ChristieBardo

Innovative Packaging and Content Interactivity Explored by Revenue Panel

by Media

In a session at our recent BIMS event, Christie Bardo (pictured), chief revenue officer for Brief Media, joined host Tom Cintorino of The Next Chapter Consulting and Rob Keenan of Keenan Media to discuss Five (At Least) New Revenue Ideas You Can Be Selling in 2021. “Content is still king so all B2B operators can do really well because of our expertise with content and talking to the audience,” Bardo said.

As an example of the choices they want to offer audiences, here’s what’s on the homepage for Brief Media’s Clinician’s Brief brand:

Links to articles from their superlative 84-page, monthly, peer-reviewed journal; a welcome to their Continuing Education platform; unobtrusive ads; an interactive daily quiz question about animal bites (that I missed!) with a link to an article about bite wounds; a social media calendar; links to the Clinician’s Brief podcast, Career Center and COVID-19 resources; a video segment featuring a dog with one of those protective lampshades; a testimonial; and a place to offer feedback.

It’s an impressive array of places to engage, visitor value and ways to increase their database and qualified leads. The Clinicians Brief website exemplifies much of what this dynamic panel spoke about during the session. That you need many ways to engage and market these days, personalizing and productizing when possible, packaging innovatively and giving your customers a choice to do what’s most comfortable for them.

“People take in information in different ways,” Bardo said, referring to a series they do called Read Watch Listen. “We’re taking a content package and doing a podcast on it, or creating a virtual event or webinar and having it in print. It’s a way to expand—if someone was just going to do a native article, it’s getting more revenue, getting maybe triple the revenue. You need to have it in different platforms. So we’re doing some things like that on the product side.”

Similar to the variety on the Clinician’s Brief website, Keenan showed a food website he’s worked on with a flywheel of content where a visitor can choose between six topics—from Savor the Flavor and Evolve Meals to Smart Choices and Image Matters.

“You’re able to dive deeper into an area so now the audience is basically interacting with the content,” Keenan said. “This does two things for us. It allows us to reinvent our native model because the current native model is a very flat content model—[where we] put an article out and hope someone reads it. But here we’re creating content that people can go through. It lets you digest what you want from the story. We’ve seen publishers having success with the crafting of immersive content.”

“I was reading one definition of flywheel, and it was a tract engaged delight,” Cintorino said. “What that does is it merges the content itself with the visual or engaging experience. And that makes all the difference.”

Bardo also spoke of immersive content. “It’s hard to keep growing one piece of your business year over year. [So it becomes more about] expanding marketing services and doing some of the things we’ve always done but pivoting and elevating them. So elevating lead gen, elevating content and making it more immersive, making it more customized to a client with the lead generation. We’re trying to find new streams in marketing services and more operate as sales enablement for our customers instead of straight marketing. So really helping our marketing clients become revenue generators and using data to attach their efforts with revenue.”

The conversation tilted towards packaging—are you presenting your content in the best forms to attract dollars? “One of my mantras—and I think everybody should take this back to their company—is to productize your customized solutions,” Cintorino said. “It’s not intuitive to think of it that way but custom becomes hard to communicate through sales to the client and then by the time it comes back to your delivery teams it’s what are we actually delivering. It’s creating products out of your event brands. A lot of them will be digital products. You can bring that to the customer in marketing services.”

Keenan agreed about the importance of packaging, suggesting publishers try a weekly series of webcast-type events. “What I just talked about wasn’t a webcast; it was a content series—just how you would do [a series] in print,” he said. “What can we learn from print? We can learn about packaging. Webcasts are okay if you’re doing one-offs. But if you’re doing something that’s packaged together where you’re aligning it around a singular topic, you can create some interesting white space where you can generate revenue, you can generate content interest and you can generate really qualified leads on a topic… We have to do more with our webcasts. We can’t just put an audio presentation out any more. It’s just not going to be good enough [in 2021].”

The panel was confident that if any industry can find new revenue sources, it’s media companies and publishers. “Content is still king so all B2B operators can do really well because of our expertise with content and talking to the audience,” Bardo said. “…It’s [also] important to keep finding partners that can elevate your game and create more experience on your site. Anytime someone is self-selecting or engaging, that’s someone easier to take down the funnel and have [important] conversations with.

JesonJackson

‘Listening Precedes Telling’; Education Week’s Empathy, Outreach Offer Revenue Lessons

by Media

Facing the heavy loss of advertising dollars, Education Week used the surveys they had launched early in the pandemic to pivot their products and also show their advertisers where customer needs had shifted. “You really want to ask your customers what they need, how best you can support them… and how [you] can be a partner to them,” Jeson Jackson (pictured), marketing and customer experience manager for Education Week, told us.

“The biggest hit that we took that [looked] to be long lasting was from our advertisers,” Jackson said during our BIMS event in December. “There was just so much uncertainty about what schools were going to do, what they would need.”

Advertisers worried about their print visibility, and everyone worried about the impact on revenue. “As a partner to our advertisers, we wanted to help support them in the same way that we supported ourselves, and that was by listening to our customers to find out what they needed,” Jackson said. “Much of the survey data that we collected”—early on in the pandemic Education Week launched twice-monthly surveys to all areas of their audience—“we made available to our survey partners. We created sponsored survey products and had advertisers add questions.”

For Education Week, the goal was to take away some of that uncertainty. “That not only helped us generate good will with our advertisers but helped them see that schools were going to be more reliant on product and service providers than ever. That helped us with our advertisers in the tech space but also with those that provide social and emotional learning, and emotional support for teachers. It opened up budget lines that allowed them to continue advertising with us and help us retain revenue moving forward.”

Many of the solutions I hear from publishers result from asking customers questions and focusing intently on the answers. Education Week calls it “listening precedes telling.” It’s one of their four marketing principles, along with leading with your mission, attracting—not driving—customers and focusing on credibility and clarity.

Jackson started his talk by saying that their biggest goal during the pandemic has been to be both “relevant in content and empathetic in tone.” I heard that again this morning from Lev Kaye, founder and CEO of CredSpark. He even got a bit fired up when that subject came up in our conversation.

“The number one piece of advice we give our clients is to find ways to be relevant to individuals,” he told me. “That’s what everyone craves. They’re not starved for content, they’re starved for relevant content. Ask questions, learn about your audience. Then you can decide, does this person get a phone call because there’s a [specially suited] package or should this person be targeted in another way?

“You’re asking questions to be able to get towards relevance with an individual. That’s the basis of the relationship [you want to build]. That way you know you’re going to provide value for them. And the reason to do this is because Google and Facebook are not going to do this. That’s the beauty. That’s what B2B media can do. You have more meaning to your audience.”

Of course, this is not new, but it certainly has become even more valuable during the last year—when we’re not getting any in-person feedback, and people are pretty open to be communicated with in a substantive way.

“For us, customer intelligence became the new currency internally,” Robin Crumby, co-founder and managing director, Kademy—and formerly the head of Melcrum—told us at a session in 2019. “So every team meeting would start with an insight from a customer conversation, and people learned very quickly that if they really weren’t having regular contact with customers, they really weren’t having say in those meetings.

“What we found was the higher the price point, the deeper the level of engagement that is required. [For a] $30,000 product, sometime the customer can’t articulate the need or what a product should look like. So we try to understand some of the challenges that they’re facing, trying to understand their individual pain points and how can we pinpoint our individual products and services to address those. It went beyond listening to co-creating the solutions.”

The difference now is the need for the empathetic tone. “We’ve been framing the conversation that we’re not necessarily here in this moment to make a sale, or to convert to some sort of product but to support you,” Jackson said. “And to do that we had to listen to their needs… because we really didn’t know what our readers needed most. We had some assumptions, but you really want to ask your customers what they need, how best you can support them… and how we can be a partner to them and supply what they needed. So some of that led to us reframing some existing products and getting that out to them, and some led to new products.”

Brittany Carter, president of Columbia Books & Information Services, once told me about a small company they acquired and with it an HR Guide that they published every year. “Does this even apply anymore,” she asked? The author assured her yes, and they published it.

“We didn’t sell a single copy,” Carter said, and she soon found out that the last one didn’t either. But because of the lack of transparency—and customer outreach—nobody knew, not even the author. “I said right there, ‘We will rearrange this.’ You don’t think any of this can happen, but if no one is thinking about the end user and what the customer is telling you, then it can happen.”

Advertising management presentation promotion concept. Vector flat graphic design

A Combo Platter of Metrics and Knowing Your Goals May Be Best, Two Leaders Say

by Media

Audience metrics and which ones publishers should focus on continue to matter greatly—and only get more varied as our platforms advance. It used to be having a high open rate and few unsubscribes would allow you a good night’s sleep. Now time-on-page, page views, scroll depth, article scores, shares, printouts and even absence can all keep you up at night. We asked two leading publishers to weigh in

“We still look at open rates for our newsletters and several other metrics—but it is important to understand what these metrics actually tell you, and what they don’t,” Davide Savenije, editor in chief for Industry Dive and its stable of 23 newsletters, told me in an email recently. “If you understand your goals, you can figure out which metrics you need to pay attention and in what ways they are relevant—it’s never a single golden metric; for us, it’s a composite picture of multiple metrics that fill in different parts of the picture and that are tailored to your goals. These metrics provide you with a feedback loop from your readers that helps you guide strategy and adapt where necessary as you see the results. Benchmarking is also important so that you have context on what the numbers mean.”

As Savenije and the other leading publisher I turned to for this article, Dan Fink, managing director of Money-Media, both indicate, it is not just one metric that can tell the whole story. It’s more of a combo platter, depending on your needs and goals—be it building subscriber loyalty, adding new members/subscribers, increasing engagement, moving people to and within your site, or all of the above.

“We’re looking at time-on-page in addition to page views to assess which articles are resonating with readers,” Fink wrote to me. “It’s useful to look at average time and total time for each article. This reveals that the article with the most clicks doesn’t always get the most time. That’s important because users put a greater value on the amount of time they spend with your content, than the number of times they click on it.

“We are also looking at scroll depth (i.e. how far down the page readers scroll). This gives a similar insight to time-on-page. We are working to develop a formula that combines page views, time-on-page and other user actions (print, save, share, etc.) into a single metric. My plan is to shift our internal focus on this new engagement metric, since it is more valid than one-dimensional page views.”

A recent article on INMA titled, Should Time Replace Pageviews as the North Star Audience Metric?, showed that time spent has gained traction throughout the industry. At Facebook, time spent helps rank the News Feed. At Google, it informs search results. “At Netflix and Spotify, play time guides content, product and marketing decisions.” A Netflix study found that “the total hours spent watching was the most predictive for member retention, well ahead of movie or show ratings.”

Finding the metric that most ties into reader/subscriber loyalty would seem to be the gold standard. Mediahuis, a huge international media company in Antwerp, Belgium, also found that “aggregated time spent on the site by individual readers correlated with the likelihood they converted to paid subscribers and renewed.” Other research confirms this, though visit frequency often tops even time.

Of course, metrics do not tell all. Industry Dive goes the extra mile, setting up “measurement and feedback loops” to try to answer further questions about value and loyalty, quality of their coverage and even which readers you should covet most.

“At the same time that we use website and other metrics to tell us important specific things about readers, I think there is a big analytics gap in the journalism world in terms of measuring the qualitative value of your relationship with readers outside of these specific contexts,” Savenije wrote. “There are many important questions that the above metrics do not provide clear answers to. What value do readers believe you provide? How loyal are your readers? Where do readers see you vs. your competition? Are some readers more important to your editorial model than others, and how do you measure your relationship with them? What do readers think about the quality of your coverage? Are they satisfied with your product?

“At Industry Dive, we have worked to build up measurement and feedback loops to help us answer these important questions. We have a data analytics team within our audience department that helps us build measurement tools around these questions, and develop custom dashboards to make them easy for our editorial teams to interpret and glean actionable takeaways from them.”

That last part is music to an editorial person’s ears. In 2019, the Financial Times, Money-Media’s parent company, developed a Quality Reads metric that “measured page views qualified by the threshold of time and scroll depth,” writes INMA. “For a page view to be counted as a Quality Read, the reader needs to spend at least 50% time required to read the whole article estimated by the number of words and scroll to at least 50% of the page’s length.”

We will continue to cover this important topic. What are your go-to metrics? Let me know at rlevine@siia.net. Thanks!

Woman connecting with her computer at home and following online courses, distance learning concept

‘It’s All About the Ability to Connect’; Can Virtual Events Be Successfully Reinvented?

by COVID 19Media
Virtual events present good content. We know that. But so do webinars, podcasts, blogs and whitepapers. So given the resources they require, can they be made more viable for sponsors and vendors? We talked to one vendor who, instead of putting her faith in the events world that she used to cherish, started a weekly conversation/happy hour/innovation chat that’s flourishing. Can virtual events facilitate that same connection?
“Originally it was, ‘Let’s try to mimic an in-person event’—with virtual expos, exhibit halls, so we can walk the hallways, step into a booth—instead of embracing digital differently. We saw that doesn’t work. Some vendors [believe] that virtual events are now just about brand awareness, sponsoring breakout sessions or getting their logo out there. So now publishers are finding other ways [to create connections]—and really being creative. ‘How can I position you as a thought leader in the industry?’ Podcasts are creating new opportunities. For us [as a vendor], it’s all about leads. People want to have meaningful conversations.”

That comes from Joanne Persico, president of ONEcount, a customer data platform vendor. She decided quickly last year when the pandemic hit not to depend on others, and hold those conversations herself. So for the last 46 weeks, she’s hosted the Bold Minds Virtual Mixers. Number 47 takes place tomorrow from 5:30 to 7 pm.

“They’re Wednesdays, mid-week, inspirational—it’s at 5:30 so we all bring cocktails,” Persico said. (The Mixers average around 20 people.) “And nothing is recorded. So people share information and are non-competitive. It has been a great way to get people to engage, have fun and drive leads for us.”

Kudos to Persico for coming up with an innovative solution. As virtual events move into a new phase—kind of an if-we-still-need-to-do-this-we-gotta-offer-sponsors-something-different phase—Samantha Whitehorne of Associations Now offered suggestions for 2021. She based it off of a manifesto of legal technology vendors who came together for a Virtual Value Workshop.

Get vendors involved during the planning stage. “Invite us to offer suggestions, give feedback and share the lessons we’re learning (and the solutions we’re seeing) before you go your own way.”

Rethink the virtual expo hall. Organize the hall around the problems that attendees are looking to solve, or even around conference tracks. “Vendors might choose to be in more than one area, depending on the variety of solutions and services they offer.”

Build small curated exhibit spaces. “Make attendees leave their virtual sessions through a curated, mini vendor hall where they might be exposed to solutions connected with the session they just attended.”

Offer discounts in exchange for engagement and data. “If registration discounts aren’t something your [organization] would consider, you could offer other benefits like prizes or access to additional content.”

Persico has seen that type of gamification and admits it does have merit, but attending a recent event with 3,000 people, three virtual expos and “so many booths that are impossible to all go to,” she was glad that she wasn’t a sponsor. “You see a logo and you have no idea what this logo is, what they do,” she said. “There was just an overwhelming number of people and sponsors and booths.”

Instead she praises chat rooms that follow a session—“People are looking more for the content”—or an idea she saw recently at a CMSWire event. “They had something with Slack where you create a profile, indicate a couple interests, then drag yourself to a breakout room and get right in on the conversation. The leader brought me in, and I started talking to people.

“Sponsors don’t feel like they’re getting a return on investment on most of these [big events],” she said. “And if they’re free, then the leads might not be qualified enough. It might be just people thinking that the topic seems interesting, so let me join.

“It’s all about the ability to connect. People still want that human connection,” Persico went on. “As a host, I’ve really perfected [getting those conversations flowing]. I scan the room and bring people in. Christine knows trade shows and conferences, she can answer that. Leslie does sales training. We have multi-pronged conversations and get a lot of forward thinkers, so for us, even though it’s 90 minutes, no one is fatigued. In fact, they usually hate to go.”

Persico also knows that putting on virtual events is not cheap. “There are costs with technologies—it’s not one size fits all. Breakout rooms, chats, speed dating all may require different technologies. Then someone has to moderate every panel and breakout room. That can be intensive. One of my attendees had to lower her price—she was having a hard time justifying the increases” without any food, receptions or real networking involved.

“Instead of asking, ‘How can we do online what we’ve always done in person?’” wrote Whitehorne, “you should ask, ‘How can we do online what we’ve never been able to do in person?’ And then answer it well.”

It’s a challenge. While not everyone has the bandwidth to do what Persico has—47 and counting!—her success points to three things: a push for more innovative thinking, the willingness to try different strategies, and the ongoing need for making connections.

You can email Persico for more information about attending the Mixers.