Audience Development in Downturn
Perspectives on how to manage circ and audience during difficult times.
Times right now are tough. Print ad sales are down. Costs are rising. So how does this impact circulation and audience development—the one group where if you cut costs, you risk literally squeezing your pipeline of potential customers?
For Nick Cavnar, VP of circulation and database development at b-to-b publisher Hanley-Wood, which serves the home building and construction industries, maintaining a pragmatic approach to cutting circ costs where appropriate coupled with a focus on continued leverage of digital sources has helped ease the pain.
On the print side, it means working closely with your publisher to examine where goals can be modified. Your publisher will know, for example, if it really matters to the advertisers whether the one-year direct requests drop from 90 percent to 85 percent. “Is your industry, in fact, contracting and does it make sense for your circulation to be the size that it is now?” asks Cavnar.
Starting with a cost-per-name analysis makes less sense to Cavnar because of the way the source mix is structured. “You can come up with an average cost per name for a magazine, but it doesn’t really mean very much because the way we all build circulation is we start with our least expensive sources and build up from there. The last five percent of one-year requests may be costing you ten times what the first 20 percent costs.”
And we all know what one of the cheapest sources is: Emedia. Like most publishers, Cavnar’s team has been using email to drive requals and new-name promotions. However, this has opened up further opportunities in aligning tactics against a total audience approach, rather than a strategy devoted to simply trying to boost print conversions. “What I see happening right now is an increased desire on the online side to know more about who the visitors are,” says Cavnar, “and there’s an increased need on the magazine side to be able to have that traffic converting into real registered database people who can become subscribers or who can be used for more effective subscription promotion.”
Hanley-Wood began integrating its magazine and newsletter registration forms to capture both simultaneously. Nevertheless, Cavnar says more people still end up signing up for a newsletter than a magazine, or both. Those names, however, get funneled into a combined database, where they can still be leveraged into potential conversions as well as a much larger total audience. “That’s been extremely helpful to us in terms of making it much easier to convert some of those people to magazine subscribers, but also then to look at how we promote to our advertisers the idea that the integrated audience, the total audience, is much bigger than the print audience,” he says.
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