For me, it all starts with the audience. Focusing on whose needs you are fulfilling is critical to success. That much has not changed. Increasingly, people want to be part of a tribe and the deeper the relationships you can build, the more traction you gain. The plethora of noise out there and the sheer volume of media bombarding us in our professional and personal lives means the more focused you are, the more useful you are and the more understanding of your audience’s needs, the more cut-through you achieve. Grabbing a fraction of attention in today’s world is critical.
Better still if you can develop a membership model where your audience pay to be part of a community of common interest. The recurring revenues are an important source of revenue and enforce a discipline to keep giving those paying customers exactly what they want so they keep paying.
As AI becomes commonplace, personal relationships mean more. The ability to meet your audience in person is becoming not an optional extra for publishers, rather a must do. We’ve all seen the multiples exhibition companies have achieved. The cash flow benefits and the hedge against an online world driven by ever-more sophisticated AI offerings, makes a convincing case for incorporating events into your portfolio. It doesn’t have to be an exhibition: targeted roundtables, facilitated networking, member meet-ups are proliferating for good reason. People crave connections and we’re in a great place to facilitate those. They also generate original content, data and insight.
Linked to events is experience. As our consumer and business worlds meet, everyone demands a high standard of experience. If people are giving you their time or even more so, their money, they want to feel valued and enjoy the interaction. Delivering an exceptional, frictionless customer journey in all aspects of publishing is key or we risk losing out to those who do.
The impact of AI
Back to AI, both the greatest challenge and opportunity right now; beware if you don’t have proprietary content and I mean unique, unreplicable. We may all think our journalists are the best, however, testing whether what they bring to our audiences isn’t replicable via AI is incredibly important. Complacency will ruin us. Remember too that research has never been easier with AI at your fingertips producing in seconds what it has taken many publishers decades to assemble. Don’t delude yourself because the barriers to entry in publishing are now non-existent. Your audience may be content to skim a collection of AI headlines with their morning coffee, what are you offering them that they really value that moves their careers forward or helps them complete their work? I think, increasingly, we will write less and focus more on the quality and usefulness of what we write. Undoubtedly, skilled journalists who are embedded in their markets, have key industry leaders on speed dial and know who to ask for a comment should lean into this expertise. AI can’t do that.
And, of course, underpinning all this is data. A single source of truth is no longer negotiable. You need a tech stack that allows you to collect, analyse and forecast all your interactions with your audience. This is the secret sauce. It is the data no one else has that is a value of and in itself. Here AI can be your friend and the ability to identify sophisticated trends has never been easier.
AI can also help you professionalise your back office though beware banking the savings and not reinvesting in your products and your people. There’s no doubt how we sell has already changed dramatically. If you’re not using AI and automations to pre-qualify your sales leads, research and profile your prospects and match their needs to your products, then you are being left behind.
Finally, our people. The temptation not to employ is strong in a world of rising employment costs and hostile employment legislation. However, we were all juniors at some point in our careers. It’s all very well saying AI will replace all the low-level skills but how are the managers of tomorrow going to understand how to use these sophisticated tools if they haven’t understood the basics? We need to invest in our people more than ever, upskilling and feeding their curiosity, developing them into the leaders of tomorrow.
None of this is new. It is the pace of change that has accelerated. Our publishing ecosystem is no longer a bubble owned by us, new entrants are coming from unexpected quarters. We need to think like disrupters. We must create our own ecosystems and seek change rather than hide from it. The lifecycle of a successful publishing business has just got faster.
This article was first published in Issue # 1 of Best Practice in Publishing, a new publication from InPublishing. Click here for links to the other ‘best practice’ articles from the publication.
