Newspaper insert literally means having your business’s pro- motional brochure put inside the newspaper. Most of us are familiar with opening the paper to find a bundle of brochures and sales catalogues. For some people they are a form of irrita- tion so they get thrown straight into the rubbish bin, for others they are the highlight of the daily newspaper.
There is no doubt that a proportion of readers will never read the material inserted into newspapers and for some busi- nesses, this makes them less effective as advertising tools. The reality is that all advertising has a miss ratio—those people that won’t see the advertising or acknowledge it. Newspaper inserts are really no higher or lower on the miss ratio and it is difficult to find statistics to provide a clear cut overview on whether they are more or less effective.
The real advantages of newspaper inserts is that they do stand out from the other information in the newspaper. You can include a lot of information in a catalogue that would be hard to impart in a single advertisement in the same paper. I have used newspaper inserts for restaurants, shopping centres, telecommunications companies, accounting firms and even tourist based businesses. The results have always been excellent even though my clients have been dubious due to the cost of producing the brochures and then inserting them.
The real key to making newspaper inserts work is to catch the reader’s attention. A lot of large retail chains use inserts regularly—normally coinciding with peak shopping periods such as Christmas, Mother’s Day, End of Year sales and so on.
For this reason, loyal shoppers tend to look for the catalogues from their favourite retailers in anticipation of finding items of interest or the ever enticing bargain.
Most newspapers will let you place inserts in their publi- cations. The normal way to pay for this is a price per thousand inserts. As a general rule, costs are between $50 and $100 per
thousand brochures inserted. You can normally do inserts for the entire print run of a newspaper or part runs. Of course when doing part runs it is harder to determine where they will end up.
Likewise, most free newspapers delivered directly to house- holds will let you do either full or part inserts, and you can even determine the suburbs you would like to receive your brochures. This is highly beneficial for businesses that rely on attracting customers from the suburbs close by.
A word of warning, though, it is more and more common for inserts to be done mechanically as part of the printing process. There was a time when they were all inserted by hand, which meant the type of insert you used didn’t really matter.
With the use of machines to do the inserting there are much stricter parameters for the dimensions of inserted material, so it makes good sense to talk to the newspaper before you print up 100 000 catalogues, only to have them rejected as unsuitable for inserting.
The best advice I can give is to design your catalogues or brochures so they will catch the reader’s attention. Use big bold headings and bright colours (or go the other way and do them in black and white for effect), make them easy to read and give the customers all of the details they need to motivate them to buy your products.
Planning the timing of your insert is also important. For example, I have seen companies putting inserts into newspapers during the middle of holiday periods and the results have been less than perfect to say the least. The reasons for this could be many—from badly designed catalogues to the fact that half the potential readers have gone away on holiday. The point I am making here is to think about when you are planning to put your insert into the newspaper.
Deciding on the right day of the week is just as important.
Weekend papers tend to work well because readers are more relaxed, having more time to sit back and enjoy reading their
ADVERTISING IN NEWSPAPERS
paper. Check with the newspaper to see if they are planning any features that you may be able to piggyback on. For example, if the newspaper is planning a travel feature on Alaska it would be an opportune time for a travel agent to insert a brochure on trips to Alaska in the same paper.
There are lots of options like this to consider and it is worth putting some solid planning into maximising all aspects of your newspaper insert campaign. When doing an insert it is worth advertising in other areas (such as television and radio) to tell people to look for the insert in the forthcoming newspaper. This will increase the results and get people who are interested in your products or service to keep an eye out for your catalogue or brochure in the coming paper.