Many Aussies think of the local Aussie newsagency as a papers, magazines lotteries and car shop, around the corner, close, a bit dark, run by someone old, carrying a bit of everything, expensive for some things, probably out of date for today.
That’s the narrative pitched in too many stories. It’s out of date, many years out of date.
The local Aussie newsagency, the one serving where you live, is most likely not like that old narrative. It’s changed.
We made this video Tuesday for one of our own newsagency shops, to promote it on social media as well as YouTube. Below we explain how we made the video and, more important, why we made the video.
We took the photos on my iPhone and used promo.com to assemble these, add text and lay music underneath. All up it took less than 10 minutes. I share these details to illustrate how easy it is for anyone to make a video like this.
Now, the why.
This video is important as it is us pitching a narrative for this shop. For decades, the narrative of the local Aussie newsagency has been controlled by others. Today, in 2023, the narrative about our shops is rooted in decades ago. It is out of date. It challenges our relevance. It does not help us.
We wanted to have a crack at recasting the narrative for this one shop in a suburban Westfield centre in the bayside area of Melbourne. While for sure we are biased, we think it’s a good video that does re-cast the narrative for this newsagency, while at the same time making a statement about the channel, calling for others to see us differently and not as others so wrongly and ignorantly pitch us.
We’d love to see more newsagents do this, make videos and other social media content that pitches our businesses with a fresh and relevant to 2023 narrative. Points about lottery jackpots and the major seasons are predictable, expected. The more we play outside of what is expected the better for us, the more we are likely to attract new shoppers to our businesses.
As we noted above, this video took less than 10 minutes all up. There are plenty of platforms you can use to make videos just like this one. While we pay a commercial licence for promo.com, there are others out there that are free.
As for the products we chose to highlight, plenty are made in Australia. In fact, half the air time of the video features Australian made, small business sourced, products.
We want to call out the final frame. This features a pair of colourful stud earrings on a card that says you inspire me. That is a very deliberate choice to pitch that message at the close of the video.
Hopefully all this background is helpful enough that other newsagents create content to recast the narrative of not only their newsagency businesses but the channel more broadly.
But back to the video. In 24 hours it passed 20,000 full views thanks to a nudge through the YouTube ad platform. Tonight, Friday night, it’s at 37,000 full views. That’s 37,000 people in the area of Melbourne I targeted who watched the video in maybe the first newsagency pitch they had seen in years.
We appreciate it’s not call to action advertising. It’s not intended to be. As we wrote above, this is about the narrative relating to the Aussie newsagency.
Here’s a footnote about why we’re writing about this here at a blog for our POS software company.
Tower Systems is not your average POS software company. This video speaks in a small way to that, it shows us engaged beyond the software, in service of one of the local small business retail channels in which we serve.
The advice in this post could relate to any of the specialty retail channel s in which we serve.
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