SIIA-amp-network-feature-photo

With Editorial Driving, BioWorld’s New Website Wins on Many Levels

by Media
Lynn Yoffee, news director for BioWorld, made a good point in submitting their 2020 first place, SIPAward-winning entry this year for Best New or Relaunched Website.
“Interestingly, though the SIPA category for this entry is under the banner of marketing,” she wrote. “Please note that the entire project was driven by the editorial team with support from technology and business teams.”
Too often in the past editorial teams were siloed from important functions of an organization that didn’t involve publications. Not anymore. Many editorial teams now drive events—in-person and virtual—lead podcasts, host webinars, suggest topics, work with marketing and speak at conferences.
When it comes to the websites, the pairing makes sense. With data and analytics what they are now, editorial teams can see what content is holding their audience’s attention and for how long—and isn’t that what a good website is about? Okay, technology, user experience and sensible design are also crucial, but if not driving the process, editorial must certainly be involved.
Here are more keys from BioWorld’s winning transformation:
Speed. “In this fast-paced world of instant news, we felt compelled to reduce our delivery timeline to remain competitive,” Yoffee wrote. The new platform technology enabled them to transition from a next-day cycle to same-day news delivery.
Brand consolidation. Pharmaceutical and medical technology industries are closer aligned than we think. “This was an opportunity to display the news across all customer groups, increasing our prospects for cross sales,” Yoffee wrote. “Simultaneously, we integrated BioWorld Insight’s analysis with daily news instead of weekly delivery.”
bioworldsite_1632535.png
Device agnostic. “Responsive web design meant our customers could easily read on the device of their choice.” Just checked, it also looks great on my phone.
Data visualization. Data was always a big part of BioWorld’s reporting. “Interactive infographics make it easier to track trends,” Yoffee wrote. “We adopted Infogram as our data visualization tool of choice. Data dashboards pin each news service page.”
Enhanced search. How often has a website’s search frustrated us? Here, the taxonomy-driven platform and search engine help customers to understand better, track trends and go deeper. And it helps their own journalists “who must comb archives quickly as they prep for interviews to deliver articles within about six hours.”
It’s harder to cheat. The PDFs needed to go. “Anecdotally we knew that customers were sharing without purchasing multi-seat site licenses. Ultimately, we want customers to transition to the website. This was at the core of the transformation mission.” So pushing customers to the site more actively, they could stop the pirate sharing. “Importantly, we could finally set the stage to develop analytics to better understand their news needs and introduce two new revenue streams: digital advertising and ecommerce.”
Easy navigation. The portal page (shown here) gives a quick glance at the three sites and their headlines of the day, “which is a terrific promotional aspect,” Yoffee noted. Visitors hit a paywall on most stories if they don’t subscribe—which means just getting the first sentence and a call to subscribe. Now customers have a “one-stop shop” which makes it easier to sell site-wide access.
A news hub. Customers still receive an e-newsletter which includes headlines and introductory content, but it is linked to the site. Each microsite is structured the same way for UX continuity with the latest headlines plus a daily infographic. Top news headlines are followed by a series of sections devoted to the most vital topics relative to each news service. There’s also a Breaking News bar if the day requires it.
Numbers don’t lie. The new BioWorld platform launched in November. Traffic increased substantially those first few months. from a daily average of 1,600 to nearly 5,500. Sessions per month went up from an average 40.5K to 146K.
The site is more flexible. As mentioned, they will be able to do advertising and ecommerce now, crisis pages and special reports, plus multimedia formats such as podcasts. And they also plan to add another news service focused on very early stage drug discovery, called BioWorld Science. “A relatively easy addition with our microsite-based formula.” I also like the excellent Celebrating 30 Years of BioWorld special article leading to a—you guessed it—30% discount off subscriptions.
Easier sales. A BioWorld Premium Subscribe button allows for buying a quick single subscription of all services.
Congratulations to the BioWorld team on a well-deserved SIPAward.
SIIA-amp-network-feature-photo

More SIPA July Member News

by Media
Industry Dive Acquires NewsCred’s Content Marketing Studio and Services
Industry Dive, a leader in business journalism, and NewsCred, a global leader in enterprise content marketing technology, today announced that Industry Dive will acquire NewsCred’s Content Marketing studio and services business including assets, people and clients. NewsCred will retain its software products.
JaneQinMedeiros2_1634025.jpg
Jane Qin Medeiros, NewsCred’s SVP of global customer success, will lead a team of 40 former NewsCred employees as a standalone business unit within Industry Dive. This will expand Industry Dive’s footprint with locations in New York and London.
“Whether based on award-winning independent journalism or sector-leading marketing services, both organizations share a common foundation built on exceptional content,” said Industry Dive Co-founder and CEO Sean Griffey. “This acquisition will continue to allow us to serve the needs of business leaders for deep insights and information.”
Diversified Communications Schedules Denver as Hub for a Group of 2021 Events
AEC Next, SPAR 3D Expo and Conference, International Lidar Mapping Forum (ILMF) and Geo Week—all organized by global event producer Diversified Communications—have announced the dates and location of their next in-person event. The events will be co-located together from March 30 – April 1, 2021, at the Colorado Convention Center and Hyatt Regency Denver.
“While we were disappointed not to be able to hold an in-person event in 2020, we’re excited about the additional value the co-location will have for everyone—exhibitors who will have access to additional categories of users, and attendees who will be able to access additional technology on the combined exhibit floor,” says Lisa Murray, group director, Diversified Communications. “This will inevitably translate to more new potential customers at our event in Denver in 2021.”
Allured Business Media Expands Professional Beauty Reach with Creative Age Acquisition, Brokered by John McGovern of Grimes, McGovern & Associates
Allured Business Media has set its sights on the professional beauty industry, acquiring publishing house Creative Age on July 15, 2020. The move expands Allured Business Media’s salon and spa professional brands from one to five, in addition to expanding its professional beauty event repertoire, solidifying Allured as the resource for all beauty professionals.
The acquisition was brokered by John McGovern of SIPA member Grimes, McGovern & Associates.
Guy Cecala Quoted in New York Times
In an article about 10 days ago headlined, Mortgage Rates Drop Below 3% for First Time, Tempting Home Buyers, the last word was reserved for one of SIPA’s finest.
“[Lenders are] looking at ways to tighten the credit a little bit to account for the fact that we don’t know what the risks are going forward with the economy and unemployment and potentially delinquencies,” said Guy Cecala, chief executive and publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, a trade publication.
Cablefax to Host Telehealth in the Virtual Age Forum
With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing us to reimagine how we live and work, Access Intelligence’s Cablefax will hold a virtual event on Aug. 13 to explore how telehealth is changing the game and leading to new industry opportunities.
Cablefax’s Telehealth in the Virtual Age event on Aug. 13 from 1-4:30 pm ET will assemble panels of experts to assess key opportunities for the cable and broadband sector as advances in telehealth intersect with changing patient behavior. We’ll explore what new business relationships are emerging as the multi-billion dollar healthcare sector looks for partners with strong relationships with customers in their homes.
How Much Do You Know About the Electoral College? Powered by CredSpark.
I came across this quiz recently on a site called Fulcrum. Good to see that on the bottom it says, “This quiz is powered by CredSpark.”
“Think you know all there is to know about the Electoral College? Test your smarts with this quiz.” I didn’t do very well—got about half right. Give it a shot here.
Send News In!
If you have any news, hirings, transactions, awards or anything else you’d like fellow members to know about, please email me at rlevine@siia.net. Thank you and be safe.
SIIA-amp-network-feature-photo

We Know They’re Good Lead Gen, But Quizzes Can Also Help Retention

by Media
The Wall Street Journal studied how different reader habits affected subscriber churn. It looked into how various products and subscriber actions affected customer retention during the first 100 days after a reader had signed up. They found that “playing a puzzle had a more dramatic impact on reader retention than other actions the team had been promoting.”
We know that quizzes can be good for lead generation, but interesting that they can boost retention as well.
Research last year from Northwestern’s Medill Local News Initiative looked at audience data from three major metro dailies. Their conclusion was that the frequency with which a reader comes back to a publication’s website “is the single biggest predictor of retaining subscribers—more than the number of stories read or the time spent reading them.”
So with that established, here are a few successful quizzes and one contest:
Remote education. After a brief hiatus, Education Week quizzes are back and they’re timely. “Quiz Yourself: How Much Do You Know About Elementary Remote Instruction? How are elementary educators responding to the shift to remote learning, and what challenges do elementary students and teachers face with remote instruction?” It’s sponsored by Square Panda but Education Week maintains editorial control.
You have to give your email address to see the results. For this quiz, there have been 994 participants. In the past, Education Week would regularly achieve nearly 90% quiz completions and around 60% of people who completed the quiz filling out the registration form. That’s a lot of lead generation. I got 63%, 5 out of 8 right. The average is 66%. They awarded me a “genius badge”—a bit of a low bar—and when I click to “claim” it, I have to sign in again, and 140 people have done that.
The Fulcrum. I came across this quiz recently on a site called The Fulcrum: How Much Do You Know About the Electoral College? Good to see that on the bottom it says, “This quiz is powered by CredSpark,” one of our members. “Think you know all there is to know about the Electoral College? Test your smarts with this quiz.” I didn’t do very well—got about half right. But it certainly engaged me.
Financial Times. The Financial Times is still doing an FT Weekend Quiz that seems to be gated to visitors. These are centered around popular culture—last week’s was titled, Marilyn Monroe, Rachel Watson and ‘The Arnolfini Marriage’—with this subhead: “Our ‘Round on the Links’ quiz tests your ability to draw connections. Thinking caps on!” Last year’s quiz focused on “The Week in News.”
Farming questions. Lessiter Media has been getting good results from their sponsored quizzes. How Much Do You Know About Soil Enrichment Practices? they ask. “Take this quick 6-question quiz to find out. We didn’t create this quiz ‘just for fun,’ but to act as an educational tool.” For a previous quiz, they received 3,346 total submissions from Nov. 2019, through the end of March 2020. About 1,658 were new email addresses and 120 new subscribers.
PR News. On Access Intelligence’s PR News grammar quiz,  a Scrabble-like image of “G R A M M A R” emerges with the headline, “How Good Is Your Grammar?” “Do you correct others on their grammar? Or do you get corrected? See how you stack up…”
Screen time. Lastly, I found one that’s more a contest than a quiz, but it has a great lead generation gimmick. “Show Us Your Ugly Screens to Win! Enter Today to Win FREE Window Sun Screens for Your Arizona Home! Show us your faded, torn, & worn window sun screens, and enter to win FREE Window Sun Screens for your Arizona Home from AZ’s #1 Trusted Shade Installations, All Pro Shade Concepts! See below, for details.” It’s accompanied by a photo of a torn screen.
What would the B2B equivalent be? Show us your worst marketing copy to win FREE upgraded marketing copy. Hmmm not bad.
SIIA-amp-network-feature-photo

As Our Events Pivot, So Do Their Names; Give It a Little ‘Process’

by Media

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
—William Shakespeare

Unlike Juliet’s rose, names do matter in marketing, especially in today’s new normal. We know that everyone is pivoting their events to virtual but they’re also renaming them.
So InfoComm became InfoComm 2020 Connected. VentureBeat’s GamesBeat Summit 2020 took on a subtitle: Dawn of a New Generation. Farm Progress, an Informa division, just pivoted their big event to Farm Progress Virtual Experience or FPVX. Meister Media just concluded their BioSolutions Africa VIRTUAL—it had the subtitle: Timely Transformation for a Changing World. And for their 23rd Annual EMACS – The Customer Experience Conference in October, Chartwell added this tagline: “Same conference. Same content. Same dates. New virtual home!”
Of course, new events with new names are also being developed. Access Intelligence’s Cablefax has one coming up next month titled Telehealth in the Virtual Age. No doubt where that tree is firmly planted. The same goes for BVR’s Fair Value Measurements Amid the COVID-19 Crisis. I believe their recent Divorce Conference is so popular that they only had to put “Virtual” in front of it. I’m sure you could guess that it was supposed to be in Las Vegas.
Here in Washington, D.C., the NFL football team has a decision to make about a new name, and by the time they’re taking, you would think the planet depends on it. Names like the Red Hawks, Warriors, Hogs, Sentinels, Justice and Red Wolves have been bandied about with no quick conclusion in sight. (Admission – I worked for them for six years many moons ago, and the name was an issue then.)
One of the country’s leading minds, Stephen L. Carter—a Yale law professor and author of several novels including The Emperor of Ocean Park—wrote a recent column for Bloomberg about Washington’s name change that is well worth reading. He concludes that “naming is not a choice but a process, and in that process power relations are constantly shifting.”
That may be a bit high-minded for this discussion, but it does provide a valid point. It’s important that your decision is treated as a process and not just a quick choice. In most cases, these pivots are being made months in advance so the new name will be around for a while. Should it be tied into other things that you’re doing? Should it be something that can stick in a future hybrid event?
Coming up with catchy names can be tough but also rewarding. Speaking about events a couple years ago, Dorothy Jones, CEO of J Star Marketing and former CMO of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, said one of the biggest challenges that meeting designers face is that there are currently four different generations in the workforce. (Are there five now?) “This will require you talk to these four groups of guests in four very different ways based on their preferences,” she said.
The same can be said for names. What’s clever and engaging for one audience group might be less so for another—which I’m sure is what the Washington football team is finding out now. But when a catchy name works, it can add a lot of value. I’ve written before about Informa’s Esca Bona conference which means good food in Latin. They’ve even used it as an adjective—”Esca Bonacentric education (i.e. food accessibility, urban farming, and food tech).”
Learnapalooza, an event staged here by long-time SIPA member Columbia Books & Information Services through their Association TRENDS label, focuses on training and education for association employees. When I once complimented CBIS’s president, Brittany Carter, on the name, she laughed and humbly said, “[That] was my only contribution. I love names—you’ll never get the marketer out of me.”
I just got off the phone with Chuck Buck, a publisher at MedLearn Media. I’ll be writing more very soon about some great things they are doing in these tough times, but I was immediately impressed by some of the names he has given to their features: Monitor Mondays is a podcast that just celebrated its 10th anniversary; Frontline Friday has given voices to doctors at the heart of the pandemic; Stay at Home Kids has given others an important voice; his latest is The Saturday Post, taking us back to another era.
These names matter.
SIIA-amp-network-feature-photo

Content, Access and Goal Branding Bringing These Groups New Revenue

by Media
oakland2_1627781.jpg

Just to prove that there are some, ahem, creative marketing people out there, listen to this. The Oakland A’s baseball team is offering A’s Access fan members lifelike cutouts for $49 to be placed in the stands at the home games. Now if you want to have your cutout in the Foul Ball Zone, you’ll have to pay up to $149. But… if a foul ball hits the cutout with your face on it, the team sends you that foul ball. And two tickets to an exhibition game next year. How do you know that’s the actual ball?

Here are three more revenue-producing examples of using your head in these difficult times—even if it’s not a cardboard one.

1. Doubling down on content. Morning Brew has added a fourth newsletter, Marketing Brew, to go with Emerging Tech Brew and Retail Brew. At a time when others are cutting back, they plan on adding 15 new staffers this summer, many in editorial. Their “revenue comes from carefully crafted native advertising, in the form of a ‘Together with’ branding at the top of the newsletter and sponsored content,” according to an article on the site Flashes & Flames. “More than 40 clients (many in finance, computing and sportswear) are charged for every unique reader who actually opens the email, which averages some 45% of the current 2m (non-paying) subscribers.”
essentials2_1627796.jpg

Once the pandemic hit, they “launched a guide telling readers how best to work from home. It quickly became a pop-up, three-days-a-week newsletter, The Essentials, with tips on how to be active, healthy and happy during quarantine.” More than 75,000 subscribers in the first three days later, and it’s now sponsored by a cold-brew coffee company.

“Another example of our mission and how we’re being a resource to readers, providing them with the content they need in every facet of their life, from professional to personal,” said Alex Lieberman, CEO and co-founder. “We are thinking differently about the media landscape. While our mission is still the same, we’re upping our content offerings—delivering more podcast episodes and dipping into opinion pieces from industry experts.”
2. Taking advantage of the access you might have to particular speakers. According to a Digiday article today, publisher Atlas Obscura has been leaning towards the experiential. Virtual attendees to an event can now pay $35 to learn mind control from mentalist and mind reader Vinny DePonto. They also put on a virtual premiere for the documentary “Spaceship Earth” for a movie studio. “The premiere included a conversation between the main characters of the documentary and moderator LeVar Burton. It was meant to replicate the post-viewing panel that takes place on stage at in-person premieres. That event brought in 32,000 views, an audience several times bigger than a typical movie theater would be able to accommodate.”
3. Putting a goal front and center… The Association of Proposal Management Professionals was headed toward a 10,000-member milestone when the pandemic hit. But Rick Harris, APMP’s CEO, decided to move forward faster. “When things are so disturbing and upsetting, there’s a comfort in normality,” Harris said. “We took the approach: We’re all in this together and we’re all moving forward as a team, an association and an industry.”
According to Associations Now, in the last four months, APMP has increased its standard one webinar a month to as many as four per month—they are free for members; some are sponsored—knowing that members needed more information to navigate the crisis. “APMP branded everything with the 10K initiative. Every new staff member was asked to commit to the drive to reach 10,000 members, and the goal was formalized in the strategic plan… Harris credits the book The Art of Membership by Sheri Jacobs as the guiding principle for reaching APMP’s membership goal. His main takeaway? “Keep membership front and center, and make it the center of your universe. Everything is ancillary after that.”