With Local Offers, the local newspaper can once again become the natural meeting place between local businesses and the people who live nearby.

Local Offers makes advertising relevant for readers, easy for businesses, and creates new, predictable revenue for the media company.

Talk to Bjarte about Local Offers

Local commerce deserves a strong local channel

Small businesses want to reach people in their local area. At the same time, traditional digital advertising is often seen as too complicated, time-consuming or expensive. For media companies, this means that many small advertisers have gradually disappeared. For readers, it means fewer local offers and fewer useful updates from nearby businesses. We created Local Offers to bridge that gap.

The solution makes the content businesses already create on Instagram and Facebook available in an attractive, brand-adapted carousel in the local newspaper. This allows the media company to offer a simple product to businesses that may never have purchased digital advertising before. More local content that people actually find useful.

For readers, Local Offers might be today’s lunch special from the café, a seasonal offer from the garden centre, news from the sports shop, or information about the next local activity. It is commercial content, but it is also useful local content. Content that makes it easier to shop locally, discover what is happening nearby, and support the businesses that help create thriving local communities.

For local businesses, it is about more than visibility. It is about being discovered by the right people – in a channel they know and trust.

Sales teams that succeed with the solution focus on annual agreements and generate more than 80% of their renewal revenue in January. Many advertisers stay for 7–8 years and find that the solution gives them strong results, easy self-service and useful reporting – at an affordable price.

“Several advertisers enthusiastically report that customers come in and mention ads they’ve seen in the carousel.”

Ken Rune Birkeland Hansen
Key Account Manager i VOL

How Local Offers works

The business connects its account once. After that, whenever it publishes a post on Instagram or Facebook using the local newspaper’s hashtag, the content can automatically appear in the newspaper’s Local Offers carousel.

This means:

• no separate ad production
• no new publishing routine to learn
• no campaigns that need to be managed manually
• fresh and up-to-date ads as often as the business wants
• less follow-up work for the media company

Advertisers use the content they already create. The local newspaper provides the local reach and an attractive presentation.

The solution also supports today’s image formats, including portrait images, giving social media content a modern and consistent presentation.

A self-service solution used by more than 120 newspapers across Scandinavia and the rest of Europe

More than 90% of the ads in the solution are updated by the advertisers themselves. This shows that the barrier to entry is low enough for local businesses to actually use the solution and keep their content up to date.

For the media company, this creates an opportunity to:

• reach small and medium-sized advertisers that can otherwise be difficult to bring into digital advertising products
• sell ongoing visibility through subscription or annual agreements
• build more predictable digital revenue
• offer a product that is easy to explain, sell and manage
• add relevant content to the local newspaper without creating more work for the editorial team
• provide advertisers with weekly reports showing the performance of each ad and their overall activity

From zero to 100 advertisers in three months

When Nordjyske Medier launched new local websites, they went from zero to 100 Local Offers advertisers in three months. Their experience illustrates what can happen when a media company offers local businesses something that is easy to understand: continuous local visibility, without requiring the business to produce its own banner ads or manage complicated campaigns.

Local Offers does not replace the media company’s other advertising products. It complements them by opening the door to a broader group of local advertisers and creating relationships that can be developed further.

“Local Offers creates value for both readers and advertisers, and the solution is easy to sell and manage. It’s an always-on solution for local advertisers and an excellent complement to the rest of the advertising business.”

Lars Slinger
Sales responsible at Nordjyske Medier

Three winners – one simple solution

For the media company
A new source of recurring digital revenue, more relationships with local advertisers, and less manual work.

For the local business
A simple way to turn content it has already created into visibility among the local newspaper’s readers.

For the reader
Current offers and updates from shops, cafés, restaurants and other businesses in the local area.

Making the local newspaper more important to the local business community.

Local Offers can be set up and ready to use within just a few days. The solution is adapted to the media company’s brand and can be given the name that works best locally – for example, “Shop Local” or “Local Offers”.