The Journey of Transformation Begins

Just leaving an amazing Key Executives Mega Conference (#2015MegaConf) in Atlanta where I had the opportunity to talk to some of the most innovative thinkers (and doers) in the media industry. I was deeply gratified by the excitement and support about our announcement that we will be leading the digital division of our partner The Bangor Daily News, and feedback to my last post about the need for transformation in the media industry. I plan on documenting our journey here, and working on creating a blueprint for digital revenue and market share growth for our partners and specifically at BDN Maine.

In talking with my colleagues this week, I heard the question over and over again: so what are you going to do first? Tomorrow we have our first team meeting, where I’ll be outlining goals and mission for the next three months, which I do in terms of sprints. Of course we’ve set a budget and sales goals for our the year, but I like to break things down in bite-sized chunks to keep things moving more quickly. And, when you’re running a startup, three months is long-term thinking. Here are the primary areas of focus for the next 90 days for the BDN Maine team.

Priority setting: Through the sprint exercise, we are setting our priorities for the next 90 days. We’ll be focusing on areas where we can have the largest impact in three key areas: revenue growth, audience development and engagement.

Sales, sales, sales: We have to kick the engine into gear, and quickly. We are in the process of recruiting and screening sales candidates, and training team members. We are creating inbound and outbound teams, and have developed roles in targeting and lead gen to support our efforts. The lead gen team works closely with marketing to conduct research identifying and qualifying prospects for the sales team, and will have monthly goals of leads to deliver. Once the sales team conducts a needs analysis with a customer, through which they identify marketing goals and objectives, what defines and drives ROI for the customer, and audiences that the customer wishes to reach. The targeting team identifies the right solutions and audiences for the customer and helps the sales team to prepare proposals. In the next three months, lead gen and training are large focuses to get us off the ground and running toward revenue, fast.

Defining our culture: We have a tremendous amount of innovative thinking, energy and talent on our team. We need to harness that energy and create a culture that keeps us moving forward, and fast. Old habits of the traditional business will be hard to break. I’ll be preparing the teams to embrace change, move quickly, and hold themselves and each other more accountable than they ever have in their professional lives before. Results are the fundamental driver, and we will be measuring them on an ongoing basis. The team is eager to have roles clarified, and I will be focusing on that tomorrow – but half of the clarification is there is no clarification and they have to become comfortable with that. By this I mean job descriptions are boxes, and startups don’t need boxes. We need areas of responsibility and assignments made, key areas of specialty and best application of our limited resources. But anyone and everyone in the organization will be part of changing the world with what we do, and flexibility will be key. Things will be moving, and fast. That’s a complete 360 from what most of them are used to. I expect this to be a bumpy transition, but we’re ready for it.

Product Roadmap: We will fill out the roadmap framework we have begun defining areas of product development for the year in three month increments. Overall, our development will be mobile first, desktop second, other publications or offline products and services third. Key offerings we will be launching in the next three months include:

• Three tiers of native advertising and a deeper dive into our content marketing services
• Taking control of the display side of the business through the implementation of trade desks/ programmatic, and deepening our relationship with ad networks
• Data: We’re going to be exploring new ways to optimize CPMs based on the first-party audience data we’re gathering, identify new ways to leverage data to enhance the reader experience, and opportunities to learn more about what our audience needs from us
• New mobile app and mobile presentation of content
• The content team has several projects they are working on in key categories where we know we can be the strongest source of unique and original content, and curation of our vibrant blogger community around these topics of interest. We need to be prepared to measure engagement as our key metric, and develop content at one-tenth the cost of the traditional business, and our team is brimming with ideas they have been testing with fantastic results out of the gate
• Online-only and statewide utilities for consumers in key categories such as obituaries, jobs, ecommerce and more

Tomorrow is a big day for our little division, and although I am physically exhausted from the #2015MegaConf – I am completely energized about this exciting journey, the opportunity for us that lies ahead. Thank you for joining us on the journey!