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For VentureBeat, a Profitable Pivot Means Meeting Audience Needs

by Media
“Bringing that human connection back to [events in] the digital world really comes down to personalization. How do you feel connected with other attendees, and speakers and the organization hosting this event? Creating opportunities for them to participate and not just be behind a screen. Being thoughtful about what their day looks like. Actively reach out to attendees asking for their participation and input is really important. ‘What do I want to get out of it?’ It’s not just about the content.”
That comes from Gina Joseph, VP of strategy & partnerships for VentureBeat—which covers transformative technology—speaking to Digiday in an excellent webinar on Friday about the April pivoting of their annual GameBeat Summit 2020. (Watch it here.)
VentureBeat was able to successfully pivot and keep their 120-plus speakers, the 50 sessions and even more incredibly all of the sponsors for the GameBeat virtual event. The sales team even brought in additional partnerships once the event became digital.
“We did not lower our sponsorship levels for the virtual event,” Joseph said. For VentureBeat, the key was still fulfilling the needs of its audience. “How can we develop customized opportunities for our partners? Instead of saying how can you fit in, let us figure out where your challenges and objectives are, and let’s work together. That’s where the opportunity is—finding a partnership where it’s very targeted and focused. Marketers are looking for partners that can provide a differentiator.”
Here are some more highlights from Joseph’s talk:
Listen to your audience. VentureBeat will ask their audience, what do you want to learn more about? Then they’ll make introductions within that community, “The more that we can show that we listen and then execute on that, the better,” Joseph said. “We’re really big on keeping authenticity top of mind when you’re developing any strategy and to keep that loyalty from your audience.
Let your attendees and sponsors know that you’re providing more virtually. “With our events… it’s not just about participating at an event and making a splash,” Joseph said. “We’re a media organization and you can get news coverage [from us]. We’re publishing content real-time or amplifying it for our online community. Now for virtual events, it’s been more important to develop that pre-, during and post-event strategy. That’s one of the things we amplified with our virtual events strategy. This is content that is now accessible to anyone in the world and it’s on demand. And now it’s content that our partners can take and have something to point to. It’s no longer about just reaching the people in the room who are physically at the event, the scale you can get [is so much larger].”
Expand what you do. VentureBeat turned one event into a series. They’re planning another fall event on the same themes. “All of a sudden everything is very accessible,” Joseph said.
You can get better metrics for sponsors at virtual events. How many people did I reach? How many people were engaged? “That’s hard to measure in a big room,” Joseph said. “In a virtual event you have clear metrics. There are more ways to track [those numbers].”
It’s easier to reach out to more people. “Everyone is much more accessible at virtual events,” Joseph said. “The virtual format gives sponsors the opportunity to hold more one-to-one meetings and have access to Slack channels to have more direct and engaged lines of communication. Over the course of the two-day event, we saw over 12,000 Slack messages and 90% of those were direct one-to-one messages. I got to connect with so many more sponsors and speakers in the virtual event than I could physically do with in-person events.” She said that they reached out during the event to get real-time input from attendees.
The “rooms” where it happens are not limited. Joseph made a good point that with fewer limitations on people in a room, there should be more opportunities in terms of diversification—of speakers, of audience. If you also can get any kind of international audience, virtual can accommodate. “Speaker accessibility becomes a big opportunity,” she said.
What does a virtual strategy look like for content? “We have a live Q&A following sessions even if they are recorded,” Joseph said. And to replicate a walk down the hall you might have with a speaker after the session, VentureBeat offered an “extended live Q&A where you go to a virtual room and continue that conversation.” Finding ways to participate it becomes a different experience.”
Again, you can watch that webinar here.
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Subscription Boxes Are Generating New Revenue

by Media
Who doesn’t like swag? In the past, we’ve only gotten these exhibitor and vendor gifts mostly at conferences and trade shows we attend. But, of course, that’s now gone away.
Or has it?
Subscription boxes are the latest publishing trend. FIPP, the international trade group, just did a whole special report on them, complete with case studies. Basically, publishers send subscribers and would-be subscribers physical boxes of cool items. Yes, it’s mostly been consumer up to this point, but it doesn’t really have to be.
The idea has proven an effective one for our homebound times. A month ago, I wrote about a new online show called The Present starring magician Heider Guimaraes, where ticket holders are mailed a box with surprise contents that they are directed not to open until their Zoom show starts.
“How do you reach out of the computer and into the audience?” asked Matt Shakman, artistic director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, where the show keeps selling out extensions at hundred-dollar prices. “The idea would be to hold something in your hand and be part of the process.”
Here are some concepts that The Present and subscription boxes are taking advantage of.
We’re home. It’s boring. “For subscribers, subscription boxes provide tangible benefits,” the FIPP Report states. “The experience of opening boxes is like Christmas.” In the past, getting something sent home might be more trouble than it was worth. Now, it’s easy and fun to break up our day.
It brings in revenue. Hearst Group Autos launched R&T Crew (Road & Track) Magazine in January with a subscription box geared to kids. “The first box included a beanie with a designable patch, trading cards featuring different cars, socks with auto graphics and a car kids can put together and paint,” wrote MediaPost. Subscribers receive six boxes for $225/year. Of course, adults like cool stuff, too. Michelle Panzer of Hearst Autos said, “The goal is to find ‘white space’ in the market where you can fill a need that no one else has already identified.”
The boxes can also be digital. “Many publishers now have a range of events, master classes, special talks and other digital goodies that they could package as part of a monthly ‘box,'” the report says. “Is it a money-can’t-buy 30-minute fireside interview with the publishers’ crossword-setter? Or a free ticket to a session” with your favorite writer? Digital “goodies” can also be personalized by seeing what the customer has shown the most interest in.
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It shouts sponsorships and advertising. That same swag we get at conferences and trade shows can be used in subscription boxes. We know that vendors and exhibitors still very much need to connect with customers. “We work with sponsors and brand partners to acquire products, and we also go direct to factories to have specific products manufactured for every box,” says David Webb, editor-in-chief of Explore. “Our brand partners are a big part of the box—they appreciate that they can get their materials and products directly into the hands of active users and buyers through us.”

The boxes can even be geared to one event, like The Present. Like the magician Guimarães whose idea it was to send the viewer a package with contents to be revealed as the show unfolded, a publisher’s subscription box can also be geared to an upcoming virtual event. Pardon the pun, but we could think outside of the box on this. Maybe it’s a special clicker or flashlight that a Zoom speaker would ask everyone to use when they have a question. “Let’s light up the Zoomisphere and take a screenshot!” I received a harmonica at an in-person event last year that became part of the show later.
It can be made easy. Subscription box vendors have started. In fact, Explore now has a warehouse and factories on contract. They learned quickly that it’s not easy to do so now they do it for others. “We had to learn everything from the ground up,” Webb said. We packed the first test box in our office, and the next one at a warehouse space. We learned it all on the fly, and used these lessons to be better with the next one.”
Added Panzer: It’s about providing “subscribers with an experience they’re not getting elsewhere.”
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Behind Questex’s New ‘Modern’ Information Model: Combining Content, Data and Events to Go to Market Faster

by COVID 19

Editor’s Note: Join Paul Miller at our virtual Business Information & Media Summit on Dec. 2 for a look at The New Go-to-Market Strategy: How Questex Launches Products Faster, Better and More Profitably. Join the discussion as Paul shows how Questex aligned internal assets to create a more efficient structure and leverages data to drive the entire process. Register here. 

In June, Questex announced the creation of a “modern” information services model that leverages audience data to tie content and events closer together to create a year-round customer engagement framework.

And as publishers scramble to make up for lost event revenue amidst the pandemic, the new approach also gives Questex the ability to launch new products and go-to-market at accelerated rates (think virtual events being produced over the course of a few weeks, rather than a full year, as with a live event).

Questex debuted the new approach with its Fierce Life Sciences group, aligning the Fierce content business with ExL Events, a Questex division acquired in 2016 that produces events in similar markets such as life sciences, pharma and healthcare, but until recently had operated as a separate business from Fierce.

Tying events more closely to digital isn’t a new idea but one that hasn’t been well executed, according to Questex CEO Paul Miller [pictured]. “On a personal level, we’ve been talking about this for many years—how we combine different types of content and data and use learnings from that to bring together the community,” he adds. “We’ve almost gotten there a couple times in our past lives but not quite.”

 

Miller points to live events tacking on an online directory or virtual floor plan. “There’s nothing wrong with that but it’s not a real translation. Those of us coming from a digital background say, we’ve got all this data on content consumption, wouldn’t it be great if we use that to pull together conference programs around what’s trending.”

The Immediate Payoff

The new approach paid dividends almost immediately as Questex shifted to virtual events, with Fierce and ExL coming together to produce the Virtual Clinical Trials Online on April 22-23. The virtual event attracted over 2,000 registrants with 50 percent generated by the FiercePharma content websites. The sponsors saw over 600 booth visits and there were 2,800 downloads of content providing strong sales leads for the vendors.

“For the first time, we had complete collaboration between ExL and the Fierce team based on content, speaker recruitment and reporting on what’s going on at the event,” says Miller. “We’re thinking, let’s do things differently. If something is really trending, let’s change our conference program and launch it quickly, taking a couple weeks to plan rather than a full year.”

Elsewhere, Fierce is working with Arizona State U to launch a new virtual event in July for the education tech marketplace called Remote that will focus on how institutions are adapting higher education in the coronavirus era. The event already has “many thousands of registrants and high-level sponsors,” according to Miller.

With 70 percent of its revenue coming from live events prior to the pandemic, Questex hasn’t avoided a major revenue revision or the significant lay-offs that came with it.

But the Fierce group is up 20 percent year-over-year and there’s early evidence that the model can pay-off across the entire organization, including Questex increasing the overall number of webinars it produces (up from 199 in all of 2019 to 347 through May 2020), while its American Spa business capitalized on the CBD craze by launching a CBD-focused virtual event over the space of just four weeks, securing a quarter of a million dollars in sponsorships.

A Second Attempt at Reinventing B2B?

In many ways, the new Fierce approach borrows from Questex’s first attempt at reinventing the B2B media model with The Beauty Experience, a content and marketing platform that the company launched last fall for its beauty industry vertical that upended the “search and click” way of scrolling through websites by enabling users to choose specific content tags that they want to follow, which then serves up relevant content.

The idea was that the data produced by the feed and follow approach would help program events, identify prospects for sponsors and create opportunities to serve users beyond the events itself. Unfortunately, the Beauty Experience Event, scheduled for March 7, was one of the first to be canceled due to COVD-19.

“Beauty is a pro-sumer market and we learned a lot of lessons from that community, says Miller. “Social is really important there and we were able to get very good in the social world, seeing which keywords work and using artificial intelligence to personalize the journey. Unfortunately, we were not able to see that come to full fruition due to the event cancellation and some market dynamics in the beauty sector.”

Getting There: Culture is the Biggest Obstacle

While Questex needed the right tech infrastructure to get the right data into the right hands, Miller says that getting beyond perceived cultural differences between Fierce and ExL was the biggest challenge.

“We were dealing with two different cultures that hadn’t been integrated and the team didn’t do a lot together,” says Miller. “Fierce thought it did this, ExL thought it did that. But did they really? The fact of the matter was, they needed to be doing stuff together.”

While COVID-19 has been the bane of B2B publishing, it has helped Questex pushed through some of the inertia that would have held up change in the past.

“In terms of collaboration and bringing these groups together, I have to say the COVID situation helped us do this more quickly than we normally would of,” says Miller.

Miller credits Questex’s ability to break down siloes and get groups working more closely together to its Centers of Excellence, in which experts across the company come together to produce best practices in a variety of areas including audience and database, content, customer experience, and product, with topics ranging from protecting customer privacy to identifying where the customer is in the buying cycle to hosting virtual events to which headlines work best and why.

“The first thing is you need to do it to make the decision on what you want your internal core competencies to be, which is easier said than done,” says Miller. “Usually, you’re saying collaboration gives you more of a competitive advantage than really deep product knowledge. We combine the two—the markets work with the Centers of Excellence by saying ‘Our audience wants this, our advertisers wants that’, and the Centers of Excellence say, ‘OK, we have that over here, which parts work for you and what do we have to create as new?’”

Having that expertise on hand has enabled Questex to move quickly. “Someone asked, how have you pivoted so quickly to virtual events?” says Miller. “We just did it, but in essence we didn’t just do it because we have six people on our team in our Centers of Excellence who were part of creating the first scalable virtual events about a decade ago.”

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‘Urgency, Excitement and a Reason to Read’: Crafting Engaging Headlines

by Media
In a famous New Yorker cartoon, a woman publisher sits behind a desk addressing Charles Dickens and his manuscript, and cheerfully advises: “But think of the SEO if the title actually named the two cities.”
Titles and headlines. In a recent virtual editorial session we held, Mike Andronico, editor in chief of Tom’s Guide, a technology publication/website for Future Plc, posited on the attention they feel must be paid to headlines. “For a news story the most important thing to me is that it has a great headline that people are going to want to click on and read. So we do a lot of headline workshopping. We use our Slack to brainstorm ideas.
“Honestly that’s one thing I pay close attention to,” Andronico continued. “I really enjoy that brainstorming process. It doesn’t always take super-long. Sometimes we’ll just share three ideas, the staff will pick their favorite and we’ll go from there. But I think it’s especially important for those feature stories and those personal stories.”
He said that they recently ran a story from a freelancer who wrote how the Galaxy Watch Active almost saved her life. “We crafted a headline around that. [Overall,] it’s about coming up with the most engaging headline you can while still being honest and not doing what people call click bait. We want to make sure we’re not falsely advertising the story but there are definitely needs for urgency, excitement and a reason to read the story.”
Here are more tips for crafting that perfect headline:
1. Be authentic not distant. Look for ways to make headlines more accessible. Maybe it means knocking out use of terms like “government,” “official,” or “according to,” things that feel distant as opposed to authentic. It’s more about getting to “what are we really trying to say?”
2. Use the curiosity gap. How do we get people to want to read this story without using “what happens next will shock you” but communicating that we actually have really interesting layers to this story. When we notice a gap between what we know and what we want to know, we go looking for that missing piece of information.
3. Numbers don’t lie. “I Went $230,000 Into Debt to Become a Doctor in America”; $230 000 instantly forms a connection to the reader. “I can’t afford that”; “I can afford that”; “I sympathize with you”… It elicits a reaction from the number alone. If you see headlines about connecting with your audience, it puts you in a much better place to get that story shared.
4. Walk the line. Try to straddle the line between setting up the story enough to be interesting, but not enough to give it all away. Imagine you’re sitting next to your reader and telling her a story.
5. Know your audience. As Andronico said, don’t mess with your audience by dishing out click bait solely to create traffic. As one journalist wrote, the key to writing good headlines is understanding your audience well enough to artfully create headlines they know they can trust.
6. Ask a question. A travel company sent me an email with this head today: “What would you like the future of adventure travel to look like?” That’s probably more inviting than “Answer this 10-minute survey.” Another email asked, “Live events are back. What now?” I wanted to know that.
7. Humanize your voice and personalize your message. Use “you” and “your.” “Surprise, we’ve gifted you $10 today,” Goldstar just wrote. “Events Picked Just for You” from Eventbrite. H&M sent this: “You lucked out! 30% off any item.” And the one that always gets me: “You’re invited…”
9. Don’t always obey the rules. I know, after all that… We’re told to keep headlines to around 8 words and 70 characters. But if it takes more words to convey your message and you can have a little fun, then so be it. Or sometimes one or two words might suffice.
10. Use strong claims. Bold can be beautiful. Yahoo: “Did Marilyn Monroe Inspire Spring’s Biggest Shoe Trend?” The virtual DC Jazz Festival today: “Fill Your Tuesday Night With Great Jazz.” Says one expert: “As long as your content can back up the claim, over-the-top is okay.”
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Seconding That Emotion Can Be One of the Best Things You Do Now

by Media

“In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic,” begins a message on the SIPA member Ace Infoway site, “We take this moment to express our gratitude and support!”

 

What follows is a moving and emotional, two-minute video of a desolate Broadway, an empty San Marco Square in Venice, a “Sorry We’re Closed” sign, and then a tribute to the “Heroes fighting the Coronavirus.” “For Ace Infoway, things are not the same as before. We really miss working together… We take this moment to thank our Ace Internal Heroes. Our dedication to our clients is the only motivation we thrive on.”

 

With all the wonderful faces of Ace Infoway employees, it’s a powerful video. Marketing consultant Amy Africa once pleaded with us to use real faces from our businesses instead of canned ones, and you can see why. We respond to emotion, she said. “We have bartenders in our brain and they’re constantly mixing cocktails to become faster and smarter and more involved. We are not thinking machines that feel; we are feeling machines that think.”

 

Two years ago, at a SIPA Annual Conference, Rick Wilkes, OPIS director of marketing, talked about the importance of emotion in marketing.

 

“I think emotion is underrated in any kind of marketing, particularly with websites,” he said during a session titled Transforming Your Website into a New Prospect Magnet. “On the new OPIS site [and still today!] you see a refinery at sunset, and that’s the best a refinery is ever going to look. You’d be amazed in stock photography how many fuel places are within sunsets. It’s very soothing. So it’s a big bold image [and the words,] ‘Buy & sell oil & gas products with CONFIDENCE’—and the confidence is the emotional hook there.”

 

This was backed up by an article by Nick Hague, head of growth at B2B International: “A successful brand is based on a connection that includes trust and an emotional bond which fosters a long-term relationship. Indeed, with Harvard Professor Gerald Zaltman finding that a whopping 95% of all purchase decisions are made subconsciously, it’s clear that B2B brands cannot afford to forget the importance of emotion.”

 

If emotion had value before the pandemic, it has only multiplied since. Last week I stumbled on a video posted by a bundled-up Wylecia Wiggs Harris, CEO of American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), standing in a park outside Chicago.

 

“Hi AHIMA members, this is Wylecia just checking in to see how all of you are doing… This is a period of uncertainty for all of us. And if we’re honest, there are fears and doubts and concerns that we’re all carrying. And yet the work that we do has never been more important. Know that AHIMA appreciates everything you are doing. We’re in this all together.”

 

Creating a New Vibe

 

Back in March and early April, many organizations moved quickly to build COVID-19 microsites to accompany their regular website. While many of those produced huge bumps in traffic, they also created a new vibe—we care about you, your health and how you are coping. Stephanie Williford of EB Medicine has talked about the pushback she got when their COVID site first appeared behind a paywall. They quickly moved it in front.

 

And, of course, EB Medicine is not alone. “PaperClip Communications knows how difficult and uncertain this time is, and we’re happy to offer these complimentary resources to help our colleagues during this crisis.” This appears on their homepage and then a very attractive resources page, where they list On-Demand Training, PDF Downloads, a Self-Care Calendar and Digital Newsletters.

 

It’s an emotional lift at a time when we all need it most.

 

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing,” said the famous “Marketoonist” Tom Fishburne, quoted in an article on the site Instapage. They write: “Does it feel like marketing when you watch a poignant advertisement and connect emotionally with the subject? Does it feel like marketing when you read a genuine positive customer review of a kind waitstaff and great service?

 

“Emotional connections happen because we’re human, and we’re built for these connections, wired for them, and rely on them to live a rich, meaningful life. Despite our significant advances in science and technology, human emotion (mainly our subconscious) will always be core to our DNA. Marketing by appealing to raw and genuine human emotion is essential, smart, and pays off.”