With marketing and advertising playing such important roles in the modern world, it is no surprise that plenty of scientific research has gone into how they work, and how to make them work better.
Some of the science used to study their effectiveness is remarkably sophisticated, including brain scans, eye-tracking technology, and measuring long-term memory encoding. But you don’t need to be a brain surgeon to understand the findings; several in-depth studies have revealed striking truths about the power of advertising on news websites, confirming the benefits of local media advertising for small businesses.
Local newsbrands enjoy a level of trust from their readers rarely seen elsewhere on the internet, and while various factors make advertising on these platforms so successful, they all come down to the bedrock of confidence that local readerships have in the papers they read.
Here are some of the advantages that local news environments offer small business owners:
Newsbrands play various interlocking roles in people’s lives, with a remarkable ability to shape people’s outlooks and habits. A recent study compared online newsbrand content to non-newsbrand content, and found that:
Despite the scrutiny that journalists and news outlets have come under from politicians in recent years, local newsbrands offer a promise of quality in an internet flooded with dubious information. As a result, 65% of under 35s now agree that, since the rise of fake news, they find themselves relying more on established national newspaper brands for their information.
The confidence that audiences have in newsbrands spans different formats. Local newspaper content - both in print and online - is three times more trusted than social media postings, and even within social platforms themselves, posts from newsbrands are shown to be 1.4 times more trusted than other content.
People read websites - and particularly local news websites - for information that they find applicable to their own lives. This helps forge a personal connection between reader and newsbrand, and has some great knock-on effects for ad content featured on these sites.
Consumers are much more likely to enjoy and engage with ads in a context they find relevant. A 2018 study into the effects of environment on advertising impact show that ads placed on newsbrands elicit particularly positive emotions, with people liking and gravitating towards ads 27% more on these sites than on the rest of the internet.
Most importantly, ads on newsbrands get noticed in roughly half the time required by other sites, and are looked at for longer, giving your message more scope to get through to your customers. This makes time on newsbrand sites more valuable to advertisers.
This observation even holds up in comparison to social media. When the same five test ads were shown on social media and then on premium sites, on average consumers spent 17% longer viewing the ads when they were seen in a premium editorial environment.
The media agency Inskin Media worked with ResearchNow and Conquest Research to investigate reactions to online advertising in different scenarios. They wanted to find out what impact environment has on an ad’s effectiveness. Do the tone and content of an article really affect perception of the brand advertising around it? Again the results were conclusively in favour of newsbrand content.
They found that regular readers are 152% more likely to consider purchasing from companies they see advertised on quality, publisher-branded sites - a massive endorsement of local media advertising!
On almost every measure, advertisements on premium newsbrands outperform other forms of media, including social media and general online browsing. If you are looking for value for money and proven effectiveness with consumers, then look no further than your local news title.
Want to learn even more about how local media advertising can support and benefit your business? Check out these articles:
