From Audience Development to Demand Generation

Managing a customer base takes a collective effort from the entire organization.

By Abraham Langer
Wednesday, December 3, 2008

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In talking with internal folks at my company—1105 Media—and outside colleagues about how they have structured their Web audience development efforts in the past, there seems to be a disturbing trend in how specific individuals were chosen to take on the mantel of Web traffic generation. Arbitrary assignment seems rife, with many citing management’s rather flippant notions of “let’s give it to marketing or circulation, they’ll work it out,” or worse yet, “let’s give it to someone in IT, they understand the Web.” With my transition from overseeing the 1105 Media print circulation departments to building our new Web audience development group, I have been thinking of how not to make the dismissive assumption that it can all be handled by the circulation department (although we do have the best and brightest at 1105) and at the same time how best to utilize existing resources.

It seems that audience development for the Web requires a more comprehensive, collaborative approach. The nature of the Web itself dictates a significant shift in organizational thinking from audience development executed by a small group of traditional marketers to pervasive demand generation that is incorporated into all aspects of the organization, including content creation. To make the task manageable I have focused on three primary areas of demand generation: Search engine optimization, direct marketing and analytics.

Thoughts on SEO

For most b-to-b information sites, traffic generated through effective search engine optimization should represent the bulk of visitors to your sites. This traffic is generated by natural search engine results directing users to your Web site. This element of demand generation is completely based on how individual search engines perceive the quality and relevancy of your content. However, SEO is not an activity that you can engage in post fact. For content-based Web sites, SEO should not be thought of as a campaign to be executed by someone with a marketing title but rather as an integral part of the content creation process. Editorial staff must be the ones tasked with creating key SEO elements such as meta keywords, descriptions and titles when creating content.

Once “traditional” marketers or circulators realize that they can’t control SEO there is a tendency to believe that direct marketing can yield results equal to effective SEO. The problem is that frequently direct marketing for large-scale traffic generation is simply not cost effective. Monetization of general traffic for content-based sites through banners or other run-of-site advertising rarely justifies the direct marketing investment. Renting lists, sending out dedicated email blasts or engaging in a robust search engine marketing campaign can be extremely expensive when the costs are offset by pennies of revenue per page view.

However, structured direct marketing programs can be leveraged to drive traffic for programs that have direct revenue conversion points such as a cost-per-lead campaign that an advertiser runs on your site (including Webcasts, whitepaper downloads, and so on), or a topic-specific area on your site that an advertiser has sponsored, or a microsite that you are hosting for an advertiser. For these types of programs, marketers and circulators can fall back on cost-per-order or cost-per-response metrics and the economics of a large scale direct marketing investment become much more justifiable. After all, few would argue with spending $10 to attract a Webinar registrant if you sell that individual as a lead for $30.

Analytics for Everyone

While Web analytics are crucial to measuring the success of SEO and direct marketing efforts, it should not be left solely to marketing folks to manage and report on these metrics. Effective usage of analytics requires pervasive training across the organization on how to utilize the numbers to make effective business decisions. Marketers should use these numbers to measure the effectiveness of campaigns, editorial should utilize path and popularity information to gauge interest in specific content, sales should be leveraging the metrics to understand how to optimize yield, and management should be concerned with the interplay of all three areas. An effective analytics implementation requires a dedicated set of resources that can serve all stakeholders in your organization.

While each organization has to decide on how best to implement effective Web audience development, I would strongly encourage you to recognize that the responsibility for demand generation must be spread throughout your organization. It is not a one-department job—and for the love of god, don’t just give it to IT.

Abraham Langer is VP digital media—audience development at 1105 Media, Inc., a b-to-b information company based in Chatsworth, CA.