Print Execs: 3 Tips For Making Digital Your New Best Friend

As a print executive, you most likely realize that more and more of your readers are now going to digital platforms for content. Instead of viewing this trend as a threat to print, you should see it as GOOD news. Digital journalism is a promising growth area that will create new business opportunities for an industry that has long been lacking in innovation. As a former magazine journalist currently studying Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University’s Medill School, I have found two articles that can help you begin to build a successful digital journalism business.

In a February 2015 International News Media Association article titled “6 pillars of a revenue-generating business model for digital journalism”, Caio Túlio Costa offers some thoughts on how traditional media companies can succeed in the digital landscape by creating a new value chain for consumers. Costa explains the drawbacks of current digital media business strategies, and argues that publications should reinvent themselves and focus on providing content that is valuable to digital natives. 

Credit: Thinkstock

The second article by Johanna Vehkoo and Pekka Pekkala, “Across the world, money to support journalism startups comes from a variety of sources”, shows that European media companies may be ahead of their U.S. counterparts when it comes to creating innovative web-based business models. Although there is no consensus on what the “Holy Grail” of digital media revenue strategies looks like, the 2013 Nieman Lab article provides many examples of potentially profitable ideas, from social web storytelling to selling technology — all of which provide new value for digital consumers.

Based on the key takeaways from these two articles and my learning experience as an Integrated Marketing Communications graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill School, here are three action items print media executives should consider implementing today.

Become a techie. Today’s hottest new digital technology may suddenly become obsolete tomorrow, so it may not be wise to hedge your bets on any particular platform. Instead, familiarize yourself with tech industry trends, understand how your consumers interact with digital technologies, and be flexible enough to pivot when the next big digital disruption comes to market.

Think beyond advertisers. Advertisers have always accounted for the majority of print media’s total revenue, but digital now gives you opportunities to monetize your content beyond subscribers and ads. Be creative: What other sources of revenue can you capitalize on? Does it reinforce your brand, and do you have the expertise necessary to craft a successful extension?

Content sells. Even though digital provides exciting new opportunities for traditional print media companies, it is important to realize that your business is still centered on producing content for your readers. Start to distinguish yourself as a reputable source of well-written stories by holding your digital content to the same quality standards and editing processes as your print articles.

The print business model has been so successful for so long that it is justifiably difficult for traditional publications to completely let go of it. In order to be truly successful in today’s digital landscape, however, it is not enough to simply transpose the print model online — every strategic decision must be optimized for digital platforms. But most importantly, remember that at the end of the day, your primary job is still to provide readers with high quality content that they cannot find anywhere else.


Ivan Yeh is a master’s candidate studying Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University’s Medill School, specializing in media management and digital marketing. He also holds a B.S. in Journalism from Medill, and has previously written for SELF and Health magazines. Ivan can be reached on LinkedIn and Twitter @iyeh22.

Marketers Leverage Unexpected Sources into Revenue

As a CMO or marketing manager, you see the consumer is changing and expectations of advertising are changing, as well.  Marketing that was once new and different has become commonplace and expected.  Finding a new way to market to the evolving tastes of the consumer has become more challenging in a market where most consumers believe they have ‘seen it all before’.  To meet that challenge, CMOs and Creative Directors need to tap into assets they may not realize they have.  They need to look outside of the marketing world in order to develop non-traditional marketing strategies.  These non-traditional strategies are those that move the success of the campaign to the consumer.

Picture Source: http://www.mediapost.com/

In his interview with AdAge, Trevor Guthrie, East Cost director of OMD’s Ignition Factory, talks about deliberately constructing a team of people from places other than advertising and media, looking for those who “who see things differently, who travel around looking for inspiration or ideas”.  His team developed a billboard baseball drop to promote Showtime’s new program “The Franchise”.   As people checked into the show’s billboard through Foursquare, they got a free baseball.  Dropping 3,000 baseballs meant 3,000 check-ins at a single billboard, and each of those check-ins were immediately broadcast to all their friends.  Using this non-traditional media, the Ignition Factory got consumers to start spreading the word to each other through these broadcasts.

Having consumers spread the word themselves is the key to the success of non-traditional advertising.  Most consumers brace themselves against traditional advertising, whereas they are more receptive when the message comes from a friend.  In order to get those consumers to start spreading the message, marketers need to start thinking like the consumers who will eventually deliver their message.  It is because of this that the most effective sources of non-traditional marketing will not come from the marketer’s brain, but rather from the mind of the non-marketer.

Here are a few tips for using non-marketing sources to develop powerful non-traditional marketing:

11.)    Don’t limit who you hire.

Guthrie talks about him being more interested by a potential employee who has studied dolphin brains, than by one with traditional marketing experience.  As the consumers have more control of the market place, companies need employees who don’t think like marketers to reach those consumers.

22.)    Don’t be held back by technology.

As a CMO or Creative director, as soon as you start putting constraints on what can be done with your non-traditional marketing, you will constrain how effective it will be.  Technology is moving so quickly that even if a platform doesn’t exist now, it can probably be built.

13.)    Keep sight of what is relevant 

Stay focused.  Just because it is new doesn’t mean that good non-traditional marketing abandons everything the consumer already knows about your product.  Any marketing, traditional or non-traditional, is not going to work if it doesn’t align with what the consumer thinks of you.

There is a risk in using non-traditional marketing, as it puts the more control in the hands of the consumer.  The evolving consumer makes this risk worth it, however, because they are looking for that control.  The concepts above will help in developing the best possible - revenue generating - non-traditional marketing.

Ryan McGuire has spent five years in media execution and is currently a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC marketing program.  Follow or contact him @RyanIMC  

Social Media recipes to measure your brand's success

As a brand manager, your brand's presence in social media is critical but difficult to measure. In my selection of coursework at Northwestern University, I have been studying the issue of measurement of social media activities (and activities on other new media platforms). Customers today constantly hop back and forth between offline and online media. Although many organizations have activated social media programs, majority struggle to measure its impact on revenue. In this post, I will highlight some important findings on this burning topic of how to measure social success for your brand.

To tell this cryptic correlation, Altimeter Group, a research and advisory firm based in San Mateo, California, conducted a study to understand challenges, as well as strategies for understanding the financial impact of social media. In her report titled “The Social Media ROI Cookbook”, analyst Susan Etlinger, lays out the best practices and “recipes” that organizations are using to understand its impact.

While the report sites multiple challenges, the prime challenge that organizations struggle with is actually tying social media to business objectives. But, while revenue is important, it isn’t everything. Eighty-four percent of survey respondents reported that the primary business impact of social media was not revenue generation, but “insight that helped us meet customer experience goals.”

Based on this research, the Altimeter team identified six primary guidelines that brands are using to measure the revenue impact of social media.

What is important to remember is that while top-down approaches provide business context and bottom-up approaches provide granularity, they are most valuable when viewed in context of each other to evaluate the complete picture.

Based on the Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) model, the lesson for a brand manager is that the criteria for choosing the right measurement mix are:

· Identify your business type: the way your company goes to market (exclusively online or multi-channel) largely drives what is possible when it comes to revenue measurement.

· Assess your service or product type: sales cycle is key criteria in determining revenue measurement strategy, sales cycle vary considerably for low consideration and high consideration purchases

· Factor in your media mix: the type of medium (Paid, Earned and/or Owned) also influences your measurement method, as you can only measure online properties that you control.

· Consider your customer profile: possibly the most important factor, the type of customer (business, consumer and/or highly social) will determine what measurement is possible

To conclude, it’s important to remember that in real terms we are still at the very beginning of social business and no one set of measures can tell you everything. But looking at the granular data in context of broader trends will deliver a more representative view of the revenue impact of social media.

By Nikhil Kaul


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nikhil Kaul is a technophile, shutterbug, avid traveler, and foodie. When not indulging, he seeks problems in the ever-evolving marketplace to rattle his brain for solutions. A masters' student of Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, he enjoys wrestling with the challenges that businesses face due to the increasing influence of new media and changing customer behavior.