Pioneering Online News, Marketing Small Businesses & High School Football #5

Brand Forward

I talk with Kelly about her success being a pioneer to the online news space, what she’s hearing from her clients and what high school footballs means to her company.

Kelly Gilfillan and Cole Evans sit down to talk about pioneering online news, Style Home Page and her media consumption.

Cole: We’re here today with Kelly Gilfillan. Kelly is the founder and CEO of Home Page Media Group. Home Page Media Group is the home of brentwoodhomepage.com, franklinhomepage.com, nolensvillehomepage.com, I’m not done, springhillhomepage.com, and stylehomepage.com. Kelly sits on the national board of Local Independent Online News Publishers and the Davis House Child Advocacy Center. Kelly oversees a team of designers, account managers, journalists, and major client accounts while growing revenue year over year. Kelly’s online properties are bringing over 200,000 people to her websites each and every month, generating millions of valuable impressions. Kelly, how are you doing?

Kelly: I’m great, thank you.

Cole: Great, thanks so much for being on Brand Forward.

Kelly: Glad to be here.

Cole: Well, Kelly, let’s dive right in. How long have you owned Home Page Media Group and why in the world did you decide to start an online publication?

Kelly: Started in fall of 2009. We saw a void in the local news that was being delivered to Brentwood. My former partner and I both lived in Brentwood at the time and she is a journalist. And I was, sales and marketing, my whole background. And we thought, you know, there’s a opportunity here, the door’s open. There’s a decrease in news from our legacy paper or just lack of. So we started experimenting with business plans and SWOT analysis and we did focus groups. We asked people from multiple different industries what it would look like to be an advertiser on this kind of publication online.

And we started talking about it in April of ’09 and we launched in August of ’09. So it was a pretty quick process from the time we made the final decision in June, went and got a business license, built out the site within six weeks or so, and sold out of advertising by December of ’09. So it was obvious that there was a need and everywhere we went, people said yes, go, this is a need. And as we’ve moved forward, we looked for that same situation. Where’s there a need? Where’s there a news desert that people are searching for information and can’t find it? And I guess that’s pretty much a very quick version of our story.

Cole: Sure. Kelly, let’s talk about the advertisers that sold you out and that’s a remarkable story. I’m still kind of hung up on you completing a website in six weeks. That has its anxiety by itself, right? But let’s talk about the advertising…

Kelly: We did Style Home Page in four weeks.

Cole: Let’s talk about the type of advertiser in 2009 as compared to 2016’s advertiser.

Kelly: In 2009, an online news site, we were really pioneers. Especially in this area. There weren’t very many news organizations that were completely online. There were plenty that were print and had an online product, but the advertising sales teams or the bigger organizations who had those products were just kind of adding on the online ads. They were just throwing them in for free. They weren’t giving them value.

Cole: Right.

Kelly: And so we had to face that which was, there was a lot of education that needed to happen and we were selling air because we didn’t even have page views before we launched. And so it was really more of the idea, the concept, Susan’s reputation, my reputation as business people to get things done and we did. We used to joke that we were selling ads on good looks and reputation. But once we had the page views and we became a buzzword, Brentwood Home Pages, you know? We were independent, we were credible.

High school sports played a huge role in that. People who own small businesses want to support local schools, local sports and we really, it was kind of my vision to really go after prep sport. Be at every football game and there were three high schools at the time in Brentwood and we were at every football game. We tried to be at every baseball game, softball game, and take plenty of pictures and with the photos going and the buzz happening, the advertisers started to come.

We definitely had early adopters who were friends, but no family. But we had a lot of people that we knew through church and through school and who wanted this thing for their city so they supported us early on and a lot of them are still advertising six and a half years later, so it’s a compliment.

Cole: Wow, that’s awesome. Kelly, let’s talk about high school football for just a second because I find that there are few people that can actually champion the category of sports. A couple of outlets might carry a couple of teams, etc. But you guys have to your own admission for many years really covered high school sports. What percent of your annual advertising revenue would you say is attributed to the sports category?

Kelly: Probably 20%. We really are aggressive and we went from trying to be at every baseball game to really developing a system. So now we’re at every district game, every region game, all the championships. We are at every…like in Brentwood, when Brentwood plays Ravenwood, it’s the Battle of the Woods. We’re at all of those real neighborhood-type games and we’ve developed a system with all of our, we have a stable of freelancers who are all really highly talented people, so once we get to that district level, we are at every game.

But even if there’s games that we’re not at, our sports editor is doing a roundup of whatever those sports are. So we’re just wrapping up basketball. He would have a basketball roundup every Tuesday, Friday, of all the games. He would go through the stats, do a rewrite story…everybody’s game is covered. And it’s just a mission of ours to do that and it brings in readership. Real estate and sports fight for the second and third place of most readership. I knew it was going to be important and it just has grown in importance.

Cole: It’s come to fruition, right?

Kelly: Yeah, we cover 12 high schools every Friday night during football season and it’s a machine. And we want to be the first to have our stories up. We don’t want to wait until Saturday morning and put them up Saturday morning. We’re up until two, three, four in the morning sometimes depending on how many games there are, making sure our stories are up on Friday nights. And our advertisers, we promise that we’re going to do that and because of that, we have tons of page views and our advertisers get great looks.

Cole: That’s awesome. Kelly, let’s switch the conversation for a second. So for people that are listening to Brand Forward outside of the middle Tennessee area, let’s just put some facts on the table. Brentwood, Franklin, Nolensville, and Spring Hill are communities within the middle Tennessee area, specifically in Williamson County. A lot of people don’t know but Williamson County, as far as per capita, one of the wealthiest areas honestly in the country. Let’s talk about stylehomepage.com. What’s the reasoning? Why not another community focus, if you will? Where is stylehomepage.com fitting in the portfolio?

Kelly: Style is our first vertical. And just to jump back to what you were saying, Williamson County is the 17th wealthiest county in America. So the demographic is a highly desired demographic. And our readership, even amongst the news sites, the daily news sites, is 70% female because of the type of news that we’re creating. Very community, their kids are playing the sports, their kids are playing the schools, the moms care. And we’ve had that demographic to sell all along. Style Home Page was born out of a relationship that I already had with Cathi Aycock who was a…her moniker was the Shopping Diva for The Tennessean, which is the legacy paper here in Nashville.

But she is a Williamson County girl. She lives in Williamson County, her kids went to school here, her peeps are here. But she’s known all over middle Tennessee so Style Home Page, we knew we already had all of this great female readership with our four news sites. We’re just directing them, say, “Hey, you want to read this, too.” And Cathi has her own brand. She’s very well-respected, very well-liked. She’s just really honestly a very likable person.

And I’m excited about Style Home Page because we fully plan on expanding into Nashville, outside of Nashville. Nashville is just hot right now and there’s so much style going on. And every different part of Nashville…Germantown, East Nashville, The Nations, Sylvan Park…all of them have their own personality and their own style.

Cole: That could not be more true. Their own magazines.

Kelly: A lot of different types of living situations. And it’s really just a totally different vehicle but I love and I’m very excited about doing a vertical as opposed to just a city-based news site. And it’s a different business model in itself.

Cole: Well, and I’m sure people are attaching a lot more to their independent communities than a publication that might have obviously worthy news, but if it’s 40 miles across the area, across the state, then you’re not as drawn to it. You might actually know the person that was in the wreck or their kid that scored the football score right down the road versus again a hundred miles in either direction.

Kelly: Right, but style is more universal. And what’s hot in clothing is universal. What’s hot in home decor is generally universal, whether it’s a color palette or a townhome layout. People who live in these big homes in Brentwood are still interested in what those really cool high-rises are doing down in Nashville and they want to see the inside of one. And what are the style choices between granite and just the things to build the townhomes or the condos? I know I am.

It’s interesting because I am my own target market. I am between 35 and 55. I am female, I live in Williamson County. My kids grew up here. They were playing the sports when we were covering it. So it’s easy for me to know what women like me are going to be interested in in a style homepage. And Cathi is the same way. She’s me, too. So it’s one of the easier marketing jobs I’ve ever had.

Cole: Kelly, let’s stick with that point for just a second, being the core demographic. With Brand Forward, what we want to make sure is to identify with our listeners what your organization’s doing differently than again just a few years ago.

I actually did a little totaling before I got you on the phone here and it looks like cumulatively your Facebook websites, your Facebook social platforms total about 24,000 individual people, Twitter coming in around 13,000. With that being said, in episode number two, we asked Bryan Huddleston at the Nashville Technology Council what advances he sees in technology in the next five years here in the area. So definitely go to episode number two and check out what his answer is on that.

Kelly, with respect to that, with the very heavy…pushing 50,000 individual people on social media in the area and again generating, those are uniques, 200,000 people to your properties, what is something that Homepage Media Group is doing to move your brand forward today versus again five or six years ago?

Kelly: Over the last year, we really evolved in the delivery. We used to have an email that came out in the morning and we would post all of our stuff and one story an hour on Facebook. And that was our strategy and that worked fine until Twitter came on so strong. Then as we grew, more and more news was coming our way. We’d get better reporters who were going out and getting stories.

So then it became about speed and consistent delivery. So we went from having just one daily email at 4:00 in the morning, so now we have two. We have a 4 a.m. and a 2 to 3 p.m. edition. So we have two editions now. We’re pushing the stories out on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest. We really go after that breaking news. We’re known for our speed. And when somebody hears about something, what they tell me, “Well, first place I’m going to check is the Brentwood Homepage and you always have it.” And so speed is really important. We’re coaching up our reporters on how we want it delivered and what to recognize as a core piece of news that our readers are going to want to know about. And now we kind of define that.

Cole: So Kelly, let me ask you a question. Again, whether it’s someone coming to the area, most broadcast stations are not going to break air to cover certain things when it could just wait until the 6:00 or the 10:00 news. Is that fair to say?

Kelly: Uh-huh.

Cole: Let’s point the listeners to your site right now, so brentwoodhomepage.com. That’s brentwoodhomepage.com. So I’m on there right now. I see local stories, regional companies. I see a business spotlight right here. So knowing that the broadcast is not breaking air like that, Kelly, and saying that speed is one of your number one value positions, let’s talk about how quick you go online, is I guess what I’m saying. How quick from a story breaking to you literally pushing it out and what does pushing it out look like if I’m getting two emails a day with my stories? Let’s talk about that for a second.

Kelly: It has to be really big breaking news for us to not wait until the 3:00. For example, yesterday in Nolensville, there was an altercation between a police officer who was injured and there was a suspect obviously. And we found out about it bright and early from one of our readers and started investigating it at about 7:30 or 8 in the morning, I believe. By I want to say 9:30, we had a breaking news email out. We now have text alerts. We had sent a text alert out to Brentwood and Nolensville because they’re very close communities.

So on that day, we sent three emails and we did the extra social media. On something like that, too, we’ll sometimes, if the readership is really good on the stories and there’s a lot of attention being paid to it on social media…we can just tell by each story real-time how many reads it has…if it’s a big story we’ll also potentially put it on social media later on that afternoon and say, “In case you missed it, this is what happened this morning.” And of course it’ll also be in the afternoon email again.

Cole: So let me ask you a question. You’ve got a handful of salespeople obviously telling your story throughout the market. You’re producing great numbers. Hyper-local content here in the area. So as marketers, we can check these boxes off. Let’s talk about the three things that you wish people knew about your business. What are three takeaways you wish everyone knew about your business?

Kelly: We always say we want everyone to know that we’re independent and that we’re credible and that we are essential to our readers. Sometimes independent isn’t really as important to some sectors of our readers, but when it’s coming to competition with legacy sites, independent means I might care about what’s going on in my community a lot more than a large national group of newspapers. And so if you explain it that way, it becomes more important. Credible? We have a newsroom full of just highly motivated, aggressive, talented writers. But they’re young, and what that means is I have to have a really experienced, credible editor. And I do in Mark Cook.

Mark is somebody I was very lucky to get after he left The Tennessean, he ran the Williamson AM office. Williamson AM was the Williamson County section of The Tennessean and so for me to have him here with his 20 years’ experience he sat at that editor’s desk, it was a good get for me. And it’s a good get for our readers because the quality of the news is just one tick above where it was because he’s got the reins on these reporters, and they love working for him. He’s such an asset.

And essential is what becomes really important to my advertisers. They want to know that those readers need me, because when they need me, that means they’re going to be there every day. And that’s where the advertisers are. And we really try to be very creative in meeting our advertisers’ needs. We have very small businesses that are advertising at $100 a month to large advertisers who are spending $3,000 a month. We are creative with what their goals are and sometimes create products around something that’s going to serve the readership that also serves the marketing goals of an advertiser. But us having over 50% of our readers read more than once a day, every day, that’s a strong…

Cole: Yeah, those are great numbers.

Kelly: Yeah, strong value to the advertiser.

Cole: Thanks for listening. Subscribe to our podcast today on iTunes. Once you’ve subscribed, text me at 615-775-4227. That’s 615-775-4227. Now back to Brand Forward.

Kelly, thanks again for being on the podcast with us today. Brand Forward listeners are consuming media in a variety of ways, so this is going to be extremely difficult because you’re running a media company. Let’s check out for a second and let’s just talk about Kelly as an individual. Let’s talk about your media consumption.

So Kelly, with Brand Forward, our listeners are consuming a variety of different media on a regular basis. So right now I just want to talk about Kelly’s media consumption. Let’s talk about your morning, midday, and evening media consumption. What’s a normal day look like and specifically whether it’s in morning, midday, or evening or not, I’m interested to know, I get in your car right now and I crank it up, what audio am I going to hear?

Kelly: My playlist on my iPhone.

Cole: Got it. Okay, so playlist, it’s on iTunes, you bought the music? Spotify? Pandora? Dig into that just a second.

Kelly: I bought the music. I had it on my phone and create playlists out of iTunes. I have different playlists for what I’m doing.

Cole: There you go. There you go. Awesome. Okay, so morning. Let’s talk about media consumption. You wake up in the morning, what do you do?

Kelly: I wake up about 6 and I open my emails and I go through everything that my competition has put out that day and see if we missed anything and what’s going on in the county in middle Tennessee. That’s about it for the morning. I really just check out the competition. I already know what’s on my own site [inaudible 00:20:46].

Cole: Got it. So 10, 11:00. You’re getting ready for lunch. Midday. How’s Kelly consuming media?

Kelly: I usually will check Facebook, make sure that our media is doing well on Facebook that day. And really don’t do much more than that until about midday when National Business Journal sends out their afternoon, so I do keep an eye on the Business Journal. They tend to break stories, big ones in Williamson County sometimes on commercial real estate deals or something, so I definitely am watching the competition there, too. And anything that comes through breaking from the competition during the day, I will check it out immediately. And then really in the evening, I watch the 10:00 news and that’s about it. I’m not on my computer much at night.

Cole: Okay, Kelly, I’m now going to put you on the spot. Is your 10:00 news consumption every night with the exact same station?

Kelly: No. I tend to move around with the stations. I have one that I like a little better, but I am flipping around just to see what’s going on. Again it’s watching my competition. I’m not trying to make myself sound obsessed, but it is important in my industry to know what’s going on.

Cole: Pioneering the online news industry since fall of 2009, championing the high school sports sector in the Middle Tennessee area, in the 17th wealthiest area in the United States of America, bringing 70% female to the front door for her audiences. Kelly Gilfillan, thank you for moving your brand forward.

Kelly: Thank you, Cole.

The post Pioneering Online News, Marketing Small Businesses & High School Football #5 appeared first on Good People Creative.