On May 16 the magazine co-hosted a Business After Hours networking event for the Halton Hills Chamber of Commerce. Here is some of the speech that we gave. We began by thanking our co-host, Andrews Scenic Acres of Milton, and the staff of the Chamber who organized the event. Then we went on to say:
The magazine wouldn’t have been possible without the enthusiastic support of the people & businesses of Halton Hills, who subscribe & continue to support the magazine with advertising. The magazine reaches a large part of southern Ontario but local advertisers see great response & so they continue to advertise regularly. They see that it works. We greatly appreciate that. Because of this local interest we feature stories from the area. By doing this we have helped put Georgetown, Acton & Norval on the map, as well as help drive tourism to our town.
There are 3 things we promise to keep doing:
Number One: Aim for excellence in magazine journalism with gorgeous photos & informative writing that make people read each issue cover to cover & keep issues a long time.
The second thing is to practise ethics in business. We’ve heard horror stories about publications that took advertisers’ money & then disappeared without publishing anything, or published something crappy, or printed ads of poor quality that you can’t even read. We don’t do that. We charge everyone the same rates for ads, not giving some people price cuts while others don’t get them. We’ve even lost some big advertisers because of this. We’ve also gained some big advertisers who came back because they respect us & the magazine.
The 3rd thing is to encourage engagement with our audience. We have a high subscription renewal rate even though the magazine is available for free. Readers send us hand-written cards with photocopies of the subscription form because they don’t want to cut up the magazine. We get lots of letters to the editor, some critical, which we publish in each issue. Copies are kept a long time & even back issues are in demand when we give them away at community events.
These 3 things: excellence, ethics & engagement, are the secret to our success & can help our advertisers succeed. Because 10 years ago we realized that we would only succeed if we help our advertisers succeed. 10 years later, we see that it’s working.
We invite you to consider joining in & seeing how your business can grow with us.
