Case study: How to add a title with a 50% margin

Company: Carolina Marketing Company, Inc (CMC), a publisher of  local lifestyle media

KeyExecutivess Sandi Grigg, Director, and Justin Willams, CEO and Publisher

Headquarters: Wilmington, North Carolina

Initiative: Launching a new title with a 50% margin

Background: Carolina Marketing Company published several quarterly local lifestyle magazines in the island areas of North Carolina:  North and South Brunswick Magazine, an annual Brunswick Homes magazine, a yearly hardback book for hotel rooms, and two annual  Discovery Maps. 

A lean company, CMC has only four employees, including the owner, Justin Williams, who started the company in 2006, and Sandi Grigg, the Director, who runs organic and branded content, manages a team of freelancers contractors, including the copy editor. There are also more full-time sellers and graphic designers. 

Grigg says they have been the dominant marketing firm in each hyper-local area, supplying content marketing, social posting, advertisers contests, and even a share of their billboard to local businesses and publishing the magazines. The magazines also partner with critical associations like Chambers of Commerce and other organizations. Distribution is by direct mail plus “hot spot locations such as hotels and grocery stores.

“All the areas with magazines are geographically defined. You must cross a bridge in the islands to get  to the mainland.”  

“If you are an advertiser,  you are thinking, ‘If  I’m not there invisible.’”

In 2019, Williams, who owned an Airbnb in the Topsail (pronounced Topsull) area, a growing vacation area near Camp LeJeune,  started talking to business owners about launching a lifestyle magazine for the area. It seemed like a great market:  Topsail was a high-income growing area between two larger cities they already served and had a healthy tourism and vacation sector.

But the launch in 2020 coincided with the pandemic, while many of the traditional distribution spots were getting rid of magazines that they thought were virus spreaders, and business, in general, had fallen off. 

“Everybody thought we were nuts.’

Strategy

There was a hidden benefit to the pandemic; were staying home reading magazines, which could be direct-mailed to the households. 

The Topsail Magazine  launch incorporated a common plan:

• Replicate the formula that made other publications successful
• Leverage centralized operations 
• Select a healthy, growing market
• Take advantage of proximity

The magazine looks and feels the same as the other publications, though it uses a different printer. Everything from design, production, and sales is run from the center headquarters. 

In addition to so many businesses not being open,  an immediate issue was “not knowing how long Covid lived on actual paper,” said Justin Williams, founder and CEO. They countered this with a polybag wrap and utilized direct mail. 

“We got involved within the community without selling advertising for at least a month to show that we were committed for the long haul,”  Williams said.

They also wrote stories online about what people were doing in the community, which businesses were open and their hours, and whether or not they were advertisers and pushed these to social media. To engage readers, they offered grocery store gift cards as contest giveaways and fun games “to get their minds off what was happening,” he said.

Another issue was where, demographically, to place the magazine in rural areas. The new area served has a couple of small towns but also covers a  large rural county. CMC’s team settled on a few placements in grocery stores as the one central place to reach rural locals and ramped up the hotel room delivery to get tourists. 

Results 

• “Once it was on the street, the community loved it. People wanted to be in it,” Grigg said. Growth has been steady; by 2023, the quarterly magazine was running about 100  pages, with a 30/60 ad news ratio, sales in the range of  $225,000, and an incremental profit of more than 50%. 

•  Financial growth for the company as a whole started in 2022. “But this is because we did not give up on the community and invest the time and effort” to build relationships, Williams said.

Lessons learned 

• Look for strong markets with less competition and leverage resources.

• Be in it for the long haul. Think of solutions, even in adverse situations.

• “People think print is dead, but people wanted this,” Grigg said.