Our 6 magazines provide extensive and full coverage of the areas and increasing all the time (phone for details).
Click on a magazine to open it up and look inside
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The Benefits of Advertising With Us
A quality magazine with a guaranteed delivery via Royal Mail to every home and business in and around Ashford, Tenterden, Rye and the Marsh. (See map below for full coverage).
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- Choice – Advertising can be localised to reach a specific area or placed in multiple areas of your choice.
- Eye catching – Premium pages available (book early to avoid disappointment!)
- Popular – Widely read and valued by local residents and kept as a reference for the whole month.
- Effective – Free editorials available to new and loyal customers. (can really boost the response to your advertising)
- Flexible – Advertisements can be moved between magazines or artwork sizes mixed to suit your needs
- Discounts – available for long term bookings and placement in multiple areas.
- Convenient – payment by Credit/Debit Card or Bank Transfer
- Free – entry in our online Business Directories
- Free – entry in our new Smartphone App.
- Free Updates – minor updates are free of charge AND no design charges at all for bookings of 3 months or more.
- Additional drop-offs to public pickup points in each area, for example Pubs, local shops, libraries, supermarkets
- Our magazines are produced to the highest quality, representing incredible value.
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Click on the map below to see a larger view of our extensive coverage…
[spoiler intro=”About the Village Directory and how it all began”]
The Village Directory is very much a family business, it’s run predominantly by myself (Debbie!) with help from my husband and my father-in-law.
Nearly Six years ago I was a commuter totally unaware of what was around me. We live down a country lane between two villages and never receive anything unless it’s delivered by Royal Mail. I had no idea what was going on locally, and I’d been living here for 15 years. If ever I needed a particular service for my home my only option was to look in the Yellow Pages, but I wanted to use local tradesmen and finding them amongst everyone else’s advertising was not easy. I was aware of the success of small locally run advertising magazines in the Midlands and I was sure that with my years of IT experience and document design I could do the same, so the idea of The Village Directory was born.
We began the first magazine for the Aldington Area in July 2005, delivering to 3,000 village homes. From the very beginning I had decided that my magazine must be of high quality, I wanted it to be valued by its readers and kept throughout the month until the next one arrived. It was also important that it wasn’t simply a book of advertising, it needed local content. I also wanted it to reach EVERYONE and the only way to achieve this in a rural area was to use Royal Mail. Initially I had to wait for the delivery dates I needed with Royal Mail so my husband and family offered to help me deliver the magazines. In June 2005 the first issue went to print, that’s when I panicked, the fear of what I was about to do set in, but with a few supporting words from my husband we crossed our fingers and hoped that people would like what we were trying to do, luckily they did.
For six months we delivered the 3,000 magazines every month, searching out every letterbox in the area. By the time Royal Mail took over it had become difficult to pass a letterbox without experiencing the urge to deliver a magazine. I don’t know what I would have done without the family, and in these financially tight days all they wanted was to be fed and watered at the end of the day! My poor husband had the hardest job delivering to all the rural lanes, he was on a mission to boldly go where no magazine deliverer had gone before!
In addition to the deliveries to homes and businesses we also drop off magazines at locations where people can pick them up if they haven’t received one. These locations are predominantly pubs but also doctors surgeries, village shops and hairdressers etc. My father-in-law delivers these to all our areas every month and enjoys a little banter along the way.
With free distribution and a focus on village life I hoped that the magazine would help connect the community with their local tradesmen, and through their advertising the local tradesmen would in turn help fund the community pages, enabling the community to advertise local events and information free of charge. It was and still is a balancing act, trying to provide low cost advertising whilst ensuring that community pages are provided and quality and reliability is maintained.
The first magazine proved a great success and received nothing but praise from villagers and advertisers alike, many advertisers are still with me from that very first issue six years ago. The church, local schools and charitable organisations could now advertise their events to the community and anyone raising money for charity could raise awareness with an editorial. Editorial is also provided for businesses when they first advertise or at some point during their booking.
A year later we began our second magazine in TN26 and now, nearly six years on, we have succeeded in covering every rural home around Ashford,Tenterden and the Marsh. Without the support of our readers, and local business we could not have done it,
My sincere thanks go out to my family, my readers and my loyal customers.
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