I very much enjoy working at Immediate Media, a vibrant hub of vivid content, exciting brands and talent. Immediate is home to content curators, who bring joy to our audiences in our core markets: Food & Wellness, Entertainment and Knowledge. We have footprint across many formats including digital apps, premium web, live events, podcasts, social media, and print. Immediate has many touch points that enrich UK consumer lives.
As managing director, customer marketing & subscriptions, my remit is commercial, to grow revenues, largely subscriptions, across digital and print formats.
Immediate has been re-balancing our business between physical and digital revenue streams. Print continues to be robust and highly profitable but digital is both fast growing and profitable. Today, we have about 1.1m paid subscribers, with the majority of these being digital subscribers. Growing the paid digital base, profitably and at pace continues to be the mission critical task on my to-do list, alongside nurturing and maintaining our important print revenues.
In common with many media companies, who have multiple brands and formats, my team and I have been working with leadership, stakeholders and cross-functional colleagues to make a shift to a customer-centric approach. Having restructured the team around the customer funnel, earlier this year, I am spending a lot of time supporting, facilitating and orchestrating my brilliant and talented team to grow, develop and excel at what they do.
I stay focused on understanding industry trends across the paid subscriptions landscape, in the media sector and beyond; keeping tabs on what is happening on the big tech platforms (Google, Meta, Insta, X, TikTok); and keeping a grip on changes within the regulatory environment. There is a lot going on right now!
Building and nurturing a modern customer marketing team
Like many media organisations with physical and digital formats, we have faced into the challenge of how best to organise to drive truly customer-centric marketing and leverage efficiencies from our marketing talent and owned / paid media spend.
Now structured around the customer funnel, the new team is well set up to drive maximum results. The team is structured in a way that allows for us to be both strategically forward looking and technically expert in modern marketing specialisms. This means I spend time each week on supporting teams within the team to both develop their specialisms and to work in a tightly orchestrated matrix way across the customer funnel.
At the time of writing, we are setting our 2025 budgets and plans, in line with our 2028 strategies to massively scale top of funnel demand and drive serious growth in digital subscribers. This is a science and an art, looking at historic trends, identifying risks and opportunities, always re-inventing our marketing, being ROI driven, and managing the art of the possible in our forecasting and budgeting.
Right now, we are focused on setting stretch targets to turn anonymous customers to known, redefining plans for performance marketing across paid and owned media, driving a big uptick in top of funnel demand, and improving conversion at all touch points to significantly increase yield, retention and profitability.
Working with incredible brands like Radio Times and Good Food, with huge traffic and great content, we have a massive opportunity to develop personalised journeys tailored around areas of interest. The new team is set up to tailor journeys from top of funnel down and the level of specialism now in the team facilitates this. We have over 600,000 paid digital subscribers and these are growing fast.
I am currently working with my propositions and planning team to get the budgets in place, define our product roadmaps and create new market maps for our key markets. This team is the engine room for subscriber growth and helps us keep our foot on the gas.
KPIs, metrics and ROI, coupled with customer behaviour insights, sit at the heart of our customer marketing data team’s remit. This is a new team that looks holistically at consumer revenues and how best to drive them. The team are 100% commercially focused and ROI driven. My work with this team is to challenge our thinking and champion new approaches to pricing strategies, marketing investment, and commercial negotiations to maximise profits and support the conversations with the wider team, collaborators and stakeholders in other teams, to get traction and shift how we think about investment. Lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratios should be at the heart of decision making and we are bedding these into an agile way of working that allows us to react to strategic changes as well as daily movements in customer demand, to always get the maximum return on our marketing investments.
With the demand team, we are optimising our performance marketing (paid and organic social, paid search and the other channels) driven by LTV:CAC ratios and other success metrics. In a high growth environment, segmenting audiences and personalising marketing begins at the top of the funnel, with data-driven ROI metrics informing all our plans. Getting into specific challenges, understanding how demand is trending vs plan, and vs last year and supporting the team to use this knowledge to refine, innovate and optimise. We are extending a single promotional calendar approach across all our marketing, channels and creative treatments.
Another core area of focus for me is on accelerating our already strong performance in CRM / CRO. We have recently put in place a more structured and expert team who are very focused on the customer funnel — maximising conversations at every touch point in the customer journey. Underpinning this is a new CDP we have put in place. This tool orchestrates all our 1-2-1 personalised marketing and we have grand ambitions for leveraging this in Q4 into H1 25. This is a mammoth project that will hugely upskill our capabilities and give our talented marketing team freedom to create and innovate around what is trending in customer demand. Setting big targets to drive 3 X growth over 3-year timelines, gives focus. Putting these targets into OKRs gives further clarity on the most important things for the team to get behind and deliver.
Bedding in a new team structure takes time and energy as well as strong leadership skills. I use the Tuckman model — Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing — as a tool to check in on where the team is at and have been lucky enough to lead many high performing team variations, as marketing and business goals have evolved and adapted. Adaptive leadership is something I believe strongly in, alongside supporting agility and flexibility in team members and fostering a growth mindset. I use learning from many great training programmes extensively in my work at Immediate.
Scaling digital subscriptions
Scaling digital subscriptions, is mission critical, alongside nurturing our print heritage.
Creating a great app experience, a compelling marketing customer journey and understanding demand in performance marketing, is a daily task that links to our strategic objectives. Delivering 100%+ growth in acquisitions and maintaining this run rate comes from a huge team effort between brand, content, product & tech and customer marketing. Our results this year have been spectacular.
We have a huge existing and potential audience of consumers who face the daily challenge of what to cook tonight. Investing in talent to drive Good Food app marketing campaigns has been a particular success: the Good Food team create amazing content, augmented by external talent such as Max La Manna, Nadiya Hussain, Tom Kerridge and other talented chefs who have helped us curate content.
We have also seen strong growth in subscriber numbers from Nutracheck, the UK’s leading calorie counting app. As a pureplay digital product, we have been able to scale through product investments, great marketing and customer journeys and we have very successfully leveraged synergies with Good Food and healthy eating to dramatically increase brand awareness.
The importance of print subscriptions
Print subscription revenues continue to be very important — and we continue to invest in our print products and their marketing. Our new customer-centric approach helps us maximise sales across both print and digital (leveraging efficiencies from a single team and promotional plan). It helps us signpost and recommend content to our audiences and give customers more of what they love.
I am thinking a lot about customer service right now. This includes strategic thinking on how we join up the customer experience across multiple brands and formats. I am also considering the impact of the proposed changes to Royal Mail second class deliveries and we are talking to interested parties to represent our subscribers’ needs within ongoing discussions. This is particularly the case for older customers in remote and rural areas.
Final thoughts
With continued hard work and effort, we are on track to finish 2024 on a subscriptions high, with very strong trading and successes hitting our strategic goals and milestones. This kind of success comes from an enormous amount of effort and energy and is a true team effort. I make sure we take the time to celebrate success, to get staff feedback and act on it, to hold socials for the team — including recent pottery painting, a baby shower, weekly “bring your own grub” lunches and social drinks. We also have cake for everyone’s birthday!
I love the variety of what I do. The mix of strategy, marketing execution, coupled with the leadership challenges and fast paced turnaround, keep me busy, engaged and full of energy.
I’m enjoying looking ahead to 2025 and seeing what we can achieve. It’s exciting to see the business evolve and to know that much more is to come.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
