10 Ways To Get Back On Track

There are good news to spread. The FIPP Media Tour London showed that the publishing industry is coping better and better with the changes digitisation heaped upon us. Nine publishers gave insight in how they manage this change, focussing on the three big assets: content, brand and audience.

From Bauer Media to Times Inc., from Dennis Publishing to Shortlist Media, how different their brands, contents, audiences and approaches might be, there is one thing they have all in common: content is king.

Content is what attracts the audience and the advertiser as well. Content defines the brand and its quality is the first step towards customer loyalty and, more importantly, customer trust. Certainly, this is only the first step. Much more has to be done, as we learned during eleven salient presentations.

Even though content defines your brand, shaping it to fit your targeting audience is an important necessity. The Economist, unhappy with their perception as a brand for bankers and traders only, reshaped it by using context sensitive and dynamic ads and clever content marketing to do so. Now, it is perceived as a must-have-magazine for well educated, progressive cosmopolites interested not only in economy but politics, deep analytics, art and lifestyle. This led to an increase from expected 500.000 to more than four million prospects within the campaign. This does not only help to further customer analytics, but also lead to significantly risen subscriptions.

Analysing customer’s behaviour is crucial. Not only for content marketing reasons or branding issues, but for generating ad revenue itself. Advertisers are demanding more and better data about their target groups and their response to specific ads. Centaur Media even uses article performance data as a metric for the payment of their authors. Analysing and tracking behaviour is even more important when it comes to lead based revenue streams. Advertisers are more than happy to pay for generated orders by their media partners. As long as it is trackable!

Digital Spy, the world leading social entertainment platform, points out that clickbait does not do the trick. It might increase page impressions but ruins trust and credibility, leading to a decrease in customer loyalty, interaction, engagement and, finally, click-through- and conversion rate. Nevertheless, a fast pace in content production is crucial. Around 150 articles and 350 social media posts are produced 24 hours a day, with an increasing focus on videos. Within this content driven environment, Hearst’s new advertising format “shared spaces” (a native advertising concept) generates the biggest bulk of their advertising revenue now.

Not all good news come with a digital background. Even with traditionally printed magazines, economic success is possible. Shortlist Media disrupted the market for fashion and lifestyle magazines with its freemium glossy magazine Shortlist. Given away in the tube, in gyms and shops, its ABC figures (= IVW for the German readers) are well over 500.000 copies weekly with a return rate around 2%. Despite being highly profitable (approx. ￡1m), Shortlist Media launched a series of similar magazines for different target groups in different countries. Certainly, this success didn’t stopped them from going digital, too.

But success is not only limited to freemium and digital. It can be done with regular magazines, too. Dennis Publishing launched “The Week junior”, a brand extension of their regular magazine “The week”, targeting kids between 8 and 14 years. It is exclusively available at Sainsbury or subscription only. The target might be the kids, but they certainly aim at the parents. Who won’t buy their kids a magazine designed for the smart and curious mind, that tries to makes sense of the world around it? Obviously, Dennis Publishing knew their customers well. It was a bullseye with over 2.800 pre-launch subscriptions. Within 25 weekly issues, they reached 15.000 subscriptions with a marketing underspend of 65% and a take-through-rate of around 90%.

Expanding your brands is the most obvious way to generate new revenue, but by no means an easy one. Special interest publishers like Retail Week or Good Housekeeping are typically in a better position of doing so. Nevertheless, general interest publishers are catching up. More and more publishers are organising live events to attract well-defined target groups, using the event not only for self-promotion but as advertising and sales platform for advertisers. Beside revenue out of exhibitor’s fees, ticket sales and display ads, commissions on sales provide some cash, too. There are as many other expanding possibilities as there are publishers, but all of them chose organising live events at least.

An even more significant trend is the production of video content. Estimates are that within three years 80% of internet traffic will be videos. Especially the younger generation nearly exclusively watches videos. Thus in mind, most publishers started to transform their content into video. Good Housekeeping magazine did more than 300 cooking videos, Retail Week produced 800 video interviews with the most important people in retail business, The Economist and Digital Spy focusses on videos as well as for editorials but also for self-promotion.

Economic success is sometimes a little like your car keys: if lost, you finally find them where you will search last. Switching from individual subscriptions to corporate subscriptions could do the trick: Bundling print and digital, giving readers individual landing pages and, of course, analysing their behaviour to provide them with more relevant content. Maybe it’s not the economy, but the distribution of your magazines. Newsstand sales decrease continuously and will be doing so in the foreseeable future. Venue or corporate placement, events, sponsored copies, brand-to-hand or pop-up stands may be worth trying. Goldkey Media, owned by Hearst and Condé Nast, made very good experiences with this approach, confirmed by customers like Bauer, Economist or Financial Times.

Another way generating money, awareness, brand loyalty and user involvement needs a lot of creativity and might be hard to copy. Shortlist Media created a mixture of video, advertisement, live event and self-promotion with amazing results. Sponsored by a big automobile company, they documented the process of making an issue of “Stylist” within 24 hours against the clock. Inviting readers to drop by, the whole process is filmed and promoted on all available channels – from their own ones to the big social networks, reaching way more than half a million page impressions, generating 35.000 AD 300x600 openings and 35.000 partnership emails, 2.500 retweets and over a thousand likes on Facebook. This event became a huge advertising success for both, the sponsor and Shortlist Media.

Of course, there is no satnav to success and every publisher has to find his own path, but following the signs of content first, social CRM or customer engagement might be worth to try. All visited companies had some things in common: they all focus on quality if not premium content, to attract an audience which is profitable to advertisers. They all analyse their audience and its behaviour extensively, not only to provide better content, but to match advertisers’ needs. Live events are proving to be the single most successful brand extension only rivalled by digital services like dailies or knowledge bases. Multi-platform publishing might be a buzzword, but it is a very real thing at the same time. The future publishers use all channels to deliver content to their audience, giving the opportunity to engage and interact. Customer engagement is not only a sign of customer loyalty, but also generates behaviour which could be analysed and capitalised.

To sum it up, the publishing business was, is and will be content driven, but to be successful, it is crucial to know as much about the audience as possible. Everything else is secondary.