Bridging Print and Online Audience Development
Time Inc.’s Kim Miller describes her online aud dev role with the People brands, and why consumer marketing is perfectly positioned for the digital side.
For the last couple years, Time Inc. has been very public about making its digital operations a core strategy. What other company holds regular industry confabs to showcase its Internet brands? Consequently, the company has gone through a large, and often painful, reorganization. In the midst of that reorg, however, the consumer marketing group, led by EVP Brian Wolfe, stepped up and took on significant responsibilities in online audience development. It’s a move that makes a lot of sense. Here, Kimberly Miller, vice president, consumer marketing for the People Group, discusses her expanded online-related roles, the strategies behind them and why consumer marketers are particularly suited for this kind of opportunity.
You have a unique role for a consumer marketer, can you talk a bit about that?
I’m the vice president of consumer marketing for People Sytlewatch. I oversee all of the circulation for subscriptions. I also oversee all of the newsstand marketing and newsstand sales—as well as the consumer research and the studies that we do on newsstand buyers, subscribers and cover testing. We pull out insights for the editors to make the magazine better from a consumer perspective. The editors are great at that, it’s just giving them some research to move the needles. I also manage the P&L and the rate base.
The flipside is what I do for online. I’m overseeing all of the audience development for all of the People Web site properties: People.com, Peoplestylewatch.com, Celebritybabies.com, PeoplePets.com and Peopleenespanol.com.
What does that entail in Time Inc.’s world?
What audience development means here is basically to understand the consumer behavior on each of the sites in terms of the analytics: What sections visitors go to, how many pages they look at, which channels are they spending their time in, how they come into the site—what are the referring domains? So looking at all of those measurements and coming up with some insights to understand the consumer behavior and then sharing that with the editors of the site so they can make improvements or develop the next tool.
It is similar to what we would do on the print side with the subscriber research—what sections do they read in the magazine, what on the cover made them buy? Was it the image or the coverlines?—and sharing that with the editors.
So it’s the same online—how do they come into the site? Where are they spending their time? On what page are they exiting the site?—so we can work harder to make that page stickier and share those insights with the editors.
Why are consumer marketers uniquely positioned for this?
I think it’s two things: One is our division, because we’re separate from the edit and business sides, we are separated as the consumer advocates. The editors respect that because their job is to have an engaged consumer who likes their content and wants to come back. And so they love that we’re this separate entity that works with them, but also advocates for the consumer experience. And so they trust us, they trust that we have the interest of the consumer at heart.
On the flip side, in our print jobs we’re marketing subscriptions or renewals or getting the bills paid, so we understand the value of collecting revenue and managing expenses and getting the consumer to pay for something. So on the business side of digital, the folks who are selling the ad units on the site value us because they know that we understand that business transaction. So we’re uniquely positioned in the middle.
The editors have access to the same data we do, but they don’t have the time to spend pouring through it. Their job is to find the next hot story and get it on the site and send someone to take the photos. That’s really the core of their job. We’re the ones that have the time and the skills on the back end to dig into the data and say, ‘Hey, when you put up that story about whoever, this is what happened, this is where everyone came from, this is how many pages they looked at, and this is where they went next to a related story.’
That’s our function—the editors put up all the content and we look at the backend data and tell them what worked.
Is this really as simple as saying you’re overlaying your print skillset to the online platform?
Is it that simple? No. Of course there’s a learning curve.
The first thing you have to learn when you’re moving from the print to the online side is the language. What does someone mean by a pageview or a unique visitor, or even a visit versus a visitor? Why is time spent so important? You have to understand all the main metrics.
On top of that, there are so many different ways for you to run the numbers. And you could look at page views in your own internal reporting system, or in comScore or Nielsen. It’s about picking the right number, understanding what it means, how it came to be and which ones make the most sense.
It’s similar when you look at print subscriptions: Here’s our growth in subscriptions, well that’s a great number, but which sources did that come from? Was it agent? Was it direct to publisher? This is the same thing.
So it’s not only important to understand the language, but to understand how the numbers look different in different systems and different reporting tools. Then making sure you’re picking a number that makes sense and is legitimate.
You’re natural number crunchers, but the world of online analytics is a different animal, correct?
We are number crunchers by nature, but you have to make sure you understand what you’re looking at. You don’t want to misinterpret the data and make business decisions based on faulty data because you don’t understand how to run it. Every system has its own way of capturing the numbers.
The other thing is—just like circulation—learning the value of where the traffic is coming from. I can get traffic from our newsletters, I can get traffic from natural search, I can get traffic from a partnership swap of a story. How much of each one is the most valuable? You want to look at, for example, which one is driving repeat visitors or which one is driving the deepest engagement.
People.com, being a celebrity news site, needs news. Even if that isn’t the most engaging, we need to have that present. Understanding what the drivers are and where you want to invest your time and marketing efforts also has a learning curve. It’s figuring out the lifetime value of each source of traffic.
Are sites of your scale attracting traffic for traffic’s sake, or are you also attempting to pull the visitors deeper in the brand—preferably through a payment conversion?
Traffic for traffic’s sake doesn’t make sense. You have to be monetizing it. One of the reasons any of the sites would drive traffic is because there is a way to make money on the advertising side. That’s basically the model for most of the Time Inc. sites. We have traffic, advertisers want to serve their ads to our visitors, and when certain sections are sold out or when an advertiser is running across the site, we want to make sure we have good levels of visitors.
What about launching a new product?
Then it’s a branding campaign. PeoplePets.com is a good example of that. Right now, we have a few advertisers on Pets, the site is not sold out, but it’s brand new. So our job is to help consumers discover that the site exists. So we’re driving traffic even though we’re not monetizing all that traffic because it’s in a discovery launch phase. And so we will spend money in SEM or on StumbleUpon, which is a viral discovery site. We’ll spend money to market email announcements about the launch to the other Time Inc. email lists.
And even if it’s not a new site launch, but a launch of a tool—People Games, for example—we’ll send out a bunch of announcement emails and run remnant online banners so we are directing visitors to try out the new games. That is driving for more discovery and consumer awareness.
Otherwise, you want to make sure that you’re driving engaged traffic to areas where you have ads running and looking for visitors to see those messages running.
You have all these print consumers who clearly love your brand. They either buy the magazine on the newsstand or subscribe. They’re familiar with what you cover and maybe it’s a weekly or a monthly but then you have this daily updated Web site. So there’s extra value for the consumer to come to your Web site and for you to promote for them to come to your Web site just on an experience level.
But how are you making sure you’re leveraging online opportunities to market related products? Print, for example.
What you find in the industry is many consumers have a misperception that the Web site is exactly what’s in your magazine. And so there’s actually a very small overlap of consumers that read the magazine and also visit the Web site. It’s very few. Most of the Web site traffic for any of the sites in the building is a whole new consumer base.
So yes, there’s huge opportunity for all of that Web site traffic to convert to either a newsstand buyer or a subscriber. You don’t want to let that pass you by, but you also have to understand the mindset of the consumer when they’re coming to your Web site. It certainly isn’t the same as a person who is already reading your magazine who comes to your Web site. The strictly online visitor probably has a handful of other Web sites that they go to for similar information. They’re not as loyal to you as the folks in the print world. They’re coming for their hit of information, whether it’s news or photos or whatever it is. They’re coming to get that and then they go and do something else.
You want to market to these people to buy your other products, absolutely. And we do that every opportunity we have. But you have to understand that isn’t their mindset. A lot of things on the Internet are free and they’re coming for free information. So to get them to convert to paid, you have to be very careful how you do that.
We have different consumer marketing creative units or text links on different places on each of the sites—on the home page, within each channel on the site, for example. When they sign up for a sweepstakes or when they register or set up a profile, we give them the opportunity to get a free trial subscription. We use all of that, but you need a little bit more of a relationship than just, ‘Hey, they’re looking at a page, let’s have a creative unit on that page.’
And so what we like to do is when folks are signing up for a newsletter is market to those people, because they’ve already given you an email address. They’re personally invested. Getting them to the next step of subscribing is not as far of a stretch as it would be for someone who’s just cruising your pages.
On the print side, [People StyleWatch] has expanded an editorial feature that allows readers to send text messages to get more information on and buy products displayed in the magazine’s editorial pages. Next to each featured item will be a code that readers can text to get links to a retailer’s or manufacturer’s site. In only four months of testing, consumers have “snipped” more than 5,000 times.
You’ve described SEO as a marriage between audience development and editorial. Can you elaborate?
In our company, the way that digital has shaken out is that SEO lives with the audience development folks in terms of ownership. That doesn’t mean that I execute everything I think needs to be done, because I’m not editing the Web site. Nor am I a programmer. But that is one of my responsibilities.
We talk to consulting firms that specialize in SEO and get recommendations from them on what to do to increase traffic. We work out the contracts with them and then prioritize the list of biggest-bang-for-your-buck initiatives and take those to the editors and the technical teams. They pick the recommendations and divide them up.
My job, though, is to make sure that list will first help us move up in rank. That is important no matter what your goal is for your site because you always want to be showing up on the first page of results in natural search—not for just your brand keywords, but other keywords in content that you specialize in.
So one is getting tasks parsed out to the right teams, and two, checking in to make sure there’s deadlines for delivery and they’re being hit. That’s the role audience development plays at Time Inc. for SEO.
Time Inc. has made a huge shift by merging its consumer marketing and audience development groups. Can you describe the philosophy behind that?
Back in 2006 and 2007, Time Inc. made it a priority to accelerate the growth of its digital businesses. With a focus on a multimedia workforce, previously print-only consumer marketers, like me, were able to step into a digital role. Analyzing site statistics and examining the competitive sets was our first task. Culling out insights from these exercises and sharing them with our edit teams was where we were really able to make a difference. In today’s climate, even though we are centralized within consumer marketing, we are dedicated to certain digital brands and are involved in those brands’ initiatives from the very beginning.
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