Publishers are no strangers to big decisions. But choosing the right technology to support their businesses now and into the future might still be the trickiest. With so many fancy tools promising to revolutionise everything from content creation to all manner of monetisation, it’s easy to get swept up and commit to platforms and services that wow in a demo but don’t move the business forward in a meaningful way. So, before you swipe the company credit card, let’s break it down.
- Start with the main course: What’s the centrepiece of your menu? Revenue? Audience? Efficiency? All of the above? In which case, in what order of priority and therefore share of budget? In a sea of ‘C’s’ — CMS, CDP, CRM, CMP — which combination truly matches the requirements critical to growth?
- Serve your audience: Audience is still everything. Whether you’re selling to them — or selling access to them — if they’re not in love with the experience you provide, your tech isn’t working. Look to make your digital products faster, smoother and easier to navigate. Don’t make them work too hard to find what they came for — they will go elsewhere.
- Find the right ingredients for profit: Publishing is a business full of passion and integrity but let’s face it, we all need to get paid. Whether that’s through subscriptions, ads, marketing services or ecommerce, your tech needs to fully support and align with revenue streams. That means frictionless registration, payments, subs or membership management and even playing nice with ad networks.
- Cook up some killer content: And whatever the revenue or audience model, we can safely assume that content is at the very heart of the business. A solid CMS should be super organised, efficient and able to adapt. It should handle any kind of content you wish to throw at it and distribute it to any platform with which your audience engages — they’re highly unlikely to all hang out in one place 24/7.
- Data: The Secret Sauce: Data is a (not-so) secret weapon. Solid analytics will tell you exactly what your audience wants and needs. It’ll also tell your customers how valuable your platforms really are. Real-time data is the only way to stay on top of trends and make sure you’re able to respond to them.
- Don’t let the dish go cold: Picking the right tech stack isn’t just about the latest new thing, it’s about what works for your business, your team and your audience. Future-proofing is an often overlooked component of tech decisions. And while tech waits for no one, the very latest thing isn’t always the right thing for your goals. Get the basics right, build a stack that you can sustain, that can scale as you do and then build around that in response to audience insight and not just what’s just become possible.
- Take-away: Take your time, assess requirements in a systematic way and the decisions will make themselves.
Bon appétit!
About us
With a combined experience of over 80 years in the publishing industry, Full Fat Things works with B2B and B2C publishing businesses to develop sustainable digital products with deep integrations with infrastructure and workflows. We create fully customised outcomes using open-source software to enable ultimate flexibility now and in the future.
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