Transforming Audience Development into Business Intelligence

Tricia Syed, Everything Channel’s new engagement expert, talks about how she’ll take Aud Dev to the next level.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, March 30, 2009

Publishers across the industry are jumping on the unified database bandwagon. But part of that strategy requires an emphasis on analytics and better targeted marketing tactics. Here, Tricia Syed, director of audience engagement and marketing, and a new hire for UBM’s Everything Channel, reveals her top priorities for the organization and how she’ll get them accomplished.

What are your top priorities?
Beyond extending the database of solution providers that we currently have at Everything Channel, it’s really about creating more opportunities through audience analysis, looking more closely at user profiles and activity data to enable us to be more strategic with our marketing messages and outreach, to really focus on data mining.

How can data mining benefit you?
I think data mining is a critical piece that results in a sustainable database of members. And only through that mining will I really be able to provide my marketing staff, as well as business owners and people in the sales department, with some transparency around audience trends and interests and then we can create products and topics and marketing messages that are relevant.

What’s first on your to-do list?
One of my first tasks is to restructure what audience development or audience engagement looks like so that my team consists of more than circulation folks and people with direct marketing backgrounds. I also want to bring in people who are online guerilla marketers, as well as people that will focus on marketing analysis and data analysis. Ideally, I want to have more of a business intelligence group that can absorb the user behavior data, activity data, and profile data. You can start to segment not just your marketing but how you classify your audience and that ultimately can spill over into ROI for the advertisers.

It’s a more interesting conversation with sales and product managers when they’re talking to the advertisers and the vendors about the kinds of opportunities or types of leads they can generate for them—there’s just that much more information.

My goal is to start to capture all that information and then produce it in a more seamless, transparent way that’s a real value-add. And offer new points for our business units and sales reps to talk off of. At the same time, start to really look at, along with the director of acquisition marketing, how can we further diversify our marketing efforts.

Diversify how?
How we lure people in and how we capture and collect that information about our solution providers, about our audience. Everything Channel has done a phenomenal job at building up a really large qualified audience and a lot of that has to do with the print publications. And as we know, the way in which you acquire through print is an extremely thorough process, but it’s also extremely expensive and it’s not necessarily scalable. So going forward we have Web sites that are highly trafficked and how do we take more advantage of that traffic and convert it and continue to capture more info?

In a roundabout way, one of the most critical pieces for the business, in order to reach out to advertisers and offer something new, is the more business intelligence and data we have the more we can project what level of a qualified audience are we going to deliver. And then guide advertisers based on the trends we’re seeing and how they should position their products and their messages.