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Media & Publishing
Translating subscriber data into
actionable intelligence
4 imperatives for media and publishing companies
A marketing goldmine just out of reach
In the era of the connected customer, data is everywhere,
providing a direct window into the wants and needs of your
customers. Unfortunately, as a media or publishing company,
your data is often siloed in different databases and with
different structures and languages. This makes analysis
difficult, if not impossible – a problem that frequently
overwhelms marketers.
But harness and analyse this data correctly, and you have, as Rob
Grimshaw, Managing Director of the Financial Times calls it, “a
marketing goldmine.”
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What kind of content do your subscribers want?
When do they interact with content?
What are they willing to pay for it?
What ads get them to engage?
Why do they interact in the way they do?
Your data can provide insights into your customers’ every action, behaviour,
and preference. But first, you must learn to unite online and offline data
sources and capture critical insights.
Lucy Handley, “Q&A: Rob Grimshaw, managing director, FT.com,” MarketingWeek. August 18, 2011.
http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/qa-rob-grimshaw-managing-director-ftcom/3029339.
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Good data analysis
deliver concrete results
3x as likely as companies
with average analytics
capabilities to execute
business decisions as
intended.
5x as likely to make
decisions much faster
than market peers.
2x as likely to be in the top
quartile of financial
performance within their
industries.
Source: 2013 Bain & Co. study of
409 large companies. As reported
in The Wall Street Journal
But what data sources should you unite? What
insights should you look for?
How should you monetise your data?
A step-by-step blueprint to transform your subscriber data into
actionable business intelligence
1
Create your monetisation strategy
Success under the traditional media paradigm has always been about advertising sales. In the past, simply showing
you had more eyeballs on a given page than your competitors would lead to success. Today, the landscape is
changing. Yes, a large audience is still important; however, progressive companies are shifting their thinking
towards a “subscriber monetisation” model in which they seek to maximise the value of each subscriber across
channels and properties.
This new paradigm relies on building strong, long-term subscriber and advertiser relationships because more
engaged subscribers result in less churn, lower subscriber acquisition costs, and more data on how to best serve
subscribers with relevant content and advertising.
In order to be successful under this new paradigm, you must mine your data for insights that will be
valuable to three core audiences:
Advertisers:
Showing that you can serve the right advertisements,
to interested parties, who are likely to interact and
convert to being their customer.
Subscribers:
Discovering how you can gain more subscribers, upsell
them and how you should price subscriptions.
Internal stakeholders:
Content producers, editors, directors, marketers, salespeople.
Help them understand how to better serve subscribers and
improve upon key metrics.
Turning your data into revenue
When constructing your data collection, usage, and analysis strategies, it is best to
begin with the end in mind. This means outlining your monetisation strategies. A few
of the most important include:
Driving non-paying subscribers across paywalls by analysing pre-subscription behaviour.
By analysing content, usage, demographic profiles, and conversions, you can learn what content is likely to
bring your non-paying users across paywalls.
Identifying high-value, niche subscriber segments that will be valuable to advertisers.
Many believe that the content subscribers consume provides direct insight into their advertising preferences.
For example, someone reading an article about skiing must be interested in buying new ski poles, right?
However, closer analysis of subscriber behaviour can reveal surprising trends about the kind of
advertisements with which they are likely to engage. For instance, affluent readers of an article about skiing
may also engage particularly well with advertising from a financial advisor. Mine your subscriber data to find
these insights and use them to drive incremental revenue.
Improving relations with advertisers by tailor-making products.
Here, the Pareto Principal becomes relevant. A few large advertisers often dominate buys within product or
industry segments. Use your enhanced analytics capabilities to tailor-make packages that will help your most
valuable advertisers reach their goals. Advertisers will not only pay more for the opportunity, they will
appreciate the personalised effort.
Identifying the most popular content in key demographics to inspire loyalty among subscribers.
For many years, editors and content producers have been forced to rely on their gut to determine which kinds
of content their subscribers value most. This is no longer the case. By mining your data for insights, you can
learn precisely which kind of content is most valuable and segment the delivery of that content by
demographic or behavioural criteria. This will result in increased loyalty, more social engagement, less churn,
and more value to advertisers.
Leverage your data to create more efficient direct marketing campaigns and specialised offers.
Leveraging demographic or firmographic information and digital behavioural data, build out a “best-subscriber”
profile. Start by determining which types of subscribers are likely to interact with your content and advertising.
You can then build out new direct marketing campaigns or offers such as webinars or special events, which are
likely to drive engagement with your audience. Armed with your target monetisation strategies, you can now
work to identify and unify the data sources you’ll need in order to get your desired insights.
2
Unite subscriber sata from across the
enterprise to drive 360-degree insights
The 360-degree subscriber insight. We like to think of this as your “golden record.” A
multi-channel, demographic- or firmographic-rich understanding of how your
subscribers interact with your content both online and offline, across all properties.
Critical capabilities
To build your golden record
Collect and normalise a wealth of disparate data from a variety of cross-device, cross-channel sources.
Connect the behavioural dots for every subscriber to chart their individual journey.
Integrate data and insights with 3rd-party systems such as CRM, advertising platforms and marketing
automation tools.
Deliver clear, easy to understand analysis that drives higher revenues and subscriber engagement.
No matter your monetisation strategies, this “golden record” is what you should work to create because this
individual view of your subscribers will allow you to do more than just convert them once. It will allow you to build a
long-term relationship that will translate into recurring revenues.
You’ll want to begin by identifying the data sources that you need to incorporate. There will be many to sift through,
and you will need to prioritise.
For most media and publishing companies, you’ll want to begin with online data—content consumption, page views,
clicks, and time onsite—any data point that can help shed light on how your subscribers interact with your content.
Remember to take into account your various web properties, as well as the types of devices your subscribers use to
access digital content. Next, consider other digital assets such as social profiles, email engagement activities, or any
other channels that can provide insight into online behaviours.
Finally, you’ll want to marry your online behaviours with rich offline data sources, such as your subscriber database.
This will allow you to pair demographic or firmographic information such as household income, marital status,
gender, job title or company size with behavioural insights.
Next, you’ll need to create a plan for organising and normalising your data so it can be analysed holistically—a
process that can quickly get complex when reconciling online and offline data sources.
Armed with your comprehensive dataset and subscriber profiles, you can now begin the analysis that will tell a
richer story about your current and prospective subscribers.
3
Get answers to the big five:
Who, what, when, where, and why
Content consumption. Number of page views. How long and how often. As a digital
publisher, you have most likely been tracking these metrics for years.
As a print publisher, you have a rich understanding of subscriber demographics. Before uniting your data, there was
no way to analyse the two in tandem.
Now, armed with your holistic, cross-channel understanding of your subscriber behaviour, you can get answers to
four of the big five questions:
Who are your online subscribers and visitors: income, gender, marital status, interests? Etc.
What types of content do they interact with? For what duration? What advertisements do they click on? Etc.
Where do they access your content? In print or online? On which devices? Where do they bounce or leave
the site? Etc.
When do they interact with content? When do they interact with ads or advertiser content? When do they
use various devices? Etc.
From Rob Grimshaw, Managing Director of Financial Times (ft.com)
“We know when [users] come to the site, the type of content they read and how often they visit.
All of this is a marketing gold mine... Subscription revenues are up 60% year on year at the
halfway point.”
Lucy Handley, “Q&A: Rob Grimshaw, managing director, FT.com,” MarketingWeek. August 18, 2011.
http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/qa-rob-grimshaw-managing-director-ftcom/3029339.
2
What you’ll be missing is the “Why.”
Answers to questions such as, “Why do certain
subscribers behave in the way they do?” or, “why does
certain content drive higher acquisitions?” will not always
be immediately clear.
The good news is that your new dataset of combined
sources can give you the capability to test assumptions
and behaviours, which will lead you to predictive insights.
Getting to the “Why”
Here’s a simple process that you can use to learn why your subscribers behave the
way they do:
Step #1: Isolate a high-value segment
Using behaviours, social or demographic segmentations, firmographic data or other criteria, carve out a key
segment of high-value subscribers.
Step #2: Analyse based on content usage, conversions, or other metrics
Armed with cross-channel insights, you can now analyse precise subscriber-groups to understand how they
behave and what they want from your properties.
Step #3: Use the insights to drive monetisation strategies
With these insights, you can now support and inform your monetisation strategies with hard data rather than
assumptions or instinct.
An example of success
By using this method of testing, one major media company was able to prove that longer app usage directly
correlated with a higher likelihood of becoming a subscriber.
The company can now serve users who cross certain app usage thresholds with more subscription offers at
higher price points.
They can also communicate to advertisers as to why these highly engaged subscribers are good targets and
require higher priced advertising packages.
Clear return on investment
79
%
Increase in
registered visitors
50
%
Increase in
subscribers
24
%
Increase in
digital revenue
4
Make data easy to interpret and share across
channels
Making the best use of your data will mean working across departments not only for
analysis, but also for reporting. So it’s critical you make the data, and your insights, easy to
share and interpret so they can be used across your organisation.
Your first task
Identify the key metrics and analytics that you will use to drive business growth over the short and long term.
The goal is to build repeatable processes and analyses that will serve as benchmarks for success, so that you
don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel.
Your second task
Make data and insights easy to understand for all stakeholders. This usually means creating reports, charts,
and graphs that distil complex concepts into plain language and bite-sized insights.
Your third task
Make the process easy. For many organisations, reporting and analysis relies on excel spreadsheets. Compiling
these spreadsheets is time-intensive, which often means that there’s no follow-through. In addition, the
preparation of these reports may have a higher cost to your organisation than you realise. Automate your
routine reporting so it’s easy to share insights in a meaningful way.
The ease with which you can build-out these capabilities will be dependent upon a combination of factors
including how your new dataset was built, your in-house capabilities, and the tools your data analysts use. If
your team already uses SQL or Tableau, for example, be wary of new shiny objects that will force you or your
team to learn new languages, make major changes to your existing processes, or become too dependent on an
outside resource.
Beyond the 4 imperatives: Looking to the future
Getting started
1
Send an email. Include all key stakeholders. Set a meeting to discuss your goals.
2
Clearly outline your use cases and desired insights. Make sure to outline both immediate ROI and
long-term value.
3
Identify organisational competencies and gaps. Learn what expertise you have in-house and what
will need to come from third-party resources.
4
Ensure you have a clear cross-functional understanding of goals and capabilities to avoid spinning.
This means analysts should ramp up their marketing chops and business stakeholders must clearly
outline and communicate their goals to analysts.
Predictive insights that describe your subscribers’ behaviour: this is where you ultimately want to
go. So you can understand, in real time, how to optimise your subscribers’ experience and best
serve your advertisers.
While the path to these insights and understanding of “why” behaviours may feel long, simply uniting your
data and getting answers to “who, what, when, and where” is a huge first step. It will allow you to optimise your
subscribers’ experience, drive more users over paywalls, and increase your value to advertisers. In fact,
answering those four questions will put you leaps and bounds ahead of many of your competitors.
It will also lay the groundwork that you need in order to bring your organisation into the new age of media—an
age when insights and analysis, rather than intuition, are king. To get started on your path, begin with step
one—send an email! In no time, you’ll be harvesting your very own data goldmine.
Sources: http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303519404579353200953287192
Fospha’s mission is to help marketers turn fragmented data into unified, actionable subscriber
intelligence that accelerates business.
Their solutions help marketers answer questions such as:
How can I sustainably acquire more revenue generating subscribers and consumers?
How can I get a single view of consumers across channels and devices?
How can I understand which advertisements are proving most successful?
How do I predict who is likely to subscribe now so I can target them more effectively?
How can I better understand which content and ads to serve my non-paying
users/subscribers to bring them across paywalls?
How can I increase my value to advertisers?
Contact Fospha today
General enquiries
[email protected]
Website
fospha.com
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