How to Get in Front of the Lucrative 50+ Demographic

by Sally Reynolds | Jul 19, 2017 | Advertising, Insights, LNP Advertising Opportunities

Adults over 50 years of age are a prime audience for many businesses, including retirement communities, financial planners, insurance agencies, health care providers, retail shops, travel agencies, restaurants, and many more. Older adults have disposable income and the free time to spend that money. Plus, there are a lot of people in the 50+ age bracket – about 200 million according to the US Census Bureau.

This article will provide an overview of traditional and digital marketing strategies to reach older adults, especially those in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and surrounding counties such as York, Lebanon, Berks, Chester and Dauphin.

First, this article will review traditional marketing channels that are most important for reaching older adults, then this article will review specific digital targeting strategies that help businesses find adults 50+ wherever they may be on the internet.

Traditional marketing channels to reach the 50+ demographic

Newspapers

The average age of newspaper readers is about 57.9 years according to Nielson Scarborough, making newspapers one of the very best ways to build brand awareness with seniors. Locally, LNP newspaper commissioned an independent market research study that found that about two-thirds of their paid subscribers are 55+, making LNP a highly targeted channel for reaching older adults in Lancaster County.

Newspaper marketing has powerful benefits: you get broad reach, you can ensure exclusivity within news sections, and your ad appears alongside trusted local news stories. All these aspects are particularly important for the 50+ demographic since they were raised in an era when newspapers were the dominant source of information, long before the advent of websites, smart phones and social media. For older adults, newspapers remain a source of reliable, trusted news content. Advertising in the newspaper associates your brand with those feelings of trust and reliability.

Newspaper special sections

Most newspapers publish regular special sections which offer deep dives into specific topics of interest to older adults. Typical topics might include health care, home improvement, senior living, or travel. Advertising alongside this type of content is especially important if the products and services of your business align with the special section content. For example, a special section on home improvement would be logical choice for a business offering roofing, HVAC, plumbing, building services, kitchen/bath renovations, flooring, painting/drywall, window treatments, lawn care, hardscaping, furniture or interior design.

Lifestyle magazines

Many newspapers also publish lifestyle magazines which cover topics such as wellness, fashion, food trends, home, and garden. This type of lifestyle magazine retains the trusted voice of local news media while showcasing content that isn’t normally presented in regular newspaper pages. Businesses get a unique opportunity to present their business in the form of sponsored content (storytelling about your business) with great photography on glossy paper. This approach is not offered in the regular pages of the daily newspaper.

Direct mail

Direct mail reaches the home, has a long shelf life, can be personalized, and is very influential. A research study by Temple University and the US Postal Service found that direct mail recipients were strongly likely to remember the content of printed ads and had a strong emotional response to printed ads. Direct mail is essentially a printed ad that is delivered to the mailbox. For older adults, direct mail is familiar, personal, tactile, and non-intrusive, which are all important attributes when communicating with this demographic.

While you can send direct mail to a list of customers or prospects that you already have, most direct mail providers also offer targeted lists for purchase. These lists can be selected based on location plus demographic attributes like age, income, marital status, home type, home value and more. Direct mail list vendors also offer interest-based targeting. An example of interest targeting for adults 50+ would be an interest in golfing or crafting.

Digital marketing channels to reach the 50+ demographic

Research shows that not only do seniors (and their adult children) want to become familiar with a product or service before purchasing, going online is a popular way to do that kind of research.

Take a look at the following facts that dispel the senior/anti-tech stereotype:

Seniors are very likely to be online, with 96% of those aged 50 to 64 using the internet, and 75% of those 65 and older using the internet. And, 61% of adults 65+ own smart phones.
Seniors list health and medical research as important online activities, along with researching senior living options.

Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing’s value is not inherent in the content or the platform. Digital marketing is valuable for its own set of unique benefits when marketing to older adults. Most notably, digital marketing offers:

Refined analytics
Precise targeting (see our blog post on digital targeting)
Reliable success measurements
Budget-friendly options
Increased exposure

Across all digital platforms, there are three general categories of targeting:

Demographic (location, age, income, gender, etc.)
Behavioral (sites/apps that users have visited, or their status as a customer).
Interests (inferred information about users’ interests based on their behavior)

While these overall categories are consistent across all platforms, there are differences in the details. Below is an overview of the targeting options in each of the major digital channels that will allow your business to reliably reach the 50+ demographic.

Social Media – Facebook and Instagram

Facebook ad campaigns (which include Instagram) have four levels of targeting to help you reach older adults:

Demographic – This includes targeting by age, which is an excellent tool for reaching your businesses’ desired older adult age group. You can also use Demographic targeting to select your ad’s audience by gender and location.
Behavior and interests – Facebook’s list of behaviors and interests is huge. Using this targeting feature for older adults simply requires that you have a clear idea of the interests of the particular type of older adults you want to reach. For example, under Entertainment targeting, older adults are less likely to be reached by selecting Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, and more likely to be reached by selecting Word Games. If you know what your audience likes to do, this targeting feature can be very effective.
Custom – This option is for retargeting people who have already interacted with your brand. For example, a custom audience could be created to target people who have visited your website, added your company’s items to their shopping cart, or interacted with your company’s app. To create a custom audience, you can also upload a csv or txt file of your customers and then Facebook will use this to target your ads.
Lookalike – Once you have created a Custom Audience you can leverage it to find people with similar behaviors and interests. Facebook provides a sliding scale so that you can define how similar the Lookalike audience needs to be to your Custom Audience. If the current customers you used for your Custom Audience are older adults, using Facebook’s Lookalike targeting is a great way to find more older adults who are similar.

Social Media – LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the #1 platform for businesspeople to connect with each other. If your target audience is older adults who are retired, then LinkedIn may be less relevant to your campaigns because the further people get from the workforce, the less likely they are to actively engage with LinkedIn.

However, if your desired audience is still in the workforce, LinkedIn’s ad manager has some powerful and unique capabilities to help you reach older adults.

Demographics – LinkedIn allows targeting by age, which you can use to reach older adults, plus gender and location. While demographics are a standard targeting feature across all digital channels, the following four targeting options are unique to LinkedIn.
Job Experience – Target your ads by job functions, seniority, titles, years of experience and skills. This is also relevant to targeting older adults based on attributes like seniority and years of experience.
Education – This includes degrees, fields of study, certificates and schools.
Company – This includes company name as well as corporate attributes, such as growth rates and size.
Interests and Traits – Member interests, traits and groups (relevant to peoples’ skills, careers, and education) are all targetable with this category.

Social Media – YouTube

YouTube is a video-centric social media platform owned by Google. Your business’s ads on YouTube should be short videos that auto-play before, or in the middle of, YouTube content videos. It is possible to use a static image in a YouTube video ad spot but it is not recommended because you would lose the inherent power of communicating via video to a video-focused audience.

YouTube has a comprehensive list of targeting options. The most important ones for reaching people who are 50+ include:

Demographics – This includes geography, age, household income, parental status, and gender. These are all excellent choices for defining the older audience you want to reach.
Interests – Use this type of targeting when you know what your specific 50+ target audience is interested in. Interests include topics such as avid investors, cooking enthusiasts, frequent salon visitors, etc.
Customer Match and Similar Segments – As with Facebook, YouTube allows you to target people who have already interacted with your website or apps, and also allows you to reach your current customers based on uploading a list. Further, YouTube can create lookalike audiences who are similar to your current customers or website/app visitors.
YouTube search history – YouTube allows you to target your ads based on the search history within YouTube. So, for example, you could target people who have searched for videos on “European river cruises”.
Competitor Channels – If your business has a competitor with a robust YouTube channel that is relevant to a 50+ audience, you can target that channel to serve your ads. This is a great way to get your products and services in front of an audience that is already consuming video content that aligns with their interests.

Targeted Display

Targeted display ads are served on the Google Display Network, which is comprised of over 2 million websites, videos and apps. It’s huge. Targeted display campaigns harness many of the same targeting options as other digital campaign types, including:

User based targeting – Location, demographics, interests, and affinities. User based targeting shows ads to a set of users, regardless of what websites or apps they are using. User based targeting is easy to use for reaching older adults.
Website-based targeting – Select specific groups of websites where you would like your ads to be displayed. This approach shows your ads to all users on the targeted websites. So, in this case, you’d want to select websites where you are confident that there is a high proportion of older users. Or, you can select specific types of content or keywords relevant to your business.

Targeted display also offers targeting options such as remarketing (serving ads to people who have visited your site), similar audiences (people who are similar to your current customer list), and in-market (users whose behavior online has shown that they may be in the market for a particular product or service).

Two other very powerful targeting options within Google Ads are Custom Intent Audiences and Custom Affinity Audiences.

Custom Affinity Audiences are essentially a customized version of Google’s standard affinity targeting options. You layer on additional attributes (like keywords) to define an audience that aligns with the interests of your customers.
Customer Intent Audiences use multiple factors to determine that a user is in the market for certain products and services. The factors might include that users have visited your competitors’ websites, or that they are using certain search terms or keywords, or that they have watched certain types of YouTube videos. Custom Intent Audiences harness the power of your users’ actual behavior to find the people who are most likely to want your business’s products and services.

Paid Search

Paid search ads are shown when users use a search engine, like Google or Bing, to search online for products and services. With paid search, your business bids on certain search terms (or keywords) that are relevant to your business. For example, if your business sells golf clubs, you’ll want to bid on search terms relevant to people who are shopping for golf clubs (e.g. “5 iron for sale in Lancaster PA”). These ads are powerful because your ad will be reaching people who have just demonstrated that they are looking for exactly what your business is selling.

There are different types of paid search ads from which to choose. For example, there are shopping ads which display one of the actual products in your e-commerce store (e.g. golf clubs) and click right through to the product page. And there are text ads, which appear within users’ text search results, with the word “sponsored” displayed above. And there are local listings, which appear next to a little map on the search results page, showing where relevant local businesses are located.

Geo-fencing

As the name implies, geo-fencing is location-based targeting. With geo-fencing, your business’s ads are served to people on their mobile devices, based on their interaction with a geographic perimeter that you define. When the person passes the geographic perimeter with their mobile device that has location services enabled, their phone is tagged as qualified to receive your business’s ads.

The value of geo-fencing is the tight radii that can be defined. For example, if your business offers financial services to seniors, you could fence local retirement communities. Other types of businesses, such as car dealerships, can fence their competitors to target people who are actively searching for a new car. Or, if there is a bridge competition at the local convention center, you can fence that area to reach what is, presumably, an older audience of bridge players.

Geo-fencing ads have about double the click-through rate of regular digital display ads making them an excellent digital tactic when you have defined location information to harness.

Digital marketing channels that are less useful for the 50+ demographic

TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat are three social media channels that have fewer older users than other digital channels. Here is the percentage of users 50+ on each of the major social media channels:

LinkedIn – 33%
YouTube – 23%
Facebook – 22%
Twitter – 17%
Instagram – 14% (included with Facebook campaigns)
TikTok – 7%
Snapchat – 4%

Source: Statista.com

Twitter has recently had issues with user trust due to changes in Twitter’s user verification process. Until these issues shake out, businesses may want to avoid Twitter because of the risk of showing an ad alongside content that is antithetical to the business’s mission.

Snapchat and TikTok don’t have a user trust problem, but they are youthful platforms with a small percentage of senior users, and thus not the most productive place to market to an older demographic.

Digital Targeting – Final Tips

In summary, there is a vast array of options available to target 50+ adults via digital channels. However, an important tip to remember is to be careful not to over-target. Over-targeting can result in whittling down your potential audience to such a narrow slice that you miss out on reaching qualified people. Best practice is to start with geographic targeting plus one or two other targeting options that you feel are the most important. Then, see how the campaign performs before testing additional layers of targeting.

Don’t think of digital vs. traditional marketing as “either-or.” The right answer is both.

Think about how you want to allocate your advertising dollars to attract 50+ consumers; the most effective plans use the best features of both digital and traditional together to build awareness, create engagement and generate sales leads.

LNP Media Group offers a full array of successful print and digital strategies. Contact us to learn more about how to reach older adults, or any other target audience, through both traditional and digital media.

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10 Ways to Stretch Your Ad Budget

by Sally Reynolds | Apr 28, 2017 | Insights

No matter how big (or small) your ad budget is, you probably struggle with making the most of your marketing dollars. While outspending your competition is ideal, not every business has the resources to match competitors’ budgets.

What can you do to stretch your marketing dollars? The marketing experts at LNP Media Group have put together some strategies to maximize your advertising impact.

1. Narrow Your Target Audience

A good place to start is by spending some time researching your target market; if you’re talking to the wrong people, you’re wasting your time. To maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing plan, create a narrowly-defined profile of your ideal customers.

Think about things like:

What age are they?
Do they own a home?
Where do they live?
What special behaviors define them? Do they shop a lot? Watch movies? Mow lawns? Save money?
What special needs unite them? Do they hate to waste time? Want great customer service? Are they picky eaters? Environmentally concerned?

A narrowly defined target market is essential for efficient marketing and media decisions. Try not to think of keeping a targeted profile as excluding anyone, but rather keeping your messaging focused on the people who will be most likely to respond.

2. Hone Your Message

It’s easy for companies to get caught up in talking about what they do, sell, offer, or provide. If you want to get customers to pay attention, however, you must stop telling them about your business and focus on helping your prospects:

How does your product or service make life better? Safer? Healthier? More convenient? Will I save time? Will you cheer me up? These should be explained from the customer’s point of view.
When talking to businesses, start by explaining how you can help them find leads, close sales, reduces operating expenses, save time or avoid unpleasant situations.

3. Create A Compelling Offer

Customers are inundated with advertising. One way to get more attention and to drive immediate action is to include a limited-time offer in your ads, such as a seasonal product, weekly sale, coupon, a discount code or gift:

Any time you include a promotion or limited-time offer in your ads, you should also clearly note that the supply is limited or include an end date. There’s a reason why the terms “act now” and “while supplies last” have been over-used; perceived exclusivity raises the value of the product and motivates action.
Creating new, limited-time offers is also a way to bring in new customers. For years, fast food restaurants have been relying on seasonal and limited-time menu items to draw in a broader audience.
You can also use offers to drive business during slow periods, offering deals on slow days of the week or during slow seasons.

4. Male An Impact With Ad Flights

The way you schedule your media can help you increase your impact among your best prospects. An ad flight is grouping ad placements over a short period of time, alternating with periods without advertising. Flights can work weekly, monthly or seasonally:

For example, a restaurant might make a big splash by choosing to advertise heavily for two weeks, and then go dormant for two weeks. A garden center might spend the majority of their budget in the spring, halting ads when the peak planting period ends.
Buying ads in flights may even enable you to match or exceed competitors’ ads for short periods while not exceeding their budget.
The other advantage of using flights is that you may be able to get preferential pricing.

5. Super Size It

Next, just as running ads in flights may create more impact, running fewer ads at larger sizes is another way to increase your brand impact:

Bigger units are more noticeable. They stand out from the ad clutter. Larger placements also allow you to include more benefits, and while frequency helps build awareness, it is important to ensure that each ad has impact and stopping power.
Not sure if your business will get more impact from lots of smaller ads or fewer larger ads? Do a test. Run a series of smaller ads and a series of larger ads, then measure results and see which strategy garners the most attention for your business.

6. Make The Most Of Moments

Today, many of your best sales prospects have mobile phones they use to find products, stores, restaurants and more, and you can reach them as they perform these searches. Google calls this Marketing in the Moment and recommends using paid search advertising to reach customers who have one of these needs:

“I want to know”: They are searching for information – like how to solve some problem.
“I want to go”: They need directions and may be doing a “near me” search.
“I want to do”: “How do I fix my dryer?”
“I want to buy”: They’re seeking a product and they’re ready to buy.

Many of these searches create marketing opportunities for your business; advertising on search engines enables you to capitalize:

The key is to ensure that your advertising targets the right search terms and provides a highly relevant offer.
Customers seeking to fix their dryer, for example, may want help and parts. Can you provide that? If so, you may win a new customer. Customers searching “lunch near me,” may be pulled through the door by hearing your specials.

Another key to “marketing in the moment” is to ensure that your place of business appears on search engines for local searches. So when a hungry customer Googles “restaurants Lancaster”, you want to be on the list. To make this happen, you need to add your names and address into local directory listings like LancasterOnline, Yelp, and others.

7. Repeat Yourself

No matter what medium you choose for your marketing, repetition is key to success:

While studies vary widely on the most effective level of repetition, most marketers agree that it’s wise to try for six to nine impressions.
Retargeting is one of the most powerful methods to achieve repetition in digital marketing. Retargeting allows you to show ads to customers who have visited your site previously, by tracking their website activity. This use of repetition builds brand awareness with your best prospects.

8. Combine Media To Get Better Reach And Frequency

Your customers are interacting with a variety of online and offline media, so your advertising plan should be built around intercepting them in a variety of places:

For example, newspaper advertising can reach consumers with larger ads in a highly engaged environment. A consistent schedule of newspaper advertising creates a familiarity that leads to awareness and trust of your brand.
Adding a digital advertising component to your plan can increase both the reach and frequency of your advertising. People interact with digital ads differently than how they do with print, however. In digital, the ads are smaller and the average attention span is shorter.

Choose LancasterOnline as a supplement to your print advertising campaign or run ads on Facebook or Google. That way, sales prospects see your brand with their morning coffee, when they check the weather online over lunch, and when they search online. The result will be an increase in brand awareness that may result in sales leads and store traffic.

9. Become A Social Marketer

Social media platforms offer targeted, engaged online audiences. It’s a great type of media for most businesses and if used wisely it can become one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal:

Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram are excellent marketing tools for businesses, but effective social media marketing requires time, skill, and financial commitment to be successful.
Users determine what they see and which unpaid messages come to them. While communicating with friends is fun and easy, most of these social media platforms also make it very difficult for businesses to bubble up on newsfeeds without a paid component.
Social media marketing doesn’t need to be expensive. Our marketing experts recommend a mix of organic (unpaid) content combined with paid messages to targeted audiences. Since social media platforms regularly change rules, formats and advertising options, it’s also important to keep up to date on changes.

10. Never Stop Testing

No matter how much you strategize and estimate, testing your marketing is the only way to find out how effective it will be:

Testing one idea or approach against another will help you understand how each decision affects your businesses’ success; compare results to find out which methods are most effective for your business.
Don’t rely on reports limited to clicks and impressions; you need to determine which digital ads drove prospects to action. Some ads, such as ones made for brand recognition, will not have the immediate tangible impact as others but will play an important role in growing your business.
Be patient. Testing just one campaign on a particular platform isn’t enough to provide accurate insight into whether a given tactic is working. Instead, experiment with ads over different time periods, targeting slightly different audiences.

Once you’ve got enough data to start making decisions, you’ll become more confident about what works and what doesn’t drive business. Monitoring relevant metrics across your ads is one of the most effective ways to make the kind of smart decisions that increase impact and create efficiencies. We can help! Contact us for effective, efficient marketing strategies tailor-made for your business.

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LNP Media Group is committed to delivering exceptional experiences to our audiences, our customers, our vendors and our employees throughout Lancaster County and Central Pennsylvania. We provide value to our marketing and advertising partners by building effective and innovative solutions and by delivering exemplary customer experiences.

How to Market to Lancaster Millennials

by Sally Reynolds | Feb 14, 2017 | Audiences, Insights

How To Reach This Elusive But Lucrative Market.

Are you one of those marketers who still think that Millennials are just teenagers glued to their smart phones? Think again. Millennials have come of age, and with a spending power hitting trillions of dollars, Millennials are fast becoming one of the most sought-after demographics:

Now ranging in age from 23 to 38, Millennials not only act differently than older generations, they’re also one of the largest generations. According to the US Census, Millennials represent more than one quarter of the nation’s population.
This large group is linked by social media, and is racially diverse. They’re burdened by debt, but also financially conservative. While they are more distrustful of people than older generations, they remain optimistic about the future.
They care deeply about business ethics, and are more likely to use their wallet to express their conscience. This generation’s shopping behavior is driving the nation-wide resurgence in small and locally owned businesses.

Fiscally Conservative

Millennials have grown up in difficult financial times and have experienced a relatively austere childhood:

These young people carefully weigh the urges of consumption and aspiration against their desire to play it safe. This generation is fiscally conservative, an unusual trait relative to the youth of previous generations.
That’s good news for banking, insurance and investing businesses. It also means that this group is going to be especially interested in preferential pricing, low-interest loans and short-term deals on bigger purchases like auto and home.
Millennials have a combined US spending power of 600 billion per year.

Less Trusting

According to Pew Research, Millennials have rather low levels of social trust:

When asked a long-standing social science survey question, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people,” only 19% of Millennials say most people can be trusted, compared with 31% of Gen Xers, 37% of Silents and 40% of Boomers.
Promoting your certifications, qualifications and good standing in the business community will resonate with this group. Millennials will be especially receptive to businesses that provide extra security, like anti-theft devices, home security, renters and home insurance.

Cause-Driven

You may know that Cause Marketing is becoming more important to all age groups, but it’s especially important to Millennials:

According to a Nielsen survey, more than half of Millennials will pay extra for sustainable products. About half of that group will go even further and check packaging for sustainable labeling before purchasing.
90% of Millennials will switch brands to one associated with a cause, reports The Cone Communications Millennial CSR Study.
Cause Marketing should be a part of your Millennial marketing efforts; highlighting your commitment to causes will be an important part of getting and retaining Millennial customers, clients, patients and employees.

Still Optimistic

Even after growing up in one of the worst recessions in memory, Millennials still retain the optimism of youth and believe that the United States is improving:

49% of Millennials say America’s best years are still ahead, a view held by 42% of Gen Xers, 44% of Boomers and only 39% of Silents.
That’s good news if you want Millennials to invest in their future. Organizations like colleges, technical schools, or training programs are well positioned to recruit Millennials into programs with long-term benefits.

Hyper Local

Millennials love their community and love supporting the businesses and services that also contribute to the local economy. They especially like knowing that they are spending their cash on the community instead of on corporations. Shopping locally is a big part of this mindset. In fact, 40% of Millennials prefer to shop locally, even when it means they have to pay a little more. The individualized experience that locally-owned shops offer reinforces Millennials’ ideals and values.

How Can You Reach Millenials?

Now that you know more about Millennials, there are a few key things to remember when marketing to them:

Don’t be afraid to do the math. Because Millennials are more concerned about finances and more financially aware than previous generations, they want to see the value you’re providing. Be clear about offers in your ads and messages.
Be transparent about who you are and what you do. Being open and honest in marketing communications will build trust and restore low trust levels.
Don’t be modest. In the past, talking about causes has been considered “bad taste.” In today’s marketing world, talking about the causes you support is not only appreciated, it’s expected.
Stay upbeat. Even though Millennials grew up in austere conditions, they look forward to the future. They are upbeat and gravitate towards brands that mirror their enthusiasm.
Promote your role in the community. Even if you’re not a locally-owned business, you can still tap into the local mindset. Talk about the number of local people you employ, the local causes you support and the ways your business works to improve the community. After all, social responsibility is one of the key drivers behind the local movement.

Wondering which media tools to use to reach Millennial audiences? LNP Media Group can help you reach Millennials with a wide range of media options including mobile marketing, web services, events, search marketing, online marketing, magazine and print. Contact us today and we’ll help you evaluate the mix of media that will ensure you reach your Millennial marketing goals.

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Digital Marketing from the “Newspaper?”

by inbndmarketing | Dec 30, 2016 | Insights

Digital marketing has become a critical part of most marketing plans. Platforms like Facebook/Instagram offer unmatched audience targeting, paid search advertising reaches specific customers who are ready to buy, and geofencing reaches mobile audiences within narrow geographic areas. The question we often get is, “Why do I want digital marketing services from the newspaper instead of a dedicated digital marketing agency?”

In this article, we’ll demonstrate the reasons why your business will get the best results using “the newspaper” as your digital marketing agency:

Digital marketing credentials – We earn, and maintain, digital marketing credentials that demonstrate our expertise.
Local – As a newspaper, we have a long history as a part of the Lancaster County community, and we understand the importance of having a local team you can talk to. Our team includes local artists, videographers, photographers, and digital marketing strategists.
Design – We have robust graphic design capabilities that are offered at no extra cost to advertisers.
Multi-channel and multi-audience – Because we have deep expertise both print and digital marketing, we are experts at creating multi-channel campaigns to boost performance by reaching targeted audiences wherever they spend time.
Proof of performance – Newspapers have long understood the need for transparency and factual information. With LNP Media Group, you’ll know exactly where your money was spent and what results your campaign generated.

Digital Marketing Credentials – LNP Media Group is a Google Partner and Meta Certified

LNP Media Group’s historic roots in the newspaper business mean that we know the value of credentials to prove the truthfulness of our claims to have digital marketing expertise. Our Google and Meta credentials show our clients that we have taken the time and effort to master these platforms, and that we can bring that expertise to a business’s marketing campaigns.

We are not a fly-by-night digital marketing agency; LNP Media Group has been in business for over 225 years. We have embraced the digital marketing era and will continue to stay at the forefront of the learning and credentials needed to maintain our expertise.

Google Partner:

To be certified as a Google Partner, LNP Media Group’s digital team members had to pass exams to validate our understanding of Google Ads (Google’s advertising platform) and Google Analytics (Google’s website traffic analysis tool).
We also have to show Google, on an on-going basis, that we’re managing a significant amount of digital advertising, and we have to verify that we have sustained growth in the number of clients we serve.

What does this mean to your business? It means that when you use LNP Media Group for a Google campaign, you can be sure that our team is on top of the latest advances in Google’s ad serving technology. Google offers a broad array of campaigns and we can select the best ones for your business’s goals. Among the options are:

Search campaigns – These campaigns target people who are actively searching online for specific items and services to purchase. This is an excellent campaign type if your goal is to drive sales or leads through your website.
Display campaigns – These campaigns are best for creating awareness and consideration of your business’s brand, products and services. Display campaigns use visually appealing ads to help drive interest. You can target people who have visited your website, or who have visited a competitor’s website, or who have interests in topics related to your brand.
Video YouTube campaigns – Video is a highly engaging content type that can tell the story of your business. Your business’s video can be shown as pre-roll, outstream, skippable in-stream or non-skippable in-stream.
App campaigns – These campaigns run on over 3 million sites and apps and are great for promoting downloads and engagements with your app.
Shopping campaigns – Use shopping campaigns if you have an e-commerce store so that your ads will appear in the Google Shopping tab and in search results. This campaign type is excellent for conversion.

Our status as a Google Partner also means that the Google support team is just a phone call away. Our proven expertise translates into a better return on investment for your digital marketing campaigns.

Meta Certified:

To become Meta Certified, our team members had to study the details and pass exams to demonstrate mastery of Meta’s targeting and campaign management tools for Facebook and Instagram.
We understand the details of the audiences that Meta can reach, and the best placements for your Meta ads. We also understand best practices in setting objectives to drive the right kind of traffic and engagement with your campaign.

What does this mean to you? It means that when you use LNP Media Group for a social media campaign, you can be sure that our team is on top of the latest advances in Meta’s ad serving technology. Meta offers a broad array of campaigns and we can select the best ones for your business’s goals. Among the options are:

Awareness – This type of campaign objective will cast the widest net to reach the most people and let them know about your business’s brand.
Traffic – This type of campaign objective will increase traffic to your website, app, or Facebook page.
Event promotion and ticket sales – We have used Meta many times to successfully drive event attendance and sell tickets for many types of events.
Leads – This campaign objective is best for getting people to share information about themselves for further communication later, such as signing up for an e-newsletter.
Sales – This campaign objective is great for e-commerce, to drive product sales, including adding items to a cart.

Our Staff Are Local

Many digital marketing agencies will not tell you that they use offshore contractors to set up and run campaigns. In this digital world, it’s tempting for marketing agencies to use inexpensive overseas labor.

However, with our long history as a local news organization, LNP Media Group does not use offshore labor and never will, even for digital marketing.

LNP Media Group has been deeply rooted in Lancaster County for over 225 years, and this connection means that we only hire people who live and work in this area. We believe that offering employment is a benefit to our community, and we also believe that, as a marketing agency, we perform better by having local people who can get to know businesses in-person. As you work with us, you’ll get to know the names and faces of our team members. This builds trust and transparency between your business and our team.

Graphic Design Services Free for Advertisers

LNP Media Group’s long newspaper history means that we have always had a strong cadre of creatives on staff. And because newspapers have tight daily deadlines, we know how to work quickly and efficiently. In prior decades our artists were focused on creatives for print advertising, but our capacities have expanded with the rise of digital marketing. View some portfolio samples here.

Graphic design services are free when you advertise with us, whether using our owned-and-operated media or using outside services like Google and Meta.

Our design expertise includes, but is not limited to:

Newsprint and magazine ads
Digital ads: jpg and png
Animations: gif and html5
Billboards
Event materials like table tents, step and repeats, signage, booths
Illustration
Brochures and flyers
Van wraps
Video and photography
Logo design and branding

But, if you’re not advertising with us, that’s ok! Our graphic design services are also available as a fee-for-service.

Multi-Channel and Multi-Audience

LNP Media Group is different from a typical marketing agency because we have our own media distribution that we use to efficiently deliver audiences that no one else can:

We own LNP, a local daily newspaper with strong circulation.
We own Lancasteronline.com, the largest news website in Lancaster County with over 1 million unique visitors per month.
We own a TMC (total market coverage) weekly circular called Pocket.
We own two weekly newspapers, the Lititz Record Express and the Ephrata Review, that provide hyper-local news content for their communities.
We publish a tourism magazine, Visit Lancaster, three times a year that is distributed to hotels and tourism attractions in Lancaster County.
We publish Balance magazine, a glossy lifestyle magazine with beautiful photography and informative articles.
On top of all that owned-and-operated media, we can layer digital campaigns with pinpoint precision through geofencing, paid search, email marketing, targeted display, and Facebook/Instagram.

The fact that LNP Media Group is “the newspaper” means we have local ownership of news media that allows us to bundle together digital and print marketing to create the most effective marketing plan possible.

And, in July of 2023, LNP Media Group became part of WITF, a non-profit locally owned and operated media company in Harrisburg PA. WITF is an affiliate station of both NPR and PBS.

This combination of two local media powerhouses, WITF and LNP Media Group, creates incredible marketing opportunities for local businesses. Through this partnership we can provide your business with every possible type of marketing campaign, from print to digital to public radio and TV sponsorships.

We Deliver Clear, Measurable Digital Marketing Results

With our historical roots in the newspaper business, LNP Media Group understands the importance of building trust through factual, transparent journalism. This integrity carries over to our work in marketing, where we demonstrate our transparency through digital marketing campaign reporting. With every marketing initiative we create for your business, you will get a report that shows exactly where your money was spent, and the results that were achieved.

Here are a just a few examples:

An email marketing campaign for a local auto retailer resulted in 17 cars sold with a return on investment of over 100%.
A paid search advertising campaign for a heating and air conditioning company increased sales leads by 165%.
A Facebook advertising campaign for a local retailer resulted in 1,431 sales leads at a cost per lead of $0.81.

You can read more detailed examples on our case studies page.

Our roots in the newspaper business also mean that we understand the critical importance of the small business community in Lancaster County. Because of this, we offer digital advertising rates that are very affordable and get outstanding results.

Are we “the newspaper”? Yes, we are proud to be Lancaster County’s locally owned and operated daily newspaper for over 225 years. You’ll find that this heritage has tremendous benefits for your business when you use LNP Media Group as your marketing agency.

Let’s take the first step of getting to know each other with a free marketing strategy session. Together, we’ll review your business’s goals and craft a custom marketing proposal to achieve those goals. To get started, contact us today!

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5 Ways Real Estate Uses Digital To Attract Sellers

by inbndmarketing | Nov 29, 2016 | Insights

Digital marketing is one of the most effective ways to grow your business. By investing in digital marketing, you can reach a growing customer base at a fast pace. Has your real estate business dipped into the digital world yet? Start reaching more sellers with these digital marketing tips.

Content Marketing

Though maintaining a blog can be tedious, it’s importance to a complete digital marketing portfolio should not be overlooked:

Having an updated blog with engaging content is a great way to connect with sellers and even buyers.
Companies that published 16+ blog posts a month got almost 3.5x more traffic than companies that published between 0-4 monthly posts. Increasing the amount of blog posts you have increases web traffic.
Customized content will allow sellers to feel as though you’re speaking directly to them, which is a great way to connect with your target audience.
When choosing blog post topics, make sure to pick subjects that are both applicable to your audience and focused on a specific topic.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to connect with potential home sellers and buyers in any market. What’s critical about this kind of digital marketing is that you can communicate directly with an engaged audience. Email marketing gives you the tools to stay connected with those who are interested in what you have to offer:

Studies have shown that 74% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communication via email.
If you have a website, consider adding an email sign-up form to the most highly visited pages, such as the homepage, in order to collect email addresses. This will help provide you with a sufficient list of emails.
You’ll want to be sure your sign-up form also tells visitors what kind of information to expect in your emails.
If you’re on Facebook, set up your business page’s call-to-action feature to connect to your sign up form to attract new email subscribers.
You can also collect emails offline by using sign-up sheets at events such as open houses.

Geo-fencing

Geo-fencing is location-based digital marketing in which you define geographic boundaries to target an audience on their mobile devices. Geofences can be precision targeted down to a radius of 400 meters, allowing you to fence locations such as home shows, interior design stores, home improvement stores, or any location you can envision that would attract your target audience.

Once your audience has entered the geofenced area, they will be tagged to be served your ads on their location-enabled mobile device. You can use these ads for awareness of your real estate company, or even to alert people to their proximity to an open house.

Social Media

Social media allows real estate agents to set themselves apart while growing a loyal following:

Selling or buying a home is one of the most important processes in a person’s life. Listing houses can be a lengthy process, and prospects will need to be nurtured along the way.
Facebook is an excellent tool for building longer-term relationships. Facebook Ads can reach a targeted audience based on demographics and interests, so that you can engage with them throughout the longer buying and selling process.

Website Design

You have one shot at impressing visitors when they come to your website for the first time. Their first visit will influence their decision to stay or move on. Make sure your website makes an impact and highlights your most compelling message. How do you make sure your website is working hard?

Ensure it is mobile friendly
Include a mortgage calculator
Include information for buyers, sellers, and investors
Make sure your site is easy to navigate on all types of devices
Include social media sharing buttons
Make sure your content is compelling

For more information on how you can use digital marketing to reach sellers, contact us. Our real estate experts will be happy to assist you in developing your digital marketing plan.

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LNP Media Group is a division of Steinman Communications, one of the largest and most experienced communications companies in the Mid-Atlantic. Steinman Communications is an innovative, multi-channel communications company that delivers high quality news, information and entertainment to diverse audiences.

5 Ways to Reach Pet Owners

by inbndmarketing | Nov 16, 2016 | Advertising, Insights, Search Marketing

Pets are important to their humans; they are another member of the family. Whether it be for grooming services, veterinarian services, toys, apparel, boarding, etc., pet owners shell out quite a bit of money on their pets. Pet retailers have been finding new, inventive ways to engage consumers with their brands when it comes to pets’ needs. These digital marketing strategies are just a few of the ways brands are getting their message out there to reach pet owners.

Content Marketing

Typically, when pet owners have a question about caring for their pet, they’ll use online search to find answers:

Appearing in search results can enable you to bring web traffic to your brand’s site through content marketing. Content marketing gives brands the opportunity to create and share pertinent information through articles, blogs, or downloadable reports, that are designed to target a specific consumer segment.
Content marketing is an important and effective marketing strategy because it provides answers to the questions consumers are interesting in knowing. Informative content will help the pet retailer become a trusted source to consumers, promoting brand awareness while increasing traffic to pet retailers’ websites.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the easiest and most effective digital marketing tactics for building brand awareness and increasing leads:

The best thing about email is that when it’s sent to the recipient, they’ll open it on their own time when they know it’s convenient for them to read.
Email marketing comes in a variety of types: newsletters, promotional campaigns, invitations, survey emails, etc.
Email can help you build relationships with customers by sending emails that include behind the scenes stories, frequently asked questions, information about your staff, local pet news, and rewards for loyal customers.

Whether you’re a dog groomer, dog walker, pet store owner, or veterinarian, you’re most likely competing with some big brands for customers’ attention. Email marketing can help you build a bond with your customers that will position you as an authority on pets in your area. This will help you get to know your customers on a personal level, setting you apart from the competition.

Events

Events are a great way to connect with customers and build your brand. Being face-to-face with your target audience will help you develop a more personal relationship with potential customers, as you have more of a chance to interact with them. Pet owners will be most responsive to events that they can bring their pets to. This could include events at the dog park, pet-friendly restaurants, bars or cafés.

SEO Friendly Website

The quality of your website is critical because you really only have a few seconds to capture the interest of visitors when they land on your page:

A good website has what it takes to reach, engage, and support your visitors.
A few critical components your website should have in order to reach pet owners include engaging images that tell your story, a clear navigation throughout the website, calls-to-action that will entice the visitor click, and an SEO strategy to support the website.

Social Media

Customers turn to Facebook for a wide variety of information, including pet retail locations, new products, tips for their pets, coupons, or even events. Facebook is the best social media platform for pet retailers to be on. With Facebook’s particularly targeted and effective Ads platform, it’s a guaranteed way to reach the pet owners:

According to The American Pet Products Association, it is estimated that approximately 37 to 47 percent of all households in the U.S. have a dog, and that 30 to 37 percent have a cat. With 90 percent of young adults ranging in ages 18 to 29 and 65 percent of adults overall on social media, there’s potential for a large amount of leads for pet retailers.
Using Facebook’s analytics, you’ll be able to see what types of posts have the biggest impact on your audience and when most of your page’s fans are online. This information will help you craft content for the utmost impact.

If you are a pet retailer looking for more marketing ideas, contact us. We’ll help you develop a plan that’ll reach pet owners.

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