Lecture Content
We had an update meeting on what the plan for The Yorkie magazine is and are now aware that the University will not be paying for everyone’s work to be in the magazine, only the feature pieces with the best content and highest quality will be included. This will make planning more difficult because it means deciding at the last minute what will be included in the magazine unless there is another progression in this plan. However, this will ensure that the magazine has better content and ensure that people are motivated to do their best work.
Task
Use a “£100 marketing budget” and look at how this could be used to increase readership of the Yorkie.
There are numerous possibilities to market The Yorkie with a budget such as this with digital media being so easily accessible. As well as this, with York being such a small city it would be far easier to hold events etc. that could garner plenty of interest. There are areas such as the Spark York Event Space, a social project in the Piccadilly area of York, the whole motivation for the project is to help support up and coming businesses. Other organisations have made use of this space and the YSJ school of media production also owns some of the containers in partnership with Spark, meaning that we would be able to access this as a magazine. For The Yorkie, it would be possible to host a launch party, in advance of our first issue being printed, in this space.
The target audience for the Yorkie is fairly young, roughly 18-30 with an even gender split, this means that any advertising has to be fairly balanced. With this and a small budget in mind, the magazine would have to look at opportunities with a potentially large output with minimum cost or demographic specialty. One option could be to contact That’s TV York, their offices are located within the same building as our own newsroom and therefore it could be possible to do a collaboration with them.
The most obvious choice is social media, one option is the Facebook advertising site where you can create an ad to appear on people’s feed for a small fee. This mixed with posts on Instagram and Tweets would be an easy way, at extremely low cost, of increasing awareness of The Yorkie.
Comparison:
Party launches at the Spark York Event Space have happened before and with organisations that are in a similar industry with a similar demographic to the Yorkie. The charity Northern Youth is using the space to launch the latest issue of its Hard magazine. The charity has an extremely similar demographic to our own: students and young people celebrating Northern culture and art. This is strong evidence that this is an option for The Yorkie to make use of in the lead up to its launch.