Contrary to widely held opinion, even a small niche publisher with only a relatively modest handful of visitors can benefit from a substantial investment in its digital activities. So go ahead, be „small but refined“, because the internet enables you to expand your niche. With WEIDWERK, the members’ magazine of the NÖ Jagdverband, STRG is successful where other agencies do not dare to go.
STRG has several major media companies among its clients, with large national reach and deep pockets. But STRG is also not afraid to enter into partnerships with regional publishers that reach a much smaller niche audience. The resources used for large projects such as STRG.CMS and BeHave, as well as STRG’s high-end consulting services can be aligned with the needs of smaller clients and are also suitable for modest budgets.
By developing a tailored business case together with the client, STRG demonstrates how the investment in digital technology can be justified and ensures that returns cover the costs of implementation as well as ongoing management and development.
„Most people would say that a website with such low traffic could never make money. But our work with WEIDWERK has proven that it is possible!“
Jürgen Schmidt, STRG’s CEO
WEIDWERK is a print magazine that, since 1928, around twenty years before the founding of today’s publisher, the NÖ Jagdverband , has served Lower Austria’s hunting enthusiasts. The magazine has a modest monthly circulation of 46.500 copies, distributed free of charge to active members of the association and to a smaller number of paying subscribers. Its content includes articles, news, event information, product reviews, recipes for game cuisine and profiles of dog breeds.
The hunting sector is often considered very traditional, conservative and old-fashioned. When WEIDWERK approached STRG to develop a digital strategy for its traditional print business and implement it, Schmidt was initially sceptical: „I grew up in a rural Austrian community where hunting was essentially just a pretext for drinking schnapps with the neighbours. My own father was a ‘beater' – the type who drove the game towards the shooting stand – and I remember my mother always getting upset when he and the other hunters came home completely drunk!“
Schmidt’s partner, Mic Dosser, brought him up to date on today’s hunting scene. Dosser had recently started training for a hunting licence and knew that alcohol consumption while hunting is now strictly prohibited, and that the hunting community has diversified, become younger and even attracts urban professionals.
When the association began looking for a new chief executive in 2017, many expected the board to choose one of the „good old boys“ from its own circles – that an old buddy would be appointed. Instead, it turned to a young lawyer, Silvia Scherhaufer. As a recreational hunter with insider knowledge of the Lower Austrian government and the law, she was the ideal, if unexpected, choice. Scherhaufer’s appointment in January 2018 was more than a symbolic statement. She quickly set about attracting new target groups and modernising communication with core members. „We are certainly a traditional community“, Scherhaufer acknowledges, „but we are attracting a broad spectrum of new people to our courses – from farmers and civil servants to chief executives of Austria’s largest companies. And we also want to communicate better to non-hunters that hunting is a living subject with more aspects than just shooting game.“
WEIDWERK already had a website, but it had merely reproduced the content of the print magazine, and the „shop“ displayed goods without any checkout function. She knew there had to be a way to bring the website up to date and even make it profitable, but she knew as little about digital business strategies as Schmidt knew about hunting. During the initial planning workshops, STRG and the WEIDWERK team developed several ideas. Everyone agreed that a mobile focus was critical – not only to reach younger readers, but also the „captive audience“ of hunters who sit silently in the dark forest all night, waiting only for prey and having nothing else to do but look at their phone. „We thought that while they are sitting out there at 3:00 Uhr in the morning, they could buy our goods online!“
Schmidt was still sceptical that shop sales alone would offset the costs of relaunching a website. „I asked Martin, the editor-in-chief, ‚who on earth buys a hunting knife that costs 1.500 Euro?‘ He replied: ‘That is our bestseller!'“ Schmidt became convinced that WEIDWERK readers, even if they are few in number, are highly motivated fans, who often spend every euro they have left on hunting equipment.
„The planning workshops enabled both sides to explain and understand each other’s concepts, visions and possibilities“, recalls Scherhaufer. „STRG contributed unique ideas that we could never have imagined on our own. And both of us were better able to determine whether our ideas fit our respective conditions and resources.“ For example, Schmidt advised WEIDWERK against a pay-per-click or display-ad sales model, since the website’s traffic volume could never be high enough to make it profitable. Instead, WEIDWERK should sell a fixed presence on the site to an advertiser, such as the Austrian shooting sports chain Kettner, and participate in the resulting revenue through Affiliate-Deals. Scherhaufer’s team also saw this as „a better way to market Advertorials for print and digital – and successfully so.“
Likewise, it was agreed by mutual consent not to set up a paywall for subscribers, but to make all content freely accessible. Most subscribers receive their magazine free of charge as members of the association, and a user registration and login function on the website would have been a futile investment.„We also do not want to prevent children from visiting this site, seeing the articles and persuading their parents to buy them something“, Schmidt says, only half joking. They also decided against developing a sophisticated classifieds function for peer-to-peer trading. „There was already another website for buying and selling used hunting equipment, and there is also Austria's extremely popular online P2P portal Willhaben“, Scherhaufer explains, „we could not compete with that, and it is not our core business.“ Schmidt makes clear: „We certainly could have developed a business case for it, but second place is the first loser, as they say.“
The decisive factor in the decision was the fact that, by introducing STRG.CMS as the editorial backend system, WEIDWERK's small publishing team could publish the website's content and manage digital assets without needing specialized knowledge of web programming. In addition, STRG's AI software, BeHave, could be tailored to the company's needs. For WEIDWERK, BeHave operates more at a semantic level than at the level of user personalization. It semantically matches article and advertorial content with product teasers. „It is about analyzing and maximizing the user journey“, says Schmidt. „Do they read the content? Are they satisfied when they read it? Do they scroll at the right speed? Do they reach the page where they can buy something? Is the purchase process efficient? Is Weidwerk trustworthy, too expensive, or do readers see the items on the website and then go to Kettner to buy?“
Initially, Schmidt was concerned that the relatively low traffic volume would not be sufficient for BeHave to work as intended, (…) „but it turned out that high traffic volume was not necessary. That was my main goal – to make this ‘little thing' successful. You know, Austria has only 8 million inhabitants, so you will never get the necessary traffic volume to generate pay-per-click revenue. The real skill is to generate ROI from a small audience of highly motivated fans.“
STRG's partnership with Weidwerk should prove to everyone that this is possible, just as Weidwerk has proved that today's hunters are not just a bunch of traditional old boys who are only „heavily armed alcoholics walking through the forest to the tavern“, as the old joke goes.