December 2008

Be Brave and Innovate

MatchWork reports back from the latest INMA events in Europe

In October MatchWork participated in two interesting events organised by the International Newsmedia Marketing Association (INMA) – the European Conference in Vienna and the INMA/IFRA Classified Advertising Seminar in Prague.

These events show that the classified print business IS changing its view of future business opportunities and how to exploit them.

Outlook 2009

“Outlook 2009” was the theme of the INMA European Conference in Vienna. As Grzegorz Piechota and Jerzy Wojcik of Gazeta Wyborcza of Poland said in their keynote address, newspaper publishers spend too much time focusing on ‘adding value’ to newspapers and advertisements. “We sometimes forget about our core mission and content that – if well marketed – can become a solution to attract readers and users with different channels”.

Start experimenting
Instead of putting their heads in the sand, newspaper publishers should experiment.

“Let’s be brave and innovate” stated Earl Wilkinson, INMAS’s Executive Director. Finally, Juan Antonio Giner of Innovation Consulting concluded that life is too short to read boring newspapers. “Let’s make our newspapers relevant to modern audience needs by innovation, by marketing and great content itself.”

Classified Advertising Seminar

In Prague the transition from print to online was the key focus area.

”We are still in the business of connecting buyers and sellers: job seekers and companies, etc… but they need us less and less. Ads can be placed for free anywhere and search engines are replacing publishers”, said Gerald Coniel of Junk Mail Publishing in South Africa. With 20 years of experience in global classified advertising, the CEO of Pretoria-based Junk Mail provided an overview of the major trends at the Classified Advertising Seminar.

From selling a product to selling a service
”The classified industry is facing the same challenges as the music industry! Why pay for a song? Why pay to view or pay for a classified ad?” said Mr. Coniel. ”And online revenue growth doesn’t match the loss of physical sales. The solutions will be similar to those that the music industry uses.”

”Technology is your new partner and search engines are your new best friends!” claimed Mr. Coniel. In his opinion Google is unavoidable, as it carries 80 per cent of all searches ordered by Internet users worldwide. On average, 25% of the traffic of US classified sites comes from search engines.

”A well-optimised site will get 50% of its traffic via search engines. So forget the discussion as to whether to let Google crawl your site or not,” the Junk Mail CEO appealed to the newspaper publishers. ”Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is as important to your site as distribution is to print. Google needs to be able to find you!”

There will be a transition from print to online. The classified industry faces huge changes and strategic challenges. According to industry analysts, the worldwide online classified industry is expected to grow from $10 billion in 2006 to $15 billion in 2010.

Online is here to stay

Of course we at MatchWork are pleased to see that influential organisations within the print world are starting to accept the fact that online has come to stay and needs to be included in the planning and strategy of every newspaper.

It is very important to optimize your site for the search engines but the strategic discussion point lies in the question: How deep down in your site would you like Google or any other search engine to link?

If you let the crawlers down to single page views for e.g. a specific job ad you might lose traffic on your site compared to only allowing links to be made to the job listings level.

Links at the listing level allow visitors entering via a search to get an overview of more than one job on your site and the chance to see all the relevant jobs from the list and the profiled ads.

This may tempt visitors to stay for a little longer, with a few more page views than a single ‘click and return to search result list‘ would generate.

You can learn about all this and much more with our experts if you call your local MatchWork office. We will make sure that you are taken to the most appropriate level of SEO on your jobsite.