1. Think mobile
In the last couple of years, sales of smartphones and tablets have gone from irrelevance to enormous scale, far eclipsing sales of desktop computers. The mobile internet is where the action is as devices are personal and, in the case of smartphones, taken everywhere. If you’re a publisher without a clearly thought through mobile strategy, then you’re on dangerous and shifting ground.
2. Start with Apple
Microsoft, the dominant player in the desktop market, has been sidelined by Apple and Samsung in the mobile one. In terms of operating systems, there has been considerable consolidation around Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. While sales of Android devices are starting to overtake iOS devices, the fact is that many of these devices are bottom end of the market, used for video and games and not much else, and, therefore, of little interest to publishers. More importantly, for publishers, many of these cheap devices don’t come with Google Play, so your lovingly crafted Android version of your digital magazine, is not accessible on large numbers of ‘Android’ devices. In a nutshell, it’s safe to say that Apple still dominates the publisher tablet proposition, so make sure you develop for iOS first.
3. Measure the right things
You’ve got to make sure you are monitoring and measuring the right things. For Accountingweb.co.uk, the main KPI was ‘number of logged-in users’ (currently about 18,000 a month). Engaged users drive the site; they ask questions, they comment and they request white papers. Engaged users are what advertisers really want, so these figures are far more telling stats than either ‘page views’ or ‘unique users’. Consider the oft-quoted case of Google+ users. The figure Google put out to show the ‘success’ of the new social networking platform was ‘number of accounts’, when, as we all know, a far more telling figure would have been ‘number of active accounts’.
4. Forget banners
Advertisers have moved beyond buttons and banners and want integrated marketing solutions. They want campaigns that run across multiple platforms and which deliver a mix of branding, lead generation, sales, thought leadership and networking opportunities.
5. Get to know your customers
Technology might change, but some of the tenets of marketing remain reassuringly familiar, and ‘knowing your customer’ is one of them. UBM aims to be the world’s best events-led B2B marketing company and serving up relevant content in parallel with the event helps to create one integrated customer experience. One of the ways UBM determines the content needs of its audiences is to create a ‘day in the life of a customer’. By engaging and finding out what the customer wants, and also what the customer doesn’t know they want, UBM builds up audience segments. Each segment is given a persona, a name and a face, and a profile is built up. At this point, UBM can start to precisely tailor the content needs for each segment.
6. Think productivity tools, not content
People don’t buy content, they buy productivity tools or solutions. Raw data is dry and commercially unappealing. What gives it value is the analysis, the interpretation, the value-added overlays. Analyse the raw data you have at your disposal and work out how you can add value to it. Then package it up as productivity tools that will save your customers time, reduce their risk or make them more money.
7. Marketing strategies never stand still
Your marketing strategy should not be set in stone, but should constantly evolve in light of experience and changing technology. For The Economist, marketing is always on the move; search and SEO strategies now include ‘content recommendation’ strategies; brand campaigns now feature (particularly in the US) City Blitzes (wallpapering the city, along routes likely readers would travel); social media strategy has evolved from what was primarily a numbers game, to one of refining engagement. Everything is constantly being fine-tuned.
8. It’s all about engagement
The more you engage, the more money you make – simple. If you follow a prospect through the sales funnel (from anonymous website visitor, through the different levels – registered website user, socially engaged user, socially active user - to website customer), it is clearly demonstrated that the more your customer engages with you, the more revenue you will earn. And it’s not just about acquisition, retention is all about usage too, so successful publishers also expend a lot of effort into driving usage by existing customers.
9. Use free stuff to make money
If you charge for your content, it doesn’t mean you can’t give some of it away for free, to encourage sampling, capture contact details (through registration), whilst at the same time driving site traffic that you can monetise through advertising. For many publishers, the paywall question is primarily one of where to draw the line and how porous to make the wall, and publishers like The Economist and the FT are continuously experimenting. For The Economist, the ‘wall’ is currently a two stage process. You can read five articles in full, but when you try and access a sixth, you are required to register. Registration qualifies you for a further six free articles a week. To read more, you then need to subscribe. So, yes, some of The Economist’s valuable content is being given away, but the publisher is continuously building a highly valuable prospect list that it can market to in the future. The OECD’s Toby Green thought that a hard paywall was only really conceivable for an elite product aimed at the super rich. For everyone else, some variation on the freemium model is crucial.
10. Be a pig, not a chicken
Tim Brooks compared international marketing to the respective roles of the chicken (egg) and the pig (bacon) in a traditional English breakfast; one is involved, the other is committed. And, to succeed on the global stage … you need to be a pig. BMJ is in the process of expanding its operations in India and Tim had some good advice: do your homework first before committing any money and make sure you have a good reason to think you’ll do ok. For the BMJ, the fact that English is the language of medicine in India, print is growing, and the Vice Chancellor of the All India Institute of Sciences had bound copies of BMJ dating back to 1892 in his cellar were all positive signs.
11. Leave it to the locals
Once you’ve set up your international operation, you then need to let go. Drop any tendency towards control freakery, otherwise you’ll stifle them. Control brand and governance centrally – everything else, including pricing, you leave up to local management.
12. Tailor your content.
The digital revolution has opened up global opportunities for publishers and, because of the vibrancy of the UK publishing sector and widespread use of English, UK publishers are well placed to build international sales, but they need to be careful not to assume that content created for a domestic UK audience will automatically appeal to overseas readers. Future has successfully created US and Australian versions of their hub sites: BikeRadar and TechRadar and US and French versions of MusicRadar. Future has invested in someone on the ground in each of these areas to localise UK content and to also create local content, and this, according to Andy Rice, has been the key to their success in these markets.
13. Find the fear
If you can find out what keeps your customers awake at night, then you are on to a winner. Julie Harris of WGSN revealed that one of the drivers behind their recently launched new service, INstock, was the fact that fashion buyers and merchandisers were spending up to five days a month researching stock on rival sites and were having to make major purchase decisions at speed based on incomplete information. In an industry where market share is everything, these important decisions were often based on little more than a roll of the dice. Less than one in ten buyers was satisfied with the information they were basing their purchasing decisions on. One in five felt the buying process was like placing a bet. Armed with this knowledge, WGSN created INstock, a comparison shopper service listing a quarter of a million products, three million daily datapoints across sixty online retailers. It’s early days, but the signs are that fashion buyers are responding enthusiastically to this time saving, risk reducing new data service … and sleeping better at night.
14. Mix maths with magic
The provision of big data products like INstock requires skill sets not seen before in traditional publishers, but becoming more common – data analysts and data technicians. The statistical bent of these people is obvious and crucial; without the maths, there is no product. But, said Julie, the raw data needs the magic of the creative input and market knowledge to give context, meaning and establish the commercial opportunity. The all-important taxonomy, for instance, will be heavily influenced by market specialists, not statisticians. Successfully marrying the two is a potent combination.
15. Find the blue sky
For most publishers, the day job is quite enough to be getting on with, thank you very much. The daily back-breaking slog of meeting your current commitments means that, too often, we can’t find the time to get away from the daily pressures, find a blank sheet of paper and brainstorm future possibilities. And this is a shame, because without one eye on the potential prize, you will not travel very far. You need to establish, said Julie, what you are famous for now, and what you could be famous for in the future. You need to understand your customer’s future needs and you need to be prepared to rip up the rule book!
16. Buzz words
And, finally, the words and phrases that kept cropping up through the day: integrated marketing solutions, usage, engagement, data, feed the funnel, data visualisation, integrated, mobile, globalisation, localisation, personas, freemium, value-add, and… coffee, which I’m glad to be able to report, was in plentiful supply throughout the day.
