Audience Development Trends for 2009

Five executives reveal what they’re watching for and how they’re preparing.

By AD Staff
Wednesday, December 3, 2008

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Setting aside the current economic conditions for a minute, AD asked five audience development executives to share what trends they’re looking out for in 2009 and how they’re expecting to react strategically and tactically. Online community, database integration and performance marketing figure heavily in next year’s plans.

Gordon McLeod
President
The Wall Street Journal Digital Network

The high-quality audience of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network—WSJ.com, MarketWatch.com, Barrons.com and AllThingsDigital. com—has doubled in the past year with more than 40 million visitors, and we expect more growth in 2009. Key drivers have been the addition of new content, stronger design and navigation, advanced SEO efforts, and an aggressive marketing and content sharing strategy across the network.

WSJ.com has generated a significant increase in subscribers—with more than 1 million—as well as non-subscribers, for a total audience of more than 24 million per month. We will continue to add content and interactive features to enhance the user experience even more. The new Journal Community section for subscribers is something we will focus on next year to increase its member base and increasing discussion and engagement among our loyal users. We recently introduced a free registration tier, which allows non-subscribers to interact more deeply and customize their experience, but also increases their engagement and allows us to more fully explain the benefits of being a subscriber.

In addition, MarketWatch will undergo a redesign next year and has also seen a tremendous boost in traffic that we expect to continue. The Community section for MarketWatch is tremendously important to the next phase.

Heidi Spangler
Director of circulation and audience development
Questex Media

We’re going to be focusing on identifying our digital audience better—people who subscribe to our newsletters and use our Web sites. We need to look at our audience beyond the print subscriber and identifying them and selling them as a full audience.

We’re moving our newsletter subscriber databases into the fulfillment bureau to be tied together with our magazine subscriber databases. We’re also creating preference pages where they can subscribe to all of them in one place—magazines and newsletters—and set preferences so it’s all managed in the same database. And we’ll be sending them out through our fulfillment provider too, so we can track the activity, instead of the demographics. We’re really trying to measure engagement, so we can have an idea of who opens the newsletter, reads it and responds to it.

From there we can define a bigger audience. What I’m finding is the newsletters have become so specific and strong, and I don’t want to say they’re replacing the magazines, but some members of our audience do see them as a substitute. So, we’re finding a way of identifying and retaining those people and still make them a target for our advertisers by defining them better. Rather than having an audience for a magazine that’s, say, 50,000 print and digital edition subscribers, we may now have an audience of 80,000 people when we look at who gets our newsletters that don’t get the magazine, but still fits that target. We don’t want to lose people just because they don’t want the print magazine.

Dan Smith
SVP Digital Marketing
Playboy Enterprises, Inc.

Traditional print publishers have experienced difficulty executing a sound online audience-development strategy. Although many have leveraged their existing print audience to build online traffic, few successfully have gone beyond that tactic.

At Playboy, we develop our online audience, utilizing many tools in our Web-traffic engineering toolbox. Of course, we leverage our print publication’s reach to help drive online traffic, but we also have developed expertise in several areas that are unique to the online space.

For starters, we engage fully in search-engine optimization, paid search and affiliate networking. SEO is handled in-house by our marketing department’s traffic group, focusing on maximizing traffic to our editorial content online. SEM and affiliate programs are also marketing functions, but their main objective is driving traffic to our premium content.

Also, we have developed the Playboy Audience Network (PAN), an amalgamation of third-party video and social-networking sites that carry our content, as well as links to Playboy.com. We are creating more viral content for distribution through this network, as well as widgets to carry our online content beyond our site. Finally, we are using the mobile channel to engage users with our brand.

Measuring our results is important, as is creating excitement internally for these programs. Therefore, it is imperative that audience dashboards be created, maintained and distributed such that organizations can both seize new opportunities and optimize existing ones.

Maurice Bakley
COO, FierceMarkets, Inc.

No doubt the big question for publishers moving into next year will be what impact the economy will have on our business. At Fierce, we’ve seen strong demand in 2008 and are confident that opportunities will emerge in 2009 despite this context.

Whatever the outcome, however, one thing is sure—the trend toward performance marketing will continue, and publishers need to evolve to meet this need. Throughout this year, we have seen marketers shift the risk of their media spend onto the media company through cost-per-action, cost-per-lead and lead guarantee programs. So, in addition to serving our traditional role as market makers, meeting places or facilitators, in 2009 publishers will need to be skilled marketing managers who offer certainty in uncertain times.

At Fierce, we look at skills in audience development as the key to surviving the shift towards fulfilling the publisher’s “marketing manager” role. All of the core activities of the audience developer—understanding the target demographic, analyzing sources of new subscribers, designing and monitoring campaigns, and promoting content in a way that attracts readers and search engines—can be applied to executing successful performance-based marketing campaigns.

We are also changing the way we look at audience development by treating each piece of the process—partnerships, registration pages, welcome emails, event attendance—as a potential source of leads for our clients’ campaigns, and by extension, a source of direct revenue. To meet the increased demand for performance that publishers will see in 2009, we will need to look at audience development as the untapped resource and maximize the relationship with our audiences.

Alison Johns
VP Emedia, Business Information Group and Co-chair Emedia Core Team
Access Intelligence, LLC

At AI, we tend to talk more about “community” development, focusing on how we can identify new members and strengthen our relationships with existing members. While data normalization and targeting of messaging to carefully defined segments of our community will continue to be very important in 2009, the innovations in strategies for developing community will increasingly be collaborations with our programming department or technical partners to optimize our digital titles and/or deliver applications that our members can use. At its most basic, this might be smarter automated SEO through our house-built content management system, and at its most complex, a media sharing environment to promote user-generated content.

On the entertainment side, at Studiodaily.com we’ve partnered with a Web technology company to build a site for sharing high-quality professionally-produced short films. In this environment, visitors will be able to comment and rate the films as well as communicate via a dedicated email system that maintains anonymity. The model is to produce frequent online film festivals that our community members pay to enter, which underwrites a year-round resource for filmmakers. For our conference sites, we’ve focused on helping attendees organize their time more effectively with appointment-making functionality that allows registrants to set up and manage meetings with exhibitors and sponsors. To deliver up-to-date information that our community can use, many of our Web sites feature widgets that feature the latest job postings on our job boards. Bottom line, we want our brands to be front-of-mind and ingrained in our community’s work days and on their desktops.