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IFRA XMA Cross Media Awards 2008 projects |
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Company: Mail News & Media |
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Project name: Stuff4Sale |
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Topical category of the project |
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B: Cross media classifieds (combining print with online and mobile channels) |
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General information about the publication |
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Mail News & Media publishs the Hull Daily Mail - the biggest selling newspaper in Yorkshire.
To capitalise on our highly successful classified section, we launched Stuf4Sale, an online buying and selling portal.
This entry details the Stuff4Sale site... |
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Project description |
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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 |
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The basic idea of the project |
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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. |
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Used media channels |
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The implementation |
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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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Image(s) |
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Links |
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www.stuff4sale.co.uk
www.stuff4saleinhull.co.uk
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Project results |
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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, www.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. |
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