Helping turn a passion into a full-time commercial business
Rooomy is a children’s interior lifestyle magazine with a clear vision and strong product offering. The company founder set up the magazine a few years ago to inspire families to be creative in their own homes. The publishing house came to Sharp Thinking to help monetise the magazine and create a long term business plan.
With aspirations to grow the magazine and turn it into a full-time commercial venture, Sharp Thinking provided marketing mentoring over a six month period using traditional marketing techniques and business planning. Marketing can be overwhelming and it can be difficult for businesses to understand where to prioritise their efforts. A marketing consultant can help overcome this with a monthly roadmap and breakdown into manageable tasks.
Sharp Thinking were able to provide monthly support and created tailored checklists and templates to allow the business founder to easily implement the marketing in-house in order to learn how to do it and grow their own skillset, and save costs.
The Approach: On a mission to be the go-to publication of kid’s interiors for parents
We began working with the company founder during the first lockdown via a series of sessions on Zoom. The first exercise was to understand the business and set some key long term objectives for the business. A detailed SWOT analysis was used highlighting the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the business, along with a review of the market and its competitors to set some benchmarks and obtain key learnings.
Results
With a real sense of purpose and a straight-forward plan to monetise and grow the magazine’s readership online, the business would be on the right path to success.
Greater control and focus for the business commercially
As part of the planning process, Sharp Thinking worked with Rooomy to create a sales forecast for the year and put together a company budget. This needed to include all costs from freelancers to design costs, subscriptions and promotions.
A more commercially sound media pack
Sharp Thinking advised relaunching the media pack to make it more commercially attractive. This involved interrogating different data sources to put a detailed profile of the Rooomy customer using an email marketing platform and Google Analytics to get under the skin of the numbers. It also involved repackaging the business benefits and quantifying them to acquire more advertisers.
Maximising web presence to drive search ranking to build subscribers
Sharp Thinking stressed the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO) and shared some practical tips and checklists to get the foundations in place. This involved ensuring the website was technically sound and leveraging Google My Business and customer reviews. The magazine would then be in the best place to see their rankings on Google improve, giving it the best chance of being seen and driving traffic to view, engage and ultimately convert to subscribers.
"Working with Natalie has been fantastic. Running a small business is so hard and know where best to spend my time and money is a tricky decision. Natalie has taught me so much. She’s incredibly easy to talk to and listen to. Her feedback is wonderful, she guides me in the right direction often going above and beyond and her flexibility during lockdown was very professional and appreciated! If you are unsure about investing in your marketing please take it from me, Natalie is 100% worth investing in, you will not regret it I promise." Rachel Burns, Rooomy
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