Five things we've learned about growing print audiences
A recent blog (Don't Fold Too Early on Print) discussed the value of print audiences. Four motives for continuing to incorporate print as an essential component of a diverse, multi-platform strategy were outlined:
1- Print audiences are critical sources of data and revenue – data that can enable relevance and revenue that can fund other strategic initiatives.
2 - Print audiences are a source of customers for other offline and online products.
3 - The ability to offer advertising solutions that can be integrated and optimized across multiple online and offline channels offers a compelling proposition to advertisers vis-à-vis single channel providers.
4 - Print advertising works.
In this follow up, five things we know about how those audiences can be developed, engaged and monetized are discussed.
Lesson #1:
You CAN Grow Your Print Audience
Most are familiar with the term "managed decline." That seems a self-fulfilling prophesy if there ever was one.
If we're smart enough to "manage" print circulation decline, maybe we're smart enough to reverse the downward spiral. In fact, there are folks doing just that.
The LEAP coalition comprises about 40 newsmedia companies with diverse print and digital assets. The objective of that collaboration is to leverage customer intelligence and marketing automation in driving audience growth, engagement and monetization across all platforms.
The coalition provides some persuasive benchmarks as to how such a methodology can influence the trend in print circulation. Among the most compelling metrics is this: Prior to embracing LEAP's intelligence-driven approach to audience optimization, just 27 percent of print subscriptions lasted at least 12 months. For LEAP's coalition partners today, that number stands at just over 45 percent – a 70 percent improvement.
Needless to say, such gains do not ensure that print increases are imminent. But strong leadership and a commitment to long-term strategic audience growth offer a genuine path to success.
A particularly relevant example is a 25,000-circulation publisher in one of the country's most challenging markets – the DC metro – where competition from a plethora of print and digital competitors is fierce. In February, after months of executing against its commitment to strategic, sustainable growth, an inflection point was achieved: this publisher saw monthly home delivery volume increases for the first time in a decade – with home delivery revenue up more than 15 percent YOY.
It CAN be done.
Lesson #2:
How is More Important than How Much
Circulators spend a substantial amount of money on customer development. Those efforts may not be sophisticated or sexy – but they are typically handicapped by a lack of data and analytics – or, at least, access to them. Without definitive knowledge about how they should invest their precious sales money, it really just becomes a question of how much budget they can lobby for.
An intelligence-driven approach to audience development changes the game. The how becomes far more important than the how much.
Analytics and marketing automation are powerful resources in optimizing the return on marketing investments by informing the entire structure of campaign activities, such as:
- Objective – acquisition, retention, engagement, value enhancement.
- Channel – email, direct mail, telemarketing.
- Target – defined by transactions, demographics, contact history, channel preference, etc.
- Offer – print, digital, price, term, etc.
- Creative execution – copy, graphics, script.
The bottom line: Marketing initiatives should be optimized based on intelligence, analytics and proven campaign management practices. Moreover, they should be integrated to work synergistically across channels, automated and measured.
Lesson #3:
Think Customer Lifecycle Management – Not Retention
At LEAP, we prefer to focus on CLM rather than retention. The purpose of CLM is to maximize the VALUE of a customer relationship – not just the TENURE. Certainly, tenure is a key element in the value equation. But customer value can also be amplified through cross-selling other print and digital products, improving frequency, increasing rate, etc.
CLM is a data-driven, technology-enabled process intended to optimize customer value through a curriculum of timely, relevant communications – communications that are, in turn, designed to provoke a specific response, such as a purchase, renewal, EZ pay migration, survey response or an engagement with relevant content.
Customer Lifecycle Management – not simply retention – is vital to growing audience and maximizing customer profitability.
Lesson #4:
A Shared Cost Structure is Enabling
The technology that supports the integration of multiple sources of online and offline data, enables comprehensive analytics and modeling, facilitates the design and automation of complex multichannel campaigns and delivers robust reporting suites isn't cheap. Neither is the expertise to effectively deploy that technology in the pursuit of business objectives.
That is why sophisticated, intelligence-driven marketing automation has typically been the domain of major media conglomerates that can leverage technology investments across multiple business units. Yet the same technology that is driving business transformation for those companies is equally critical to independent, family-owned or "resource-constrained" organizations.
Shared Resource Management is a model whereby investments in the assets required to execute and optimize data-driven marketing automation initiatives – such as technology and expertise – are shared by multiple business entities.
This is a model embraced by LEAP Media Solutions in supporting the audience development initiatives of 40 newsmedia companies. Each of those 40 benefit from marketing technology and expertise that might otherwise be beyond their financial bandwidth – and delivering a level of marketing sophistication on par with the big boys.
Lesson #5:
Too Many People Think "Expense" Rather Than "Investment"
Among the most profound barriers to the adoption of an intelligence-driven approach to audience development is the perception that the associated investment is an "expense."
Some may quibble with the distinction between an expense and an investment. Those Starbucks beans you just bought for the office coffee maker is an expense. But an investment is something for which you expect to receive a definitive and, hopefully, substantial return.
LEAP coalition benchmarks referenced above facilitate the development of a fairly rigorous ROI model designed to estimate the financial impact of an investment in end-to-end, data-driven marketing automation – including the development of the customer intelligence platform, the front-end analytics that support targeting and personalization, the design, execution and automation of customer development and CLM campaigns, and the reporting feedback that drives continuous improvement and the identification of best practices.
Although there is some variance associated with size and current sales mix, it is evident that the ROI associated with such investments is definitive, positive and substantial.
If you would like to see the projected financial impact of such an approach on your specific situation, please email tom.ratkovich@leapmediasolutions.com.
Tom Ratkovich is the managing partner of LEAP Media Solutions.
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