Local digital media offers advertisers an engaged social audience

My Dad turned 60 this month and the present I bought him was an archived original copy of the Times from the day his was born. What I really wanted to find, though was a copy of our local newspaper. News that related to places, people and events closer to home would have seemed more appropriate, somehow.

This is what local media is all about. Being someone who moved from the town I was born in to live in London, I simply don’t have the same relationship with local media that the general population does. And this is true for many of us working in media.

Research conducted by us at Connect Insight for the Newspaper Society discovered that the local media audience is a very connected, opinionated and passionate group of people. Local issues matter – a lot!  They affect people directly – crime, jobs, housing, transport links, facilities, going out. 

So this is obviously reflected in how consumers use the internet. Our digital identity is made up of the places we visit online that interest and relate to us, and locality is a big part this. Social networks and Google have been shrewd to this trend, just as local newspaper brands have had to be. There’s a strong emotional connection with local media. It has a role, a function, a part in their everyday lives. Local news brands are familiar brands they have grown up with and trust.

As you’d expect local digital brands are an extension of the newspaper brand – they enjoy the same loyalty, heritage and trust of its newspaper parent.  However, as the internet and mobile internet grows this relationship with the newspaper will evolve.

This is partly due to the fact that local digital media is used differently to newspapers.  The ability to search and personalise content plus the social, sharing and community capabilities really define online’s unique role for local media.  It is this social element and the empowerment of the audience that characterise local digital media’s unique positioning.

There are some examples of good local websites that really engage their local users. The local newspapers’ site for my own home town is Gazettelive.co.uk. Not only does it tick all the usual boxes for a news site with up to the minute rolling news, but you can also define your own definition of local and drill down by postcode. It is also home to a popular sports blogger and up to date sports news for an area passionate about football. Gone are the days when our local newsagent used to open late on a Saturday night for everyone to buy the weekly edition of the Sports Gazette supplement.

We are constantly thinking of ways of engaging audiences online. In the fragmented, personalised, often transient world that is digital media, the challenge is how to create content that users come back to frequently, talk about and interact with.

Local media is the as yet untapped sector of the digital market that can offer advertisers an audience and level of engagement that many established digital brands could only dream of.