Publishing strategies for a mobile-first world
Mobile has changed the publishing game – so how can publishers stay ahead? By Richard Jones, CEO, EngageSciences.
Traditional publishing models have been transformed by mobile broadband, multi-screens, and social networks. Businesses in this sector face falling print circulations, time-shifted TV ads and a move from propertied content to content shared across social media.
However, the most innovative companies have adopted creative strategies allowing them to benefit from the disruption: these include new advertising techniques, multi-platform strategies and the collation of data. As such, they have boosted traffic, revenue and subscriptions and are protecting valuable subscription renewals.
Increased consumer engagement is an important feature of the new landscape. One in 10 consumers have submitted content to news websites or blogs, 46% of social network users discuss news and events on social media, and 63% of US consumers now look for content recommendations online.
That there is so much interaction with content affords an opportunity for deep and lasting customer engagement and the most savvy media owners are capitalising on this. Calls to action see a 22% increase in click-throughs when pages ingest social content; while pages with social content and interactive apps see a 10% decrease in bounce rates and three times as much dwell time as standard pages.
One media outlet with a notably successful user generated content (UGC) strategy is the Huffington Post. It regularly creates social hubs featuring reader opinions and reactions around a subject or an event. One such hub collates content from visitors and journalists at the Oxfordshire-based Wilderness Festival on an annual basis.
Publishing companies wanting to maximise the impact of any editorial campaign will look to run these over multiple channels. Recent research from Nielsen found that more than 40% of TV viewers use a tablet or smart phone whilst watching TV. To make use of this second screen, publishers should deploy hashtag and photo contests throughout a TV programme, or promote competitions and sweepstakes on social media during a TV programme’s screening.
Jermain Jackman’s new album launched using a successful multi-channel campaign. It collated user generated content (UGC) from Vine, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest and launched Instagram and Twitter competitions for entrants to create and share content using a specific hashtag. The activity increased reach on social channels and boosted website traffic.
Running content across multiple channels will create a vast amount of data, and innovative companies will mine this for clues regarding the content’s success. In addition to this, and perhaps more importantly, this data will be invaluable for targeted advertising campaigns.
Content should be tagged and categorised across social media, with likes, comments and shares monitored. Other good data sources are email subscriptions, competitions entered, analysis of social network interaction, and the creation of publicly available information on social sites, such as gender and location. Subscriber accounts provide even more profiling data. All of this can be used to market directly to the user.
Innovative media companies are likely to have a powerful database able to combine data from email, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; this will help them build a unified view of an audience member or group that can be matched with their CRM profile. Publishers should aim for a single data warehouse even when they have several titles.
The data will help with targeted advertising, but advertising campaigns will need to be innovative too. Page impressions are important, and visitors should be encouraged to engage with multi-step competitions or curated social content. Each new action might prompt the display of a new ad.
Multiple choice quizzes or gallery displays are good ways of creating multiple interactive instances, where each iteration might trigger a new ad. This delivers a higher number of impressions during a single visit, and impressions are a key metric for advertisers.
The same data can be used to tailor a user’s experience in future visits using effective profiling and targeting based on user behaviour and expressed preferences.
Native advertising, a form where the advertising resembles the site’s content, is also proving successful in the new media landscape. It tends to be sold in packages comprising of curated UGC, branded content and planned editorial. According to IPG media lab research, native ads are viewed for as long as editorial content and are more likely to be shared than a banner ad with 32% versus 19% of respondents saying they would do so.
Finally, promotions, such as competitions or sweepstakes, can be an excellent way for publishing houses to boost revenue. When designed well these provide richly profiled data to improve segmentation and targeted advertising and offers. AOL and Yahoo run highly successful sweepstakes and quizzes across their portfolio of brands; and well-managed competitions such as these can boost digital revenues by as much as 25%.
Unfortunately, many online competitions are run on outmoded in-house platforms that don’t collate or combine data effectively, but modern platforms can be deployed as and when they’re needed. The main aim is to maximise entries, boost virality and capture information that combines with other data sources such as CRM, email and subscriptions.
Although there will be no narrowing of the field in terms of content produced by innovative media companies, the most successful players are likely to approach the challenges of a mobile environment in a similar way. They will maximise interaction with customers, amass audience data to tailor content and advertising, and create innovative advertising campaigns using segmented data and a multi-platform approach.