the features available to them with their relationship with us because we're sort of depending on their advertising rep communicating that to them, and I'm sure they are. But Yeah. They might have missed a step or somebody might have forgot a piece.
Marie:And so there's a lot they can get from their partnership with us that we wanna make sure they're taking full advantage of and, again, for the success of their business. So, yes, we would like to do more. Sharing the news, we sort of shared the highlights of upcoming events in our Constant Contact. But, yes, we could be also sharing more news. We do publish news once a week in an addition in the area.
Marie:So, yes, we could probably do a better job at that as well. And we have not sampled sending a weekly eblast and what that would look like. What we do know is we have a very low unsubscribe rate.
Dave:Mhmm.
Marie:And I think because we're not too too frequent, Sometimes, you know, if you get too many communications, it can be too much. So we're trying to find that sweet spot of Yeah. Just enough, just the right amount, giving the right amount of good information and strong contest that they wanna stay on the list.
Dave:Well, are you doing any segmentation at all? Are you breaking up your overall list into smaller pieces either based on so you're for a podcast where there's a shaking of a head no. So so
Marie:I'm like
Dave:you sure you're not doing anything there? So I
Marie:will tell you this this our lists are broken up sometimes by a vet.
Dave:Got it. Okay.
Marie:So if we go into the back end of our Constant Contact, we can see where people signed up because that's how they're segmented. Yep. But typically, when we send, we said, send to all of them.
Dave:Right.
Marie:You know? So the way we have it is, like, maybe holiday event 2019
Dave:or
Marie:contest 2020 or something. But we have not segmented them into advertisers, which could be a really interesting
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:Area to explore. I would like to do that. And we have not we've used it more as a communication tool
Dave:Yep.
Marie:Than business. And you know what? I think that's a light bulb moment of we can be using it as a strong business tool
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:To send our current advertisers. Hey. Are you guys taking advantage of the 5 things you get with your campaign with us Yeah. Including x
Dave:y z. It's I mean, it's really interesting. I think, you know, you've got this you've been a customer for a while. You've been doing this for a while, and you've got a good foundation of things that have been working. And I think it's nice to get to that point where you're like, you know what?
Dave:Wait a minute. There are probably some other things that we can do to build on this already strong foundation of things that have been working for us. And I it's great to have those moments. I think it's similar to, you know, even when you're you're talking to these other advertisers or things like that that may not know or be ready for something that you can offer them. Right?
Dave:But, like, oh, when they're ready, it's like, yes. Okay. Cool. I love that. So let me ask you this question then.
Dave:What would it be like trying to run your business without Constant Contact?
Marie:Well, I will tell you this, that there was a time that I was trying to email my clients without constant contact, and we were constantly getting kickbacks and getting threats of being called spam. And our email carrier at the time prior to Gmail, it was maybe an I think it was actually Outlook at the time. Yep. If you sent more than maybe 100 email addresses and somebody noted you as spam, they would say you've been identified as spam. And there was a threat several times that we would get locked out of our own email.
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:Or wouldn't have the ability to email anymore. And I can remember the panic of needing to receive an ad one day, and we were convinced Outlook had locked us out and that client couldn't get it through. And what are we gonna do if we can't get email anymore? And, you know, it actually could have affected our business at the time.
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:So that's when I started exploring an email client, something that we could input our addresses to that would offer the unsubscribe, and we had to get more professional with it. We realized all of a sudden, you cannot just be emailing a 100 people at a time and things like that. And it's funny because I almost sort of put that out of my mind because it's now been so long that we have ever had a threat of being locked over email for spamming, you know, spamming people. But can you imagine a day without email anymore?
Dave:I know.
Marie:I mean, that's, you know, that's a major major form of communication. That's, you know, how you can DocuSign. You can buy a house, buy a car, sell a thing. There's everything you can do now online, but you've gotta have an email address. And and so at that time, I think it was something that was a forced item on us.
Marie:I can remember also we changed to another client for 1 single month. You know? Because when you get over a certain threshold, it gets a little more expensive. And, oh, you've got this many addresses now. Well, now I'm proud to have enough addresses to pay a higher threshold because, okay, those are solid contacts of ours, and we've dumped a lot of old addresses and everything like that.
Marie:But at the time, we said, oh, let's go to another oh, it was not easy to use. It wasn't friendly. I couldn't drag and drop. I immediately ran back and said, whew. Phew.
Marie:Don't do that again. And from that point on, I've never considered changing. It's been very, you know, stable, very consistent, and keeping up with the times and offering new things. So the other item I want to add that I talked to Stephanie about, we're gonna work on it together, is adding our podcast videos into our e blast as well. And so I think that'll be another addition to just showcase putting some of our features together because we're doing the work on all these different elements and channels and then sort of doing the collaboration of getting the benefit
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:Through our Constant Contact.
Dave:Let me add I've got a couple of other questions here for you. So I guess the first would be so when you're thinking through the things that you are doing, how do you actually are you scheduling time with I forget with your woman's name is helping Jen. So do you guys schedule time together? Like, how do you get the marketing done, and how do you find the time for the marketing stuff? Like, what does that process look like?
Marie:So it's sort of happening all the time. We kind of partner with our businesses and our local chambers to kinda do the work for us. So all we kinda have to do is show up to the events and activities that are always scheduled. I can tell you, I just tossed it away. But every week, we have a staff meeting over Zoom Yeah.
Marie:And we call it we kinda collaborate, and everybody collects all the events from all the local chambers and all the local businesses. And we go over them 1 by 1 and decide who's covering it. If we absolutely cannot get to an event, who's in charge of following up? Our local chambers are very good about sending us ribbon cutting pictures and pictures of local businesses and press releases. So they're excellent at partnering with us, and they know that they can also get those businesses press in the paper if they send us those piece of information.
Marie:And then for Jen, all the ad reps are sending her information, flyers, current events all week long, and she is collecting that information for the 2 weeks as she's building that e blast. So it's sort of a team effort. We really work on what the theme of the e blast is. We sort of talk about at the staff meeting prior. Really, it's all related around the contest Yeah.
Marie:And what the prize is gonna be too.
Dave:Yeah. Gotcha. Alright. So some things I've been hearing a lot throughout this conversation that I've heard you say, and I just my question is gonna be, where does this come from? But some things that I've heard are, you know, like what's the free thing that we can do for you?
Dave:Or a customer experience is really important. And so my question is, where does that come from and what have you found as a result of doing that type of thing?
Marie:So what we learned very early on is the givers gain attitude. And, basically, the more we give to a small business, the more goodwill they feel towards us. And when we've written them up as a press release and we've written a story about them and we've delivered newspapers and we've tried to help them find a printer for their business cards or a banner for their business, then the goodwill is there so they think of us when all the other salespeople come through. You know? And there's gonna be others.
Marie:There's other coupon books and different things out there. In fact, in our local chamber meeting this morning, a charity stood up and said, we're starting a magazine. Would you like to advertise? And I'm like, oh, good for you. Why are you starting a magazine?
Marie:You know, that's a lot of hard work. And printing is really expensive, but okay. You know? So there's just always something coming around the bend. So we really have learned that the givers gain attitude really does work in small business.
Marie:So sometimes people say, well, what's in it for me? You know, if I do this or if I give that or I do this, what's in it for me? And I say, you know, over the years, we give a lot as far as silent auction prizes. But what I've learned is every person who walks by that silent auction basket at that event feels good that the Oscars are donated to their kids' school, their kids' little league. They may not win the prize, but they're gonna know that we were present and that when requested, we gave.
Dave:Yeah.
Marie:And so to me, it's kinda that givers gain attitude, and I'm happy to help. If I have knowledge that I can share with someone that helps them succeed in their business, then I'm happy to do it. So it didn't really come up in our interview thus far, but I didn't grow up in the United States. I grew up in Canada. So I immigrated here when I was 21 years old, and a lot of people gave me opportunities to build my experience in the journalism world, to plant my feet, to start my family, and to grow my business.
Marie:So I understand the concept of the streets are paved with gold because the opportunity is there. And I had the opportunity to take my journalistic experience and my education from Canada, bring it to the United States, and grow a business where we have success in our community, and I'm very proud of that. So maybe it's that Canadians are always considered really nice, so maybe it's that niceness, you know, that came with me when I immigrated to the United States in 2004. I became a citizen. Actually, this month will be 20 years that I have been a citizen and a voter in the United States, so I'm thinking I need to hold a party.
Dave:I think so.
Marie:And I've gotten involved in a lot of things that some of my friends say I'm the most patriotic immigrant they've ever met. A few years ago, I got involved in an organization called Honor Flight, taking World War 2 vets to DC for a one day trip. And I went on 7 Honor Flights with 7 World War 2 vets between the ages of 86 99 years old. And it was the honor of my life. We go for one single day, and we're home the same day on a charter flight from Saint Pete Clearwater.
Marie:And it really adjusts your perspective of everything people went through to get us to where we are today and give us the privilege we have to live free and have the opportunities we have. So I'm happy to give and support a small business starting out and just kind of repay the favor. Pay it forward for what people did for me when I was starting out.
Dave:Yeah. So if you had one piece of advice for another business owner out there when it comes to well, I'll just say business advice, whether that's marketing or just business, what would that be?
Marie:I also have another gift that's for free that I'll plug for a second. It's a few years old, but I actually wrote a lot of this information down. I wrote a little book.
Dave:Oh, I love it.
Marie:It's called open for business now what, and this is free on Kindle to download from Amazon. So in that book, it's exactly what to do after you've opened for business and opened the shingle. It is make sure all your friends and neighbors know what you do. You know? Send out a press release to your local paper.
Marie:Get involved in a local chamber. And the best advice I can give is don't try to do everything yourself. The local chamber becomes your giant marketing, branding, and public relations firm. In that chamber, you have your printing division. You have your SEO division.
Marie:You have your newspaper division. You have everything you need to be a corporation. So don't try to do everything yourself. Go find and collaborate with some experts that can help you. If you are opening a small business, make sure your food is excellent, your service is on point, and let the printer do their job.
Marie:Mhmm. Let everybody do their lane, and you stay in your lane and laser focus on your business.
Dave:Well, friend, let's recap some items from that discussion. Number 1, get ingrained in the local community. If there's a shortcut to success, it's that your involvement in your community matters. The success of a printed newspaper in the digital age beyond the hard work, customer service, and quality, really rests on the hyperlocalness of its efforts. When you are a participant in the community, you become an entity that people have a vested interest in seeing succeed.
Dave:Number 2, use local contests, prizes, and sweepstakes to engage. Now this won't be right for every business. But for the Osprey Observer, these activities make total sense. It's a great way to continue strengthening relationships with local businesses and engage with readers of the paper. It may also make sense for you to look for ways to partner with other businesses to create win win opportunities.
Dave:Number 3, look for those opportunities to do better. Now even though Marie is seeing success with Constant Contact in terms of engagement, she knows there are things that she's missing. She's always looking for ways to take better advantage of the tools she has access to to better benefit her business relationships. So once you've got the basics down, be sure to ask, what can I do next? So here's your action item for today.
Dave:If you're not already, look into getting involved with your local chamber. As Marie advises, you shouldn't try to do everything yourself, and your local chamber has resources to help you. I'll also include a link to Marie's free Kindle book, Open for Business. Now What? So be sure to check out the show notes.
Dave:I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Be A Marketer podcast. If you have questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me directly at dave.charest@constantcontact.com. If you did enjoy today's episode, please take a moment to leave us a review. Your honest feedback will help other small business marketers like yourself find the show.
Dave:Well, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and continued success to you and your business.