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Long-time newspaper journalist turned interactive media expert Joe Michaud recently left his post as president of MaineToday.com (part of the Portland Press-Herald in Maine) and joined the AIM Group/Classified Intelligence as senior analyst. Now that he’s settled into his home office outside Portland to work for AIM and consult for several New England newspaper clients, I had a chance today to catch up with him and pick his brain a bit about newspaper classifieds strategy. Here’s a tidbit…
What’s a smart strategy reflecting newspapers’ current (dour) situation? I asked. Answer: Rethink the printed classifieds section and treat it more like a “catalog.”
Here’s what he means: Online is clearly the best medium for classifieds in many respects, and if you’re a consumer searching for something specific, the web is the most efficient way to go. Print is not going to match online when it comes to utility. So in designing a printed classifieds section that makes sense for the times, it’s not going to work to try to compete directly with online classifieds.
Michaud favors the model of treating print classifieds in the same way as some retailers treat their catalogs. For example, L.L. Bean sends out printed catalogs in the mail, but they don’t include every product that the giant mail-order house carries. The catalogs include selected products, sometimes based on a theme (women’s fall clothing, kids back-to-school clothes, etc.), while clothing buyers would use the LLBean.com website to look up any item offered by the company.
What ultimately needs to happen, Michaud suggests, is that online is the repository of all classified ads; every advertiser coming through a newspaper ad ordering process is added to the website. Other channels, including print and mobile, may be paid upsells (or included in specific packages), so not every ad ends up in the printed classifieds section.
The key thinking behind this sort of strategy is recognition that the web (and in time, mobile) is how consumers now and in the future search for things they’re looking for (job, home, car, bicycle…). Print, as the catalog publishers have discovered, is best for creating enjoyable, browsable guides to shopping.
What is print best at? That, says Michaud, is the question newspaper publishers must ask themselves. The typical printed newspaper classified section isn’t very good when it comes to serving someone who is searching for something specific; the still-used narrow vertical column is not browsed easily or comfortably. Taking a “catalog”-like approach, you would redesign the section to make it a better browsing experience — and do a good job of guiding people to your website for expanded listings and the full ad inventory.
What do you think of this approach to reinventing printed classifieds?
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