Newspaper advertising is no longer for everyone. Newspaper readership is continuing to shrink as the demographics of the country change and the younger generation transitions to digital media. According to statistics from the Newspaper Association of American (NAA), newspaper readers tend to be elderly, married, Caucasian and own their home. If you are looking for young, unmarried, minority renters, you should probably forget the daily newspaper.
The NAA provides a lot of data for profiling an audience and this is one advertising source that can lose you a lot of money unless you do your homework. Subscribers can be profiled by age, home, marital status, income and education. These vary from city to city, depending upon each community's demographics. However, the NAA data provides fairly tight parameters for deciding whether or not to use newspaper advertising for specific products or services.
Researching the NAA database (naa.org) will help you determine if newspapers are a good return on investment (ROI) for marketing your product or service. It will also provide you with a basis for intelligently discussing the numbers that a newspaper advertising salesperson will throw at you.
Types of Publications
Daily Newspapers generally serve a community of 5,000 or more. It's useful for retail and service business advertisers who want to reach a broad, non-specific customer base. In some cases, you can buy a specific geographic area to target your advertising. On the downside, dailies have a short shelf life of one to two days. You may want to target specific type of customers by inserting your ad in a specific section (i.e. the sports section for a sports store) or in a special section (special bridal section for selling wedding dresses).
Weekly or Community Newspapers serve both large and small communities, and sometimes just neighborhoods. Their targeted circulation and slightly longer shelf life make them ideal for products or services sold in a specific area. They provide a good market to test coupons offers and local promotions.
'Shopper' Newspapers are given to every residence of a community. You will generally find them laying on your driveway, at your door, or in your mailbox and are normally published weekly. They present products in a classified ad style and are good for consumer-to-consumer (garage sales, etc.) On the downside, since they are free, readership statistics by product category may not be available. Also, a paper without news stories or local reports may discourage people from reading it and a lot just get thrown away.
City Business Newspapers offer advertising opportunities for those who sell products or services to other businesses. Their editorial material often focuses on business expansion, growth and success stories, which often makes reading them a good source of business leads.
Consumer Publications can be general interest (Time, People, etc.) or specific interest/demographic groups (Sports Illustrated, Teen, etc.) These offer national exposure and some even have regional editions. Like many trade magazines, they have full-color ads, the opportunity to run pre-printed inserts in the binding.
Trade Publications specifically target industries. Just about every industry has at least one publication serving it. This is ideal for anyone wishing to reach manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, retailers, or sales reps for specific products. They are also good for advertisers who want to show business people how they can either make or save money.
'Visitor Guide' Publications are ideal if you're in the hotel/motel, restaurant, entertainment, museum, transportation, or retail business. The audience can be either local people or visitors. Coupons work well here, as well as announcements of special exhibits or displays.
Global Newspapers are a consideration if you do business internationally. Bethenny Carl over at websiteplanet.com has great list of organizing news sources by countries and regions from all over the globe. You can check it out at https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/complete-index-of-newspapers-across-the-globe/.