The digital explosion has revolutionized dialogue between businesses and consumers yet, in contrast to all its benefits, it has led to shrinking print readership and dwindling advertiser dollars for many publications.

Media organizations need to prove value to advertisers measured by store traffic and customer acquisition. At the same time, these organizations need to deliver content-based services, relevance and timeliness to subscribers. How do media organizations satisfy both groups so they retain advertisers and subscribers? By building a marketplace and delivering services that offer measurable and differentiated value.

Deliver Value

For businesses, the role of advertising is to drive customer acquisition.  In today's marketplace, print media offers advertisers little value for their marketing investment. Publications are often saturated with ads and there is limited ability to target ads to particular reader segments and customer groups.

Additionally, there are few performance measures that translate ad dollars spent into new customers acquired in order to calculate the return on the advertiser’s investment. Even when leveraging the online channel, not all businesses find that this channel excels consistently in acquiring new customers even if it offers more measurable metrics. The lack of results could derive from poorly designed banner ad offers, an inability to target ads to specific Web customers, or an overall inability to track offers.

For subscribers, print media and associated advertising offers a rich source of information, i.e. latest sports scores, current grocery specials, classified ads and a variety of human-interest stories. In contrast, while print readers are looking for rich content, online subscribers are often looking for specific services. In a Technographics 2000 Benchmark Study, Forrester Research found that in a typical week 51 percent of users go online for “utility,” while a mere 0.3 percent go online for content only. That means media organizations need to deliver value for each channel, i.e., content in print and service on the Web. Media businesses must continue to produce content-rich print. However, because the marketplace dynamics are so different for online subscribers, businesses need to be able to deliver real-time ads and individual information based on customers’ browsing patterns. While print versions are produced on a regular schedule — daily, weekly, monthly, bi-monthly — the expectation for their online counterparts is that they are updated much more frequently, i.e. real-time.

With ad revenues down and circulation volumes at an all-time low for some media organizations and publications, how do you provide the business capabilities and processes that deliver value simultaneously to advertisers and subscribers without breaking the bank? 

Enterprise marketing management (EMM) solutions can help meet this market demand. EMM software offers analytical tools and multi-channel campaign management capability to not only build and design individual campaign strategies targeted at these revenue generators, but also to execute and fine-tune those strategies to achieve the highest response rates and profitability.

EMM applications are specifically designed to optimize marketing initiatives, making them more efficient in terms of resource utilization (staff, budget) and more effective (higher response and return on investment).

These solutions also weave in practical best practice strategies, like ensuring the presence of privacy statements and opt out options in e-mail campaigns. They also allow organizations to streamline their marketing operations by providing repeatable business processes for campaign design and implementation.

A typical EMM solution provides a breadth of capabilities, from cross-channel campaign management to resource planning and optimization across marketing initiatives. The core of EMM is based on analytics, including data mining and predictive modeling techniques that allow organizations to more effectively target customers, personalize offers and build relevancy into marketing communications.

It’s all about gaining understanding of your customers and using that to provide value, to both subscribers and advertisers, that ultimately differentiates your organization from competition in the marketplace.

Increase ROI

The rewards are great for media organizations that leverage an EMM solution, especially for local media such as independent city newspapers that compete with national players, which have significant financial resources and often more technical infrastructure.

EMM provides these publishers the competitive edge to immediately deliver higher ROI to advertisers, more relevant communications to subscribers and profitability for themselves.

Using EMM, a newspaper can use print media to drive online activity — where the publication can deliver personalized offers based on customer profiles. As customer understanding grows, the newspaper can improve its targeting and begin to identify which ads are attracting customers, which offers customers are responding to, and which local businesses are realizing a higher return on their ad dollars. Instead of building pure content-rich sites for subscribers, a newspaper can start delivering services:

·         Turn online offerings into a branded marketplace that marries what consumers are looking for with what local merchants have to offer.

·         Build consumer opinion databases to rate local businesses or offer advice on various topics.

By linking multiple channels and integrating consumer information — offline demographics and online shopping patterns — newspapers can turn customer understanding into additional value for a broader set of customers. By analyzing customer behavior history to create customer understanding and deliver individualized information and services across multiple channels, newspapers can provide superior value to subscribers and advertisers.

Local media, such as newspapers, that possess local business intelligence and consumer trust, have an especially ripe opportunity for delivering more value to their customer base. For advertisers, a publication can combine multi-channel strategies and offer them as an integrated approach that will drive higher customer acquisition rates and deliver higher ROI and measurable tracking of more targeted campaigns. Through EMM, newspapers are able to tell advertisers what consumers are shopping for by following online searches for products and services and identifying what offers are of most interest by measuring click-throughs and response. 

The cost of an EMM solution can range from $100,000 to $1.2 million or more. Some are modular in their design allowing organizations to implement the technology over time and at a price that their organization can bear.

For example, one media organization’s greatest need might be to build an analytical function to integrate subscriber information from all online and offline channels and begin building customer profiles and understanding. Another organization might require the analytical components, campaign management components, and resource management functionality immediately to manage sophisticated marketing and personalization strategies. EMM technologies deliver benefits for publishers and advertisers immediately in the form of higher ROI and, for subscribers, value-added marketing and services.

Avoid Simple Pitfalls

To ensure maximum benefit from your EMM solution, be sure to:

·         Leverage each channel effectively - To gain higher value in the offline and online channels, don’t duplicate information — ads and content — across both print and online media. Instead, use offline media to drive online traffic.

·         Have patience - Not all subscribers are currently online, but more and more are migrating to this channel. Understand this dynamic and watch customer behavior online to identify new customer segments and deliver relevant new offers.

·         Don't sell yourself short - The value that media organizations can bring to advertisers through EMM is higher customer acquisition rates that also are measurable. Since combined advertising (print and Web) can be the most effective for the advertiser, make sure you offer it and price it effectively.

Defend Your Future

In order to retain advertisers and subscribers and earn even more of their business, deliver more value to each. EMM solutions allow media companies to be better stewards of the advertiser’s dollar. They provide effective targeting, cross-channel capability and measurable results. EMM applications also allow media to deliver more value to subscribers.

Publications can offer personalized online ads, deliver individualized offers and sales incentives through e-mail and other communications channels, and provide more utility, i.e. allowing consumers to search for the best deal on a product locally, rather than merely delivering static content across channels to all subscribers.

Because EMM applications provide rapid ROI, the cost of these applications can be easily justified through top-line revenue and reduced costs. Consumer intelligence, more effective targeting, higher and more measurable ROI and a cross-channel value proposition are the rewards that media companies can offer their advertisers and subscribers.

The marketplace will continue to change as more and more consumers migrate online and as technology becomes even more sophisticated in its ability to target customers and track results. It is time for media companies to implement enterprise marketing management solutions to retain — and grow — their share of the market.

Jennifer Sullivan has over 12 years of database and customer marketing experience, and is currently the director of acquisition and continuity marketing for Unica Corporation.