THE SENTINEL TO INTRODUCE NEW MARKETING PLATFORM FOR AREA BUSINESSES
The Sentinel
618-532-5604
232 E. Broadway, Centralia, IL
(The Sentinel will be one of the participating Chamber member media sources at the May 21 “Dive into Marketing” lunch at the Centralia Community Youth Center.)
The Sentinel is moving is offering new products and opportunities to better serve the local readership and business community.
One of the biggest developments at the historical newspaper is Better Newspapers Incorporated (BNI) Marketing, a new online website-building service The Sentinel will soon roll out.
“We are now in the marketing business,” said publisher and general manager, Jeff Peyton. “The hook is making really good websites for very little money. And the best part is, they’re self-service.”
“I’m trying to get beyond ads. The goal in these tough economic times is not to get every last dollar. We are trying to provide a service,” he continued. “Not everybody wants to buy an ad in the Sentinel, [and] not everybody can afford an ad in the Sentinel. But there are an awful lot of people that could use a nice-looking website.”
Peyton said the third-party service presents a simple and effective way to build quality websites in very little time.
“You click a button, answer a few simple questions, and then the program builds you a website. It’s a flat $75 a month. There’s no construction fee, there’s no hosting fee,” said Peyton. “I built a website in about five minutes and then uploaded my own content in about another half hour. It is very easy to set up.”
Other new initiatives at The Sentinel include less special tabloid sections in favor of new magazines aimed at the 55-and-older demographic.
“New Horizons is the big one that we’re doing. That’s a quarterly senior citizen magazine,” Peyton explained. “The first one has already come out. The second will come out in July, then in the fall and before Christmas.”
Peyton said the Morning Sentinel has also combined two long-running tabloid books into one digest-sized magazines which encompasses all of the activities at Carlyle Lake, Rend Lake, and in the local state parks.
