How one French publisher boosted revenue and traffic by partnering with local influencers

The French Nice-Matin group owns three newspapers – Nice-Matin, Var-Matin and Monaco-Matin – in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, in the southeast of France.

In 2021, the group launched NM Influence, its own innovative incubator for local influencers and micro-influencers. The ideal was to offer their advertisers influencer campaigns that complement their traditional media formats. 

At the same time, this strategy also helps attract new advertisers, which can be challenging for publishers nowadays, and boost their revenue and traffic. The group recorded a growth of more than 10% of their revenues last year.

The agency now collaborates with 120 local influencers – who have between 5,000 and 50,000 followers – all of which are exclusive contracts. Faced with the success of this strategy, other French regional media are also making the same bet.

The Fix spoke with Mathilde Aylies, head of digital revenue development at the Nice-Matin group.

We realised that social media was taking up a lot of space for our advertisers and was relatively accessible to companies with a slightly larger budget. At the same time, we also realised that we had a real panel of profiles who were successful on social media in the region but who had a core business and who did it with passion and authenticity. 

That's how the idea started. We're a local media company that wants to diversify its revenues, and who better than us to implement influencer campaigns at the local level?

We started by doing a bit of profiling, looking at profiles that might interest us based on the type of advertisers we work with, and it took off really quickly. We check their audience to ensure that at least 70% comes from the region.

The idea was to have completely different profiles because we work with all types of advertisers – small, medium, and large – and with all types of thematics, such as travel, tourism, food, corporate, or sports.

We also had profiles who came to us directly and were looking to work with smaller agencies. As a local media company, we also had this legitimacy, this trust, which made these profiles want to work with us.

We currently have 120 influencers, from 18 to 76 years old. That's really interesting because we're able to match with brands that need to target these generations who are active, who are in the upper socio-professional categories, and who have good purchasing power to enjoy life.

In 2021, we founded NM Influence, the Nice-Matin group influencer agency. We handle everything from contacting the influencer, creating the brief, supporting them, and providing follow-up. They are all under exclusive contract with us.

Now we are also paying closer attention to recruitment. Let's not lie to ourselves, we recruited profiles that weren't necessarily suited to our advertisers, or at least their content wasn't suitable at the beginning, so that meant we had to readjust.

Exactly. The advantage for these advertisers is having the influence but also the media, which really allows for a much more viral communication mix that reaches a much wider audience with a different communication channel.

This adds value for advertisers. We can offer them 360-degree communication in addition to our own media. We can also develop their brand image on social media thanks to content creators.

Yes, this business model allowed us to be approached by advertisers indirectly, through our influencers. It’s about advertisers who wouldn't have needed the media itself but preferred to have a content creator. 

Thanks to this first contact, we brought them in to offer them other things as well, so through that channel. We're seeing a revenue growth of more than 10% for the group, which is really good news, partly thanks to this strategy. 

We realised that there was a business model still to crack there. So today we also propose a new offer in addition to the classic influence campaigns, it's called the brand ambassador. It's an influencer who will take part in an article on our website to talk about a brand with a video or a text.

The advertiser will have the advantage of having both the media diffusion and the influencer, and so this mix has a bit of the power and trustworthiness of the media and the virality of the influence. No influence agency can offer that because they are not a media outlet. 

We also realised that it brought us an audience we didn't have, huge and different traffic. So we thought there might be something to explore while controlling it, of course, because there's this editorial aspect and our editorial line that must be preserved.

We had many discussions with the editorial staff. Some people were scared because they were afraid [influencers would] take over their job. It was difficult internally. 

There's a whole educational process to do internally, raising awareness about social media and explaining to them that these are profiles we're going to sell and that they are not going to replace a journalist, far from it. They don’t have the same ethics, and they don't have press cards. There are two different worlds, but each one can learn from the other.

Our response is to be transparent and to mention in the advertiser content that it was not written by a journalist. 

Source of the cover photo: courtesy of the Nice-Matin group