The newsonomics of selling Main Street

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:
Ken Doctor:
Main Street is finally going digital. With the digitization of smaller business, newspaper companies believe they’ve found that elusive third leg of a business model — a model that could keep them standing, maybe even taller, into the second half of this decade.

...The business push goes by several names: marketing services, digital services, “becoming a regional agency.” Those terms all point to the same business, which targets small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). It’s a category of businesses many dailies long ignored — in the good times of 20-percent-plus profits, why focus on pennies, nickels, and dimes when the dollars were busting down the door? When Macy’s, Best Buy, and Safeway were subsidizing ink by the barrel, paying high rates, insertion orders were worth five figures.
...
Let’s look at the newsonomics of selling Main Street:

• Well over a thousand new dedicated-to-marketing-services salespeople are roaming Main Street. The strategy espoused by Hearst-owned market leader LocalEdge: Hire a sales staff separate from the newspapers’ ad sales group, and use a different brand in the marketplace to differentiate the marketing services offer from that of traditional advertising sales. The Star Tribune’s chief revenue officer Jeff Griffing explains why he hires non-ad salespeople — like former 3M salespeople — to sell marketing services: “They are used to walking into businesses and being truly consultative.”
  LocalEdge is a Buffalo-based Yellow Pages company that Hearst bought 10 years ago and has made into the newspaper industry’s marketing services leader; it now syndicates its platform and training. CEO Jeff Folckemer says that there are 1,000-1,200 full-time marketing services salespeople pitching its products. The Star Tribune (Radius) and the Dallas Morning News (508 Digital) have each hired more than two dozen full-time marketing services salespeople for their big 2013 push; both use the LocalEdge platform. Other LocalEdge affiliates include Morris Communications, Wehco Media, Newsday, and the New York Daily News.
• Price points range from $300 to $3,000 a month, depending on the degree of customization offered...
• http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/02/the-newsonomics-of-selling-main-street/