Newspaper Publishers: 3 Ways to Improve Your Digital Revenue

As a newspaper publisher, you know that growing your digital revenue will be key to a viable future. In my graduate-level studies in Northwestern University's online Integrated Marketing Communications program, I have found two articles on how publishers are ramping up their digital subscriptions that will help inform your decisions.

Esther Kezia Harding provides a deep dive into the successful trail the Financial Times has blazed online in her article “Truth, trust, transparency: the FT’s approach to a sustainable future” in The Media Briefing. The Financial Times' approach is built on having a direct relationship with their audience, which informs their approach to both breaking news events and long-term brand messaging. Chief Commercial Officer Jon Slade tells Harding that the Financial Times was well-positioned to benefit from such major news events as Brexit and Donald Trump's election because of their focus on quick, deep news analysis. Moreover, they have teams working around the clock to change subscription offers in response to real-time web traffic.

Image source: conceitos.com

A newer media outlet, the digital publisher Quartz, turned a profit from online advertising after four years, as Matthew Flamm writes for Advertising Age in "Mobile-Focused Startup Quartz Manages toActually Turn a Profit on Digital Journalism." The key to their success? Pursuing an elite readership. With a clean design free from pop-ups, banner ads and other visual junk, Quartz has positioned itself well for advertising from prestige brands who want to reach the "right" audience. Their rates are at the top end of the market, according to the article, because they offer a distinctive news product.

From my graduate studies in the Northwestern Medill IMC program and my review of these two publications, I have developed three key lessons to help you ramp up digital revenue.  They are:  

• Seek quality readers - Pursue the highest-value audience for your publication to earn more from subscribers and advertisers.

• Push real-time marketing - Be prepared to adjust offers when traffic spikes happen.

• Value your content - Your main selling point is the quality of your journalism, and what makes it special to your readers.

      By focusing on quality journalism, and selling that journalism to the right audience, as these two publications are, you will be able to chart a path for your publication into the future for years to come.

     

    Bridget Thoreson is a digital marketer, journalist and graduate student at Northwestern University. Contact me through Twitter or LinkedIn.

3 Tips a Marketer Need to Know to leverage the mobile devices to increase sales

Mobile commerce is the trend that no retailers can afford to ignore.  Industry analysts predict that the mobile commerce will increase to 31% of total digital purchase and generate $109 billion of revenue in 2017. As an IMC graduate student in Medill School in Northwestern University, I have done research on how the m-commerce trend affect the fashion retailers, and two articles explaining the industry future integrating the mobile devices catches I attention.

Dylan Richard, co-founder and CTO of a mobile-only e-commerce company, discusses the different consumer purchasing behaviors on mobile platforms, with computers and in stores. Dylan points out that when consumers shopping on mobile devices, like all online shopping experience, they are driven by fear on whether they make the right choice. Unlike shopping with computers, however, they are looking for easier and quicker shopping experience when they shop on their mobile devices, as they tend to shift between different apps and activities fast on their phone or tablets. 

Source: www.ohlalapps.com/wp-content/uploads/header_shopping.jpg

The Guardian article emphasizes on the importance of social networks and apps in m-commerce. While the trend helps small luxury brand to be more cost efficient, it also requires brands to provide a seamless service from seeing a picture on social media app to purchase the product. 

As the previous two articles mentioned, while the m-commerce trend is a great opportunity for fashion retailers, the retailers need to understand the different consumer purchasing behaviors on mobile device and adjust the shopping experience accordingly to generate new revenue. Based on my experience in the IMC program, here are three actions I would recommend to all fashion retailers:

• Optimize your mobile sites: optimize the mobile shopping experience is not just about a larger button. The customers need to be able to find essential information/graphics they need in the small screens and make purchases within several touches.

• Link your site with your social media accounts: always provide the links of the product with the pictures you post on social media (or use hyperlink) so consumers can access your mobile site from their social media apps easily. If you are looking for a more creative way to do it, IKEA Russion innovatively use Instagram as a catalog to increase consumers’ engagement and lead them to their website. 

• Integrate the mobile device into your store: QR code, Geo-fencing etc. are all great way to enhance your consumers’ store shopping experience while leading them to your mobile apps or sites.  

   

Cindy Du is Master of a Master of Science Candidate in Integrated Marketing Communication at the Medill School in Northwestern University. Cindy has studied and worked in Boston for four year in communication and public relations. Cindy now dedicates in delivering actionable digital marketing strategies for fashion retail brands through data-driven methods. Connect Cindy via @Cindy_SiyingDu.

Digital Marketers: Well Established Contents Arouse Brand Love Through Programmatic Bidding - EDITED

As digital marketers, expand the awareness of their brand is always on top of their mind. In digital marketing, this also means putting the content in the right time in the right place for the right people. Well established contents combine with programmatic bidding can arouse brand love among target consumers in the future.

"Programmatic in 2015: 3 Resolutions for Brands", written by Bod Arnold and published on January 2015. In this article, Bod talked about brand measurement nowadays can be done from awareness to strength. To leverage the quality of inventory, there are also ways such as using private market place and programmatic direct buyers to avoid the inventory quality issues. The article also emphasized the importance of mobile media. In summary, programmatic bidding helps digital marketers to establish a deeper brand connection by helping them to get the right ad to the right consumers on any screen through any channel.


source: http://lighthouse8.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Real-time-bidding.png




Caleb Govsalves' article "Man vs. Machine: From Programmatic to Empowerment in Digital Marketing," which is written on March 2015 is about the 2015 iMedia Summit. In this article, Caleb commented on this year's iMedia Summit and the hot topic "Who will win a fight of man versus machine." Caleb states that there is not even necessary a fight between men and machine on digital advertising. Marketing is shifting to consumer empowerment, and programmatic bidding should give the exact content out to attract consumers emotionally and empower consumers to build a brand love.

After reading these two articles and from my graduate studies in the Northwestern Medill IMC program, I have three recommendations for digital marketers:

• Updating Program - Continuously purify the program in automatically bidding, and embrace the most up-to-date techniques to target the right group of people using valid data.

• Emphasis Consumer Insight - Combine consumer insight into content building, and try to build brand love by touching consumer's heart.

• Mobile Worth Efforts - Mobile platform is important as time goes on. In the future mobile platform could be more popular than other platforms, so build the right bidding strategy and content for mobile to reach consumers in a digital era.

All in all, with digital bidding technologies advancing at a high speed, together with a well established brand content to accurately target consumers, it is proper to expect programmatic bidding to create business miracles.

Grace Song is a graduate student in the Integrated Marketing and Communication program and will graduate in December 2015. Grace has a passion in digital/interactive marketing including social media and SEO&SEM, and is seeking for an opportunity to work in digital/interactive and social media marketing for her career.
Grace can be reached at Tweeter @gracesung1011.

Digital Agency Manager: Ready to get ahead of the cross-device real-time data game?

   As a digital agency manager, be aware of the latest digital advertising trends: the cross-device integrated real-time data is changing the digital advertising game rule of how to market your brand to the most valuable customers through a most effective device/channel. As a Northwestern Medill Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) graduate student, I am not only interested but also doing some research of digital marketing. There are two articles that are related to the digital advertising that will change the way you see current multi-media advertising.

  The first article indicates the fast growing digital advertising market on mobile, video and real-time biding. Traditional online banner ads will gradually lose its market share in digital advertising and be replaced by these three areas. Companies that are aware of mobile, video and programmatic ads are getting ahead of the digital advertising game. Transactions made by mobile is steadily growing, video watched becomes more common among customers while real-time biding helps a company to target on its customers anytime, anywhere. See: “Mobile,Video, And Real-Time Bidding Are Driving A Boom In Digital Advertising”  written by Mark-Hoelzel 

   

(Cross media : yay or nay? )

  

  The second article is about the impact of the acquirement and the launch of Facebook’s Atlas. Solving the problems of “cookie” that have a tracking success rate less than 50% and cannot be applied on cross-device, Facebook’s Atlas is able to target customers with “people-based” technology and advertise to these customers on all mobile websites and apps by accurately predicting the customers’ preferences and monitoring their footprints outside Facebook including all websites and apps they are browsing and using.  See”What Facebook’s Atlas Means for Brands ad Agencies—Ad Serving and Tracing Technology Solves Two Big Problems forMarketers. written by Don Mathis 

    Based on these two articles and what I have learned from Northwestern Medill IMC, here are three action items I recommend you as a digital agency to do as soon as possible.  They are:

• Take it seriously -  While digital marketing has evolved rapidly, these developing advertising strategies have to be taken seriously or else you will be left behind in the marketing trend and lose the market share of digital advertising in a flash.
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• Get involved - Traditional way of buying ads by people will be outdated within just a few years. Programmatic ads buying leverage with real-time data from social media is going to replace the traditional mass media marketing. It’s time to contact expertise or companies that are making the future digital advertising game rule.
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• Be Aware - Other agencies will of course be noticing the ongoing changes. It would be about how well you can interpret the customers’ data as soon as you received a bunch of customers’ behavior and modify your targeting strategies.

  Be ahead of the game, it's time to better integrate cross-device real time data into your agency strategies.

Ivy Chen is a Graduate Student of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC), Medill, Northwestern University. She worked for Double A, an international paper company, in Taiwan from 2013-2014 as a Channel Development Coordinator. She is passionate about digital marketing and brand consulting and will be graduated from Northwestern in Dec, 2015. 

You can follow her on Twitter: @ivychen2015 or get connected to her on LinkedIn: tw.linkedin.com/in/ivychen2015

Destination Marketers: Be On Board or Be Left Behind

As a DMO, social media is proving to be the most cost effective ways to reach consumers and their performance can revitalize your business. As an Integrated Marketing Communications student at Northwestern University and previous experience in tourism marketing, I found 2 articles worth sharing.

As tourism consultant Frederic Gonzalo has pointed out in “Why The Destination Marketing Model Is Broken”, destinations are facing a much different reality, where traveler behaviors and their decision-making processes are shifting like never before. One of the most important disruptors is the rising importance of social platforms and mobile. According to his research, social media and the rising use of smartphones and tablets have made the information-seeking process much faster and complex. At the same time, today’s travelers trust peer reviews or reviews from strangers more than those from friends or colleagues. Yet, few destinations have developed tactical plans with social media as part of their digital marketing strategy.

(Source: “These Are The Six Most-Discussed Topics On Social Media”)

On the other hand, based on the article “Social Media Best Practices For Destination Marketing”, travel is one of the most sought after topics on social media, second to technology. Today’s travelers are using social media channels more frequently, and it is important for DMOs to be there to capture their attention before they decide to visit another destination. In general, there are 4 ways to get most use of social media: Direct booking, Create engaging posts, Conduct researches and Provide customer service. It is also important to always focus on your audience more than yourself by simply following the 5-3-2 Rule, which means out of 10 Twitter Tweets, LinkedIn updates, or Facebook posts: Five should be content from others, relevant to the audience. Three should be content from you, relevant to the audience. Two should be personal, something non-work related to help humanize the brand.

Based on the 2 articles and my graduate learning at Northwestern University, there are 3 steps that I suggest you to consider:

• Create Awesome. Try to focus on your audience’s core needs to create relatable, engaging and comfortable content. It can start easily by applying the 5-3-2 Rule.

• Manage WOM. Give your consumers a chance to voice their concerns and always get prepared to fix the problem through a strong online presence.

• Generate ROI. Incorporate e-commerce to social media tools to sell products on behalf of destination partners. Remember, social media presence without generating ROI is not going to last long.

Establishing and maintaining social media accounts can take lots of time and effort. However, get on board of social media can be the turning point of the stopping or even dying DMOs. Some changes are always better than nothing.

The author, Kai Teng is an MS candidate in Integrated Marketing Communication at Northwestern University. She is particular interested in tourism marketing and consulting. You may contact the author via Twitter @KaiTeng2015 or LinkedIn.

CEOs & CMOs: Omni-Channel Retailing? Nail it and Win big!

CEOs and CMOs in the e-commerce and retailing business: It’s Now than ever that business executives need Omni-Channel strategies to maximize profits and grow market share. As an IMC graduate student at Medill school of Northwestern University, I’ve been doing research on retailing and online/offline marketing integration, and I have found the following two articles helpful and insightful.

In "Why the online/offline split no longer matters" published by Grey Williams at www.wired.co.uk, the author addressed the significant changes on the UK market (which nevertheless reflected the universal phenomenon of blurring lines between "the bricks and the clicks"), then went on talking about what brands and retailers could do to integrate online and offline shopping for consumers. His ideas of "bring the online experience into the real world", "create a richer in-store experience", "target customers appropriately”, "take advantage of smart pricing", "reward customers for more than purchasing", and "leverage your consumer's tech” are articulated with real-life examples as well as great comments from professionals.  

(Image from Ikea's "Place IKEA furniture in your home with augmented reality" video on Youtube)

At warc.com, Gian M. Fulgoni provided more insights in his article: "Omni-Channel Retail Insights and the Consumer’s Path-to-Purchase: How Digital Has Transformed the Way People Make Purchasing Decisions". With the fast growing e-commerce channel and mobile technology, consumers’ path-to-purchase has varied tremendously. Marketers need to tailor their strategies relative to different channels while maintaining a consistent voice across various platforms. They also need to constantly keep their eyes on the wants and needs of consumers. The author talked about important issues such as "how offline is influencing e-commerce" and "mobile is playing an increasingly significant role in the today’s market".

Based on the reading and my learning at IMC program at Northwestern University, here are three things I would recommend:

1. A Consumer-centric approach is vital - When it comes to put all the pieces together, a consumer-focused approach is fundamental to help marketers retain focused, understand customers’ actual needs, and build close relationships with high value customers.

2. Build on mobile, leverage new technology - Mobile is really the key link of online and offline operation. At the same time, mobile is one of the fastest growing channel worth of significant investment for some retailers. As more and more consumers are engaging with brands through mobile platforms, wise marketers will make sure that they have strong presence there too.

3. Consistency, standardization & flexibility - Different channels provide different opportunities as well as limitations. Marketers need a consistent voice, and it is flexibility helps the voice adapt to  different channels. Marketers also need standardization to ensure efficient management of their operations as well as the quality of services.

By taking those three recommended actions, marketers would largely benefit both consumers and their brands. Here are a few fun take-aways: ten retail and e-commerce stores who are doing great jobs on integrating offline with online , written by Christopher Ratcliff at Econcultancy.

My name is Juliette Chen, I worked as brand manager, creative director, designer and strategic visual planner, both in Europe and China. I am now a graduate student studying Integrated Marketing Communication at Medill School of Northwestern University. If you have further questions, please feel free to contact me on Linkedin and Twitter.

Ecommerce Entrepreneur: You Can Be the Next “Amazon”

As an Entrepreneur, you know e-commerce has shifted the marketplace and changed customer expectations about the shopping experience. As a graduate student of Integrated Marketing Communications at Medill, Northwestern University I have been investigating e-commerce for startups and have found two articles you will find interesting and helpful.

           Ecommerce is a bear, written by Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn, shows current viable ecommerce strategies and lists out real successful example. Why is bear? Think about Amazon! It is like a bear in this industry – it’s fearless and it’s fierce. The authors observed four strategies in the marketplace to deal with Amazon’s incumbency: proprietary pricing, proprietary selection, proprietary experience, and proprietary merchandise.

(source: bearlegend.com)

           Nowadays everybody is talking about big data. The article “9 Data Sets Every Ecommerce Company Should Measure” written by Scott Gerber gives you the perfect answer about what specific dataset an ecommerce business should focus and analyze. Knowing the strategies of making a good ecommerce business, we need to understand what are the most efficient and effective ways to measure the success. Have a closer look at what user acquisition costs, abandoned carts and ROI are and tweet with your comments!

In reviewing these two articles, I have found three action items you should consider taking.  They are:

• Customer feedback is fundamental and crucial  - Not only does customer feedback help businesses evolve and perfect their product or platform, listening to customers can also have a "juggernaut" effect when it comes to building a business.

• Invest in mobile  - Remember this is a trend. Research shows that 80% of smartphone users use their devices to shop online. In the meanwhile, it’s easy to track customer’s behavior over mobile devices and it is also a better way to communicate with the customers.

• Take advantage of social media   - Building up good networks on social media sites can help you drive traffic and target your customers. What is more powerful is that this is the best way to create word-of-mouth buzz for ecommerce business.

         All in all, customer is always the key to start and improve your business. Try to think and act from the perspective of the customers will always give you a bigger possibility to win the advantages and eventually win the market in ecommerce.

Joshua Chen is an MS candidate in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. He has previously worked as marketing specialist at a consulting firm in Australia and a law firm in China. Follow Joshua’s Twitter @joshuaaachennn

Luxury Marketers: Big Data from the boutique? New technologies help best serve your customers

  

Digital is radically changing the consumption pattern of luxury goods consumption in every way. As a graduate student studying the Integrated Marketing Communications in Northwestern University, I’ve always been interested in learning the marketing trends within luxury and how the industry would leverage technology as well as digitalization to make the best outcome. For those luxury managers who are poised to offer top-tier services as their merchandise, here I found two inspiring articles that would help you make it happen.

According to a recent report from McKinsey (see "Digital luxury experience: Keeping up with changing customers" by Linda Dauriz), the future of digital luxury hasn’t been bright ever — online luxury sales are growing twice as fast as the overall market. The report demonstrates that, in 2013, digital interactions directly generated more than 13% of offline luxury sales and influenced another 28% of sales. Also it shows that more than 45% of luxury purchases are influenced by what shoppers find in the digital universe. From all these mind-blowing numbers we can obviously feel the power of digitalization in terms of boosting luxury sales in today’s world. But, what’s more noteworthy is that although pure online transactions are growing twice as fast as the sector as a whole, they represent only about 4% of the total luxury goods market. Shoppers use the digital platform more for search and comparing purposes rather than making purchase — especially for luxury consumers who are going for more expensive or custom products. However, engaging, easy-to-navigate mobile platforms would play an important role to drive store traffic to the physical boutiques, since shoppers are more likely to use smartphones for commuting info (shopping or dining). More than half of their searches of products are on mobile devices, and by the time they actually enter the store, they’ve already gathered detailed information about the products they’re about to purchase.

Another way that digitalization could help in in-store sales is through in-store facial recognition. The article “Big Data is Watching” by Sophie Doran has introduced the state-of-the-art method of tracking in-store consumer data by following wi-fi signals and by using surveillance softwares to profile customers. As the article elaborates, Nordstrom’s experiment used video surveillance and signals from shoppers’ cellphones and apps to learn information as varied as their sex, how many minutes they spend in various parts of the store and how long they look at merchandise before buying it. Moreover such detailed info would be stored permanently and activate globally through the facial recognition tools. All the data gathered from this “in-store monitoring”, combined with data gathered from digital platform, can provide marketers valuable information about customer preferences so as to guide them to change store layouts and offering more customized services, creating ever satisfying in-store customer experience throughout the world. However, the legal issue has been brought up with it, suspending the experiments in Nordstrom after months. Generally in customers’ minds, personal data is the price they pay online for the ability to quickly compare pricing and arrange convenient delivery. Whereas they feel that this “give to get” mechanism won’t apply when it comes to in-store data collection — When retailers try and collect similar data from consumers in a physical retail environment, they become unnerved, with the key criticism of in-store data collection being lack of consent.

In reading the above 2 articles, I would suggest 3 actions for luxury marketers regarding how to best leverage big data to stay at the cutting edge and generate higher revenue benefited from what you have:

  

    1. Perfect in-store experience & use digital as catalyst. Digital is serving more as the helper for customers to purchase wisely, but boutiques are still where they make purchases. Deeper engagement with customers digitally, however, can increase store traffic to generate higher revenue.

     2. See the value of in-store data. The value of In-store experience for customers determines the value of monitor in-store behaviors for marketers. Combine in-store data with online transaction, marketers can profile best-valued customers more accurately and offer them more satisfying purchase experience.

     3. Never overlook the legitimacy of data collection. The dispute over the legitimacy of gathering user data is more serious than ever. Complaints and criticism around “big data or big brother” have been and will still be the topic. Therefore, marketers have to notify customers before getting any access to data in order to keep away from troubles.

The luxury market is seen as the most passion-driven and customized market. The nature of the industry has already revealed its close relationship with advanced data analysis. As the new technology popularizes in application, the deeper than ever understanding of each customer would open a brand new page in terms of building customer-brand relationship, and thus create a much more efficient business model to generate a win-win situation for both brands and customers. Let’s look forward to it.

Cerise Miao is an MS candidate in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, majoring in marketing analytics and brand strategy. Majored in economics in college, she is interested in music, movies, languages and fine arts. She has passion for luxury and for data analysis. 
Follow Cerise @CeriseMiao