Advertising FAQs - What is an advertorial page?

Potential customers often ask us what is an advertorial?

Sell from the page - an advertorial is content with a selling element

Quite simply, an advertorial is a page that is made up of a story and images and set just like all the other pages in the magazine (news, feature, etc) but it is a page that has been paid for, and you can therefore 'sell from the page'. 

Businesses with great stories make great advertorials. For instance, a new business that has just opened on the high street where they want to tell the owners’ backstory is ideal. Similarly, an organisation that has more complicated services on offer, may find it easier to explain what they do with an advertorial. Another great opportunity for advertorials in our magazines is a business that is based in, or has a specific connection to, the community itself. This makes the story very much relevant to the readership and more or less guarantees it will be read by a keen audience who love the place in which they live.

Advertorials are a great way for businesses to start their advertising with us in our community magazines. It allows for a story to be told to their potential audience, and then follow it up with repeated and consistent messages and branding, in the form of standard advertising... 

“ADVERTORIAL
Up to 600 words
Tell a story
Looks like editorial content”

“ADVERTS (Display Ads)
Any design/style
Graphic-led
Fewer words”

Standard Advertising

Display ads

What we would refer to as standard advertising is traditional display advertising. A specifically designed advert with clearly defined edges that has been branded to match the company or person it is advertising. These are sold - in our magazines, at least - in either quarter, half or full page slots. Plus, we also sell the premium positions of Inside Front Cover and Outside Back Cover. 

Editorial

Editorial content is all the other content that makes up a magazine (news articles, features, what's on, competitions, write-ups, reviews, etc). Editorial content is not paid for and does not normally promote a profit-making business. 

For advertorials in our community magazines, we do limit the number per issue, in order to ensure that our readership doesn't feel like it is being sold to on every page. We think it’s right and proper that a magazine like ours should have plenty of community news and information, and this doesn't have a price tag attached to it. We just want to tell the stories of the village. 

Advertising FAQs - Print ads don’t work any more, do they?

By David Tingley, editor and company director

We’ve been in the publishing business since 2009, and so we’d like to address a few questions that potential advertisers have for us, head-on. Right here. We aren’t in business to trick or hood-wink businesses out of marketing spend, but what we want is for local businesses in the area to making more money in sales from the advertising they do with us… Sounds simple, right?

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Print ads don’t work any more, do they?

It’s true that not ALL advertisers who spend money with us in Hassocks Life (or Kipper Life family of magazine titles) make a return on their investment.

That’s always gutting for us. But there’s no point lying.

Sometimes it’s not always obvious why the advertising hasn’t worked. While, for others, there were some warnings. Your advert needs to not only look good, but look appropriate for your target market.

Years ago, I had a builder whose advert I offered to ‘improve’ with a bit of ‘slick design’ to drag the advert and his business (I thought) into the 21st century. Having designed the revamped advertisement, we ran it for a further few months, until I took a call from the customer. He explained that his enquiries had dropped off since changing the advert design, and he’d like to revert to his basic, Powerpoint slide layout which he had been using for months beforehand very successfully. So, you see, as a professional designer - I learnt a valuable lesson that day about making the advert look right for the business and the target audience. They didn’t want a ‘slick’ builder!

Having said that, if an advert has way too much text on, and really isn’t legible in print - the advert just won’t work, if people can’t read it.

We hear from customers who sometimes say that their advertising campaign with us ‘hasn’t worked’, but when we ask how the customer finds out where their new enquiries come from - they tell us that they don’t ask! On this basis, it would be hard to measure the success of any advertising campaign in any media!

Of course, smaller adverts do have to work harder than full page ads. The bigger the ad, the larger the passing impact on the readers.

Some advertisers have a seemingly brilliant advert design (bold, colourful, large headline, clear call-to-action), and they haven’t been stingy on the size either. And it still doesn’t generate the results for them. I wish I knew why this was. We had a mortgage broker who had completed an advertising campaign for six months with half page ads, and they had had no clear leads from the run in our magazine.

Conversely, and more positively, we have one customer who runs a few quarter page ads per year, and the results from it, keeps them busy for the season! And the ad is even at quarter page size!

Fortunately we have plenty of happy advertisers, many of whom have been advertising with us for years and years. You can see Richard Talman of RTFJ talking about his success with our magazines here. Similarly, Adam Bateup from House Proud Finish used Hassocks Life to launch his new carpet cleaning business. He tells us more here.

So, can I guarantee that advertising with Hassocks Life will bring in new customers? No, of course not.

But I will guarantee that me and my team will do our absolute best to make it work for your business. Whether that’s helping with the ad design, giving you a premium spot for a special month, a bit of editorial copy or even a cheeky size upgrade when we’ve got some extra. We really do just want advertising with us to work for you, so you stay a customer for years - just like Richard and Adam and the dozens of others.