2007: A Vibe Odyssey - WAN-IFRA



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The Background

One of Stuff4Sale’s main strengths, aside from its wide-ranging listing content, is its alliance with trusted and well-established newspaper brands. At the time of launch in October 2005, the site was known as Stuff4Saleinhull.co.uk – this was promoted heavily to over 140,000 readers each night of the Hull Daily Mail. At a time when sites such as eBay and craigslist are becoming increasingly popular, we foresaw the way classified listings were migrating onto the internet and decided to do something about it. We developed a site where our readers and website users can enjoy the speed of e-commerce instead of having to call up to advertise in our classified section.

Newspapers within our media group, Northcliffe, throughout the UK followed suit and developed their own Stuff4Sale sites. Each new site followed the recurring theme with the URL – Stuff4SaleinXXXX.co.uk.

The overall aim of the website is to provide an online community for people to trade goods. It has also been used to revitalise our newspaper’s classified advertising section as all listings are now featured on the site for no extra charge.

Stuff4Sale has quickly forged a position as a popular and emergent online portal for bargain hunters throughout the UK. Initially focused at local communities through the use of sub-sites, Stuff4Sale allowed buyers and sellers to interact on a local level whilst still enjoying all the functionality of a vibrant e-commerce site. With an audience of approximately 10,000 users per month, the site now benefits from increased user interactivity as more and more make use of the forum section as well as the ever popular buying and selling areas.

Stuff4Sale.co.uk launches but ‘local’ is not lost

As mentioned above, the biggest development to the site over the past 12 months has been its introduction into a national network of sites, all sitting under one URL – stuff4sale.co.uk. Some of our users however prefer to deal at a local level & can still follow links through to a local “Hull & East Riding” site if they are only interested in listings that are from areas close to them.

In recent times we employed a dedicated Stuff4Sale team whose sole responsibility is to maintain the site. On a daily basis they are able to ensure that the site is fully up-to-date with listings as well as answering any and all queries that our users may have either online or over the telephone. Due to the innovative nature of the site, listings appear immediately after being placed. With this in mind, the team also police the site ensuring that any inappropriate or offensive content produced by our users is removed immediately. They have allowed us to further solidify our relationship with local people, and by highlighting one or two member of the team in-print, we have been able to put a face to Stuff4Sale and built a bit of personality into the site’s promotion.

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Marketing

The use of our in-print classified section has been key to marketing the Stuff4Sale brand. The readers of this section make up the majority of the target market of Stuff4Sale. Our research tells us that they are slightly less affluent and are more willing to purchase second-hand goods. With this in mind, we made a concerted effort to publicise the merits of Stuff4Sale to these readers on a weekly basis. Each week, the Mail featured the “Stuff4Sale Page” – a full page made up of hints and tips for using the site, editorial on what’s happening online at that time and a section highlighting some of the better deals available on the site.

When promoting the site we took the decision to initially distance Stuff4Sale from our flagship site, thisishull.co.uk, to allow it to develop its own identity as well as avoiding any negative reaction from the public to the fact that it’s “just another website published by a newspaper”. To this end, we decided to heavily publicise the website in-print and although we had links on our other sites to it, we concentrated our efforts on generating traffic from our newspaper readers. Throughout the last 12 months we have been able to build on that solid base of users and in the last 9 months alone, we have grown our visitor numbers by 5,000.

External Promotion

In July of last year we launched a large campaign incorporating external media to give the site a larger profile within the city of Hull and to further strengthen the brand with local people who are already users. Over the course of a 4 week period, we blanketed our area with bus advertising, poster sites and 48 sheet adverts to keep the site at the forefront of people’s minds throughout the city.

This external campaign was combined with a large campaign of house advertising in our own products to really drive the brand home.

Other promotional tools used include developing a system whereby every time a member of the public places an advert over the telephone, a member of our team informs them of the site and passes on the website’s URL. These calls are perfect for targeting our audience as the people on the phone are exactly the type of user we are looking for on the site. This is naturally very appealing to those out in the site regularly, and gives us longevity out a very innovative promotional item.

We installed a process of sending out regular eflyers to over 40,000 registered users showcasing what’s happening on the site and any offers that we are offering users at that time.

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Use of other media

In the past 12 months we have branched out and incorporated the use of other media when promoting Stuff4Sale. We have begun to use mobile bulletins to our database of numbers highlighting the site’s address. The use of mobile has been further developed by allowing users to text in a free image of any item they are selling – our team then match each photo with its specific listing and place it online. This gives our users a better experience on site and also increases the chance of them selling an item as research carried out shows that our users are 3 times more likely to sell an item after adding a picture to their listing.

The site has been such a success in the past 12 months that we have moved over all listings from our original online listings site to Stuff4Sale. Traffic from the old site, which was in essence an exact replica of or in-print classified pages, has been very effective in boosting the value of the site for users. There have never been more listings on site and volume breeds volume… since we have moved this inventory over, we have seen users upload 25% more items than in previous months.

One of the main benefits to us is the automation it allows us to bring to the process of booking adverts from the public. Historically we took 80% of adverts over the telephone. In recent months, incredibly, we have seen that position reverse – now 80% of all classified adverts we book are done by users themselves online.

Site traffic has steadily increased, as the site has become more of a feature of local people’s online lives. In the autumn we stepped back from our promotional activities and site traffic suffered as a result. Having investigated this decline, we promptly stepped up the promotion again and the figures (see charts opposite) are approaching record levels again.

A comprehensive Marketing mix

In the last year, we have used clearly defined marketing channels to promote the value of the site. When taking the following into account we have integrated a multitude of media.

In-Print advertising in:

• The Hull Daily Mail & East Riding Mail (140,000 daily readers)

• The Advertiser Series (216,000 weekly readers)

• The Journal (40,000 monthly readers)

Online advertising on:

• thisishull.co.uk (230,000 monthly users)

• thisiseastriding.co.uk (230,000 monthly users)

• Eflyers to our email database (40,000 users)

• Texts to our mobile database (17,450 users)

This allows us to comprehensively market the site and its value to a wide and varied amount of people.

Bear this in mind…

When we carried out research with our Stuff4Sale users in March 2008, 40% stated that they had sold their item on site after listing their item only once…

…it’s not just another website published by a newspaper… IT WORKS!

Traffic increase in the last 12 months

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