FOLIO: Section Blogs by Sales and Marketing

Content Marketing Has Arrived. Should Publishers Be Worried?

sbotelho — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:55:08 -0400

September 6th was a coming out party for content marketing. Over 600 marketing professionals came together in Cleveland from 18 different countries for Content Marketing World (the largest content marketing event) to learn how to create and grow their own publishing and storytelling platforms.

Yes, you heard that right. Marketers are actively trying to figure out how to do your job…publish valuable, relevant and compelling content to build subscriber bases and ultimately sell more products and services.

Content marketing is not new. You used to (or still do) call it custom media or custom content or custom publishing. Your advertisers now call it content marketing.

Your customers have been publishing content for years. Just look at John Deere. Their magazine The Furrow has been published since 1895 and is now distributed to more than 40 countries to 1.5 million subscribers. But now that the barriers to enter the publishing industry are all but gone, marketers are swiftly moving to allocate more resources to communicating directly with their customers and taking out the middleman (uh, you).

Just look at American Express and their wildly successful small business publishing effort, Open Forum. How about P&G, which has multiple publishing platforms including HomeMadeSimple.com for “moms on the go”, BeingGirl.com for adolescent teen girls, or ManOfTheHouse.com for guys.

According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, nine out of 10 organizations are actively using some form of content marketing, with approximately 25% of marketing budget and resources dedicated to these efforts.

The Content Marketing World event shed some light on where the industry is going and ultimately what it means for publishers and media companies.

• Brands of all Sizes Are Operationalizing around Content. Marketing executives like Pam Didner from Intel and Todd Wheatland from Kelly Services shared in-depth details about how content creation and distribution is becoming the center of their marketing efforts. For Intel, they develop “Topic Marketing Kits” that include content missions for each of their customers, then they distribute those to individual editorial boards all over the world for localization. This effort is helping to drive attention and engagement for Intel through search engine optimization, social media, public relations and co-marketing activities. This is no small endeavor and is taking massive organization and resources, much of which are coming out of traditional programs.

• The Chief Content Officer has arrived. More than 20% of the marketing titles attending the event are new “content-oriented” titles, including: VP of Content Marketing, Chief Content Officer, Content Strategist, Content Marketing Coordinator, Brand Journalist and more. These people are responsible for the brand story, and how to integrate that story within the entire organization. Who are these people? Many of them are your former chief editors or writers.

• Real-Time Content Marketing is Now. In multiple sessions from the likes of David Meerman Scott and organizations like Eloqua and Dell, content strategies are being setup to manage real-time content creation. This means that brands are starting to act like news organizations, taking advantage of current industry events with immediate commentary and thought leadership. Who are they hiring to do this? You guessed it…journalists.

• Content Marketing Technologies are Exploding. The majority of attendees at Content Marketing World never heard of 90% of the technology vendors at the show. Most of these technologies are less than two years old and moving to take advantage of the money flow into content marketing. Almost across the board, these technologies are helping marketers to manage the editorial process within the organization. Think of it…how do you organize an employee blog with over 1,000 contributors? No easy task.

• Not Just Outsourcing, but Content Strategy. There continues to be strong opportunity for publishers to work with brands on helping them execute content strategies. That said, the biggest pain for marketers is not execution, it’s strategy. Publishers that are setting up marketing services arms that understand how to develop a content strategy, including content audits, gap analyses, and total integration of the story within the entire marketing programs are going to win out. While custom publishing used to be a separate, often siloed effort like a custom magazine or webinar, tomorrow’s content strategies wrap into social media, search, PR and run across marketing, corporate communication, PR, social media and even IT departments. To prove the point, on three separate occasions recently, agency of record (AOR) with some large international brands recently went to content agencies.

Traditional marketing is not going away. It never will. Marketers will continue to spend money using a megaphone or shotgun advertising when needed, especially in newer industries. But now, since consumers are completely in control of the informational gathering process (the sales role is changing dramatically), brands need content consistently, matched to their buyer personas, and they need it at multiple points in the buying process. They need it for social, for PR, for enewsletters, for print, for in-person events, for SEO, for mobile and for their internal stakeholders. To do this effectively, they need to develop subscribers, just like you do, to position themselves as the industry leaders and be there for customers when they are ready to buy.

For publishers, the opportunity to partner with brands on these initiatives is clear. What will you do?

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Content Strategy and the Dying Art of Execution

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 09:46:53 -0500

Don't get me wrong, content marketing strategy is critical to the success of a content marketing project. Not having a content strategy is like playing baseball without the bases (envision people running everywhere...not a pretty sight).

That said, I've seen a multitude of content strategies die for the following reasons:
■ Lack of support from the executive team. They fail to understand why they can't talk about themselves all the time. They don't "get" the idea of content marketing. The brand ends up producing mediocre content without real organization and continues to think that content marketing doesn't work.
■ Lack of setting success criteria. This happens more often that you think. Ever hear the "we want to do a blog" request? The response to that request is "Why?" Understanding why you are creating and curating content seems like a "yeah, duh," but you'd be surprised how many times corporate content creators have no idea of the strategy behind their content execution. Result: the execution fails.
■ Lack of talent. Content marketing takes new skills. Combine a content strategist, a journalist and a marketer, a salesperson, a touch of Walt Whitman and you're halfway there. Just because we can doesn't mean we should with the talent we have. Hire more journalists.
■ Lack of consistency. Creating a content marketing plan is a promise to your customers that you are going to deliver information that helps them solve their pain points. Starting the plan, and then stopping it is like sewing up a wound halfway. Painful. Marketing agencies around the world have blogs where the most recent posts are from March. Ouch!
■ Lack of integration. There is no such thing as just a blog, just a custom magazine or just a webinar. These things work as part of a content marketing system, which works inside of your entire marketing program. Do me a favor...take the content creators out of the basement and get them talking with your marketing team. If content indeed is the center of your marketing strategy, you need to act like it and show your employees (and C-level) that it matters.
■ Lack of promotion. No, if you create information on your Web site in the form of a blog, article or e-book, people won't just come naturally and neither with Kevin Costner (Field of Dreams reference). You have to work it.
■ Lack of effective outsourcing. Outsource effectively or be effectively outsource. The majority of brands outsource portions of their content marketing. Outside expertise is mandatory for truly great content. We need people on the outside that don't have OUR brand or sales hats on. Find them, use them, make them part of your team.
■ Lack of a call to action. What do you want people to do when they engage with your content? If you don't know, how do you know what success looks like?
Yes, content strategy is critical, but execution is king for content marketing. Frankly, you need both.
Where is your "lack of"?

[EDITOR'S NOTE: You can read more of Joe at his blog.]
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A Positive Look at Negative Ads

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:02:03 -0500

Negative advertising in politics has become an expected, albeit contemptible, practice of the campaign season. The only thing that seems to change from year to year is the amount and intensity of the attacks.

But politics isn’t the only sector that embraces it. Consumer and b-to-b marketers have employed negative tactics, headlines and copy to persuade and sell, too, including magazines and publications.

Like the sly serpent, negative advertising needs to be handled deftly. Using a broad definition of the term, here are some perspectives and applications.

In his seminal textbook on direct marketing, Bob Stone observed that yes/no offers generated a higher positive response than those without a negative option. The reason? Choosing one option over another was an involvement device.

Book and music clubs and continuity programs have used negative options for over half a century. They work precisely because the buyer can’t stop the shipments unless they expressly opt out.

When a Loss Is Better Than a Gain

The pain associated with a loss is often more of an incentive to act than the pleasure of a gain. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s usually true. For example, if you tell a prospect for a healthy living magazine that they’ll find ways to improve their vigor in each issue, you’ll produce a modest level of interest. But if your promotion emphasizes what the prospect will lose or miss by not taking action, they’ll respond with greater alacrity.

Negative ads that reinforce a prospect’s deeply held beliefs can provoke a powerful emotional response and establish rapport. A promotion for The Nation built around the perils of right wing/big business control and one for The Weekly Standard trumpeting the excesses of a left wing/big government agenda both work for the same reason: They validate the worst fears and prejudices of their target audience.

Content must be considered, too. It’s not enough to rely only on the emotional impact of negative ads or to create a promotion that’s 100 percent negative. For a negative piece to be effective, you should tie it to some kind of positive solution or salvation.

In Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, the authors warn that fear alone will not win over potential customers unless you also “provide specific, achievable steps that they can take to avoid” or minimize the risk.

Dr. Frank Luntz, author of Words That Work, agrees that pure scare tactics can backfire, especially when addressed to women. “It is not the fear of something bad that motivates them; it’s the hope for something better.”

Interestingly, negative ads come across as more believable than wholly positive ones. An ad that cites a drawback about the product or service being sold contains more credibility because it’s not trying to “put one over” on the prospect. Admitting a modest flaw breeds trust.

As Victor Schwab wrote in his How To Write A Good Advertisement: “One of the principal objectives of a headline is to strike as directly as possible right at a situation confronting the reader. Sometimes you can do this with greater accuracy if you use a negative headline which pinpoints his ailment rather than the alleviation of it.”

Humor can also be a potent way to make the negativity go down smoother without diluting the impact.

Master copywriter Gary Bencivenga wrote a magalog for an investment publication with this headline: “LIES, LIES, LIES! Why we investors are fed up with everyone lying to us!” The cover contained caricatures of the scoundrels deceiving us: Slick politicians, fast-talking brokers, rapacious lawyers, and monstrous IRS agents.

By using exaggerated but recognizable portraits of our worst nightmares, the copy resonated more closely with the prospect and actually intensified the connection. As final proof of the effect of combining the comical with the cynical, this became one of the most successful promotions ever.
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Battle of Editorial Credibility vs. Sponsored Content Continues

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 12:39:04 -0400

Over the last couple days, I’ve heard a lot of talk about crossing the editorial line as it relates to publishers accepting sponsored content.
At day one of AdweekMedia’s Social Media Strategies conference, which I attended, Huffington Post chief revenue officer Greg Coleman said the site sees itself as a “social media ad agency.” He said sponsor-generated content appears on the site (I take his word on that, although I haven’t seen any) and that it’s marked as such. He was asked to talk about how much these sponsored posts are generating for the Huffington Post, but he declined to comment.
Then last night, I read the PBS/MediaShift piece about Forbes pushing advertorials as part of its major renovation and design online. Forbes’ soon-to-launch Advoice is expected to allow advertisers to post blogs to Forbes.com—for a price. According to chief product officer Lewis DVorkin, Forbes editors will in no way be associated with the paid blogs, and Advoice is just another piece in the site’s social-focused structure. “In this case the marketer or advertiser is part of the Forbes environment, the news environment," he told Ad Age recently. "Marketers need to reach the audience. This is where publishing is headed."
The MediaShift story goes on to reference a GigaOM report that suggests that Forbes could risk losing reader trust by posting sponsored blogs, especially near the site’s original editorial content, and trigger a “giant ethical morass.” “Ironically, blurring the line between advertising and editorial content can actually damage the brand that those advertisers are so eager to rub up against, defeating the whole purpose of the exercise,” GigaOM’s Matthew Ingram writes. “It’s not surprising that Forbes is looking for alternative ways of raising revenue, but it should be careful not to sell its soul at the same time.”
He’s right—it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Forbes is trying to squeeze more money from its advertisers, especially since the print magazine is reporting a 9.6 percent decline in ad pages through the third quarter (last year, pages fell more than 30 percent). And, besides, publishers have been running advertorial sections in print forever. They’re also continuing to expand into marketing services.
As it hasn’t launched yet, I haven’t seen Forbes’ Advoice, but let’s put down the picket signs for a minute. While I’m not a proponent of ceding edit space to advertisers (I’m an editor—why would I be?), I am a fan of publishing companies making more money if the execution is right. (In fact, FOLIOmag.com’s blog page features “NXTBLOG,” which links back to posts written by Nxtbook, one of our advertisers.) What’s the problem, from a consumer perspective, as long the sponsored content is clearly labeled and doesn’t eat up space that should dedicated to hard news?
Beyond the careful edit execution, the real trick will be to successfully monetize it. I asked Forbes what the cost structure is for advertisers who want to post to Advoice. Is it a per-post fee or do they pay a one-time fee and get to post as often as they want? How many advertisers has Forbes signed on so far, and how many does it aim to have over the next six months or so?
A Forbes spokesperson said the company isn’t doing any more interviews about Advoice until its launch date gets closer (about mid-November). We’ll keep you posted.
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Marketing: Time to Play the Long Game

Matt Kinsman — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 10:50:22 -0400

As the world begins its long slow spin from one decade to the next, the spin (or marketing) industry also is undergoing a marked transformation-from "impact" to "information." In the 20th century the focus of marketing was on advertising-specifically on making a short, sharp impression. Advertisers' print creative had to pass the three second test-imparting as much positive information as possible before a potential customer quite literally turned the page.
The Internet, of course, is different. And when the World Wide Web happened, everything in marketing *should* have changed. But it didn't, and I blame the advertising agencies. As anyone who works at an agency will tell you, agency people know "everything."
But when confronted by a new medium, the Internet, about which they knew zilch, those agency types were uncomfortable giving up everything they knew about creating print ads, not to mention the fat fees associated with them, and instead opted to take the print model of advertising, with all it's flaws, and force fit it onto the Web.
Take banner ads, for example, which run in rotations with multiple other advertisers on a Web site, effectively emulating the experience of a reader flipping through a magazine. Brilliant! (Stupid!)
Convincing to Buy Takes Time, Not Banners
Finally, though, CMOs and other marketing execs are cottoning onto the notion that using advertising to grab someone's attention for a few seconds is probably going to be incompatible to selling products to people whose decision cycles may be measured over a somewhat longer period of time.
This is especially true of b-to-b marketing, where customer-buying cycles are often measured in years. So while it may be relatively effective to use a short, punchy message for peddling dishwasher detergent to consumers, trying to do the same with the CTO of a broadcast network who is evaluating which million dollar MPEG-4 Part 2 video codec to purchase is going to be a waste of time and money.
What customers like this want from their vendors is not an advertising message, but "information" And as a rule of thumb the amount of information they want increases in proportion to the amount of money they have to spend. And of course, this places the marketer in an entirely new role: that of "educator."
You can see evidence of this trend in the huge upswing in the number of white papers posted by marketers on trade sites, allowing companies to place in-depth educational materials right next to the articles that their customers are reading.
And the trend reaches its apex with single-sponsor editorial sites, where the advertiser launches and runs its own Web publication, underwriting the edit content, surrounding it with its white papers and case studies, and positioning itself as the ultimate educator or authority.
I'm currently running two such sites for billion dollar companies, and I see such a huge demand for single sponsor edit sites that this month I launched a company that does nothing but build these sites for advertisers. (In a sign of demand we pre-sold six more before we even launched.)
Who wins in this new marketing market? Primarily, publishers of original content, who have the content know-how and user databases to quickly roll out edit sites for advertisers.
Who loses? That's easy. In the switch from advertising style to educational substance there won't be much call for help from the advertising agencies.

Stephen Saunders is the Managing Director of DEX (www.dexnation.com), a marketing services company specializing in the creation of online communities targeting any combination of industry, geography, or profession.

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Seven Reasons Print Will Make a Comeback in 2011

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:13:06 -0400

Okay...there, I said it.

You'll find no greater supporter of online content marketing than me, but marketers and agencies are talking up print for 2011. Yes, in the era of iPads and Apps, there is still a role for print.

Jeff Jarvis recently wrote about how media companies need to ignore print.
"The physical costs of production and distribution are killing. The marketing cost of subscriber acquisition and churn are hellish."
He's right. And if you are a media company that relies on most of your revenue for print, you need to post Jeff's article on your forehead.

But if you are a corporate marketer, there is an opportunity here. Here's why:

1. Getting Attention: Have you noticed how many fewer magazines and print newsletters you are getting in the mail these days? I don't know about you, but I definitely pay more attention to my print mail. There's just less mail, so more attention is paid to each piece. Opportunity? Less traditional publishers are printing magazines today, which leaves opportunities for content marketers.

2. The Focus on Customer Retention: In a soon-to-be-released research study conducted by Junta42 and MarketingProfs, customer retention was the most important goal for marketers when it came to content marketing outside of basic brand awareness. Historically, the reason why custom print magazines and newsletters were developed by brands was for customer retention purposes. We have a winner!

3. No Audience Development Costs: Publishers expend huge amounts of time and money qualifying subscribers to send out their magazines. Many times, publishers need to invest multiple dollars per subscriber per year for auditing purposes (They send direct mail, they call, they call again so that the magazine can say they that their subscribers have requested the magazine. This is true for controlled (free) trade magazines).

So, let's say, a publisher's cost per subscriber per year is $2 and their distribution is one hundred thousand. That's $200,000 per year for audience development.

That's a cost that marketers don't have to worry about. If marketers want to distribute a magazine to their customers, they just use their customer mailing list. That's a big advantage.

4. What's Old Is New Again: Social media, online content and iPad applications are all part of the marketing mix today. Still, what excites marketers and media buyers is what IS NOT being done. They want to do something different...something new. It's hard to believe, but I've heard many marketers talk about leveraging print as something new in their marketing mix. Unbelievable.

5. Customers Still Need to Ask Questions: We love the Internet because buyers can find answers to almost anything. But where do we go to think about what questions we should be asking? I talked to a publisher last week who said this:
"The web is where we go to get answers but print is where we go to ask questions."
The print vehicle is still the best medium on the planet for thinking outside the box and asking yourself tough questions based on what you read. It's lean back versus lean forward. If you want to challenge your customers (like Harvard Business Review does), print is a viable option.

6. Print Still Excites People: I talked to a journalist recently who said it's harder and harder to get people to agree to an interview for an online story. But mention that it will be a printed feature and executives rearrange their schedule. The printed word is still perceived as more credible to many people than anything on the web. It goes to the old adage, "If someone invested enough to print and mail it, it must be important."

Whether that's true or not, that is still a widely-held perception.

7. Unplug: More and more people are actively choosing the unplug, or disconnect themselves from digital media. I'm doing this more myself. I'm finding myself turning off my phone and email more to engage with printed material. A year ago I didn't see this coming. Today, I relish the opportunities when I can't be reached for comment.

If I'm right, many of your customers (especially busy executives) are feeling the same. Your print communication may be just what they need.

Online content marketing is definitely here to stay. Yes to social media, apps and the rest of it. But don't forget that print can still play an important role in your overall content marketing mix.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: You can read more of Joe at his blog.]
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Consumer Marketing Back in the Limelight

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:12:38 -0400

Publishers have been angling in this direction for some time now, but Condé Nast's elevation of Bob Sauerberg [pictured] to president is a very public acknowledgement of audience development's role in the corporate structure.

What nails the concept is CEO Charles Townsend's explicit recognition that advertising isn't the only game in town—and neither is print. Publishers have all known this for years, but what's finally emerging here is a greater understanding of the role customer insights can play—and not just for magazines, but all sorts of cross-platform products and services.

“The historical priorities that have served our company so well—great content, best-in-class magazines, key client relationships—remain the cornerstone of what we do, but we need to move beyond the magazine,” said Townsend in a statement announcing the management changes. “The set of strategic course changes being put in motion today will reorient our organization to thrive in this new world of opportunity, assuring the brightest future for Condé Nast.”

Condé Nast's new model will be aligned with "digital connectivity, technology development and consumer insight." You can look at this as a sort of re-establishment of circulation marketing or subscription-based practices—the corporate gaze finally settling on this as a vibrant profit center—but it's much bigger than that. Paid content, digital products, and, yes, print subs are all optimized from unified insights into customer behavior and purchase patterns.

In the not-too-distant past, publishers diversified into all sorts of new product platforms to dilute their dependence on the advertising model: Events, custom publishing, data, new digital offerings, etc. But these were simply piling on more products. What was absent, and is now coalescing, was a strategic approach to leveraging customer insights according to which of those products they're buying, how often, whether they move in between them and what their preferences are. The implications of this new knowledge of course extends into advertising, too.

Chief among Sauerberg's new responsibilities will be getting the various groups, and not just people, but databases, within Condé to talk to each other—"integrating corporate resources," as the statement says. Without that integration, the "new world of opportunity" will be much harder to discover.
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Print Magazines Have Never Stopped Selling

Matt Kinsman — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:17:47 -0400

At the just concluded FOLIO: Show, Kerry Smith, Red 7 Media CEO, offered a surprising view of what the future of print publishing might be. Challenged, like all publishing companies, with the decline of print ad revenue, Smith has diversified his organization's offerings to include marketing services such as research, and consulting. But even as less of his company's revenue is tied to print he is more committed to it. Why? Because he has found that his magazines are most often the first point of contact leading to the sale of all the other services he is now selling.
Today, publishers of all kinds are using the presence they have in their markets to start related businesses. For example:
• Premier Guitar, sells sheet music to subscribers
• Oil and Gas Journal sells industry data and research
• Dwell, a shelter book for the modern home, sells modern prefabricated homes
But this "new" trend where publishers use a magazine presence to sell products and services to readers is not so new. Marketers have used sponsored or branded magazines to do this for years. Despite the migration of ad dollars away from print magazines, the dollars flowing into sponsored magazines are going strong as documented early this year by The Financial Times:
According to the UK research body Mintel, this type of "customer publishing" is booming. It estimates that the industry in the UK alone is likely to be worth £1bn by 2013. Between 2008 and 2009 it grew 16 per cent, and by 2013 it is projected to increase by a further 22 per cent - no mean feat when the rest of the glossy magazine world is in the doldrums.
What attracts companies is the direct impact on consumers. "Our research has shown that these magazines create an eight per cent uptick in sales," says Julia Hutchison, chief operating officer of the Association of Publishing Agencies, the representative for the customer publishing industry in the UK. "On average, every customer spends 25 minutes reading these titles. That's 25 minutes spent with the brand. Lots of companies are redirecting their ad and marketing spends to this avenue."
In the past, some sponsored publications were little more than product promos. But now, savvy marketers are investing in quality writers, photographers, and more objective journalism to attract larger audiences. The FT article continues:
"Whereas in-house magazines used to be glorified advertorials, today the branding is much more subtle and there's a genuine effort to tap top editorial talents and introduce original material; Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, photographic stalwarts of the fashion publications Vogue and Visionaire, shot the latest YSL manifesto.
The investment makes sense: it gives depth to a brand in an environment they can control. It pushes product without the obvious "sell", and in many instances may be cheaper than advertising. Asos' title, for instance, which is known for its mix of celebrity, shopping and entertainment, is now the second largest women's fashion title in the UK with an annual circulation of 471,522. Terri Westlake, head of media at Asos.com, says, "Customers are savvy; they understand that it's a brand title (and not independent), but they still appreciate a very good free magazine."
Print magazines can provide marketers with a "media marquee" that gives them consistent visibility hard to duplicate in the crowed online world. What Kerry Smith, and a growing number of publishers are taking advantage of is the same benefit marketers using sponsored publications have used for years...print magazines sell!
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Not ‘Giving an Inch’: Some Initial Results

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:13:46 -0500

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about “not giving an inch,” in terms of selling print to my customers. My friend Tony Silber, among others privately, took issue with this [“The Last Samurai”] and questioned whether I was losing my mind or was becoming some sort of anachronism.

The jury may still be out on that, but I am going to expand on my reasoning and share the results of our efforts to “not give an inch,” this Fall at my company.

My proposition was that, as an industry, we have a responsibility to sell the benefits of print as a medium as opposed to the old days of just selling against competitive titles. As much of the industry seems to be afraid of this, I think there is also an opportunity here to take significant market share.
Awareness, interest, engagement—none of this has gone away. I don’t hear arguments that awareness building is better done on the Internet than in print in trade markets. The unique benefits of print have not changed—but they are not trumpeted.

Trade magazine readership is shrinking. Fewer people read magazines, and the time spent with them is less. Many people do not read any magazines or newspapers at all. But trade magazines never reached the entire market—in fact, rarely have they ever reached more than 10 percent. So that hasn’t changed. The remaining publications need to be more relevant, more engaging, more targeted at a reading audience like middle managers who don’t necessarily know what solutions they are looking for.

There will still be print advertisers. There will be surviving trade magazines. By not giving an inch, you may become one of those survivors, and there are benefits to this:
1. By being the only game in town you can reduce your costs appropriately to be in line with what is now expected for print advertising

2. By being the print survivor you probably have a stronger, more active and committed database to promote webinars and lead generation programs to.

3. As readers and advertisers scan the field, they see only us. We become a must-buy element simply by having survived.

4. Know that competitors will continue to shut down, leaving more opportunity—IF you sell print aggressively (“yes, Mr. Advertiser, they went out of business, but here’s why they did and why we are still relevant—in fact MORE relevant than before…”)
So these were the benefits we had in mind at our company, as we continued to sell print aggressively during the Fall, when we are selling the print contracts for the next year. The results are in and our print contract sales are up 32.6 percent over last year. Not bad for a recession. Some titles went out of business and we took market share from our remaining competitors (their January issues are down from last year). We convinced the remaining print advertisers that we were going to be the survivor and that there were still unique benefits from print advertising.

It’s not easy to zig while others zag. And to be sure, we’re zagging and selling our online offerings hard, too. But by not giving an inch on print, I think we made out pretty well.
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Advertorials Give New Life to Print

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:30:19 -0500

Advertorials—the original "paid content"—are no stranger to magazines (FOLIO: does it too. See an example here.) Marketing that looks like content is always attractive to advertisers and as publishers agonize over plummeting print revenue and clients starting to do their own branded Webinars/events/lead gen, advertorials are a way to lure them back and maybe even hit budget for the first time this year.

Reader’s Digest’s Taste of Home recently said it will produce custom editorial columns that are more "synergistic" with advertisers’ promotional goals. Taste of Home created custom in-book sections that feature branded recipe cards for client Jimmy Dean that run next to the magazine’s own recipe cards section. According to RDA’s Taste of Home and Home & Garden Media Group vp and publisher Lora Gier, these sections are clearly marked as advertising and all advertroasial sections are "new pages" that don’t take away from existing editorial pages.

"The conversations we have are very strategic versus just discussing demographics and rates," Gier told FOLIO:. "We are winning exclusive business through these partnerships."

Advertorials Without the "Advertising" Tag

However, other publishers are pushing the boundaries of advertorials. A recent RIA Biz article gave a comprehensive look at a new advertorial program from Worth magazine, which was acquired by Sandow Media in 2008.

Worth charges financial advisors $2,495 per month or about $30,000 per year (the minimum commitment) to receive two-page profiles in six issues, free reprints, magazine subscriptions worth up to $11,000 for the advisor’s clients and a hard cover book with advisor profiles.

The article quotes Worth publisher Patrick Williams as saying, "Fifty-one million of assets under management just for the first issue. People say print media is dead but I have $51 million that says they are wrong." [It’s funny how marketers' complaints about print seem to disappear when they get to control the message.]

However, Worth isn’t labeling profiles as "advertising" but includes a sentence in the preamble of the profile section indicating they are paid for.

I’m all for vendor content and realize publishers (and editors) need to work more closely with advertisers but I don’t agree with advertorials that are anything less than clearly marked.

In 2006, FOLIO: did a cover story on the rise of Schofield Media Group, a publisher which at the time had grown to 10 magazines in the U.K., 14 in the U.S. and $40 million in revenue, thanks to a model that includes selling editorial case studies.

At the time, then Penton Media group publisher Terri Mollison said of Schofield's model, "How can any market derive what key trends or 'hot companies’ are worth reading about when the only criteria to select those companies is which vendors and distributors who are willing to pony up money to have accolades written about them?"

I wonder how many publishers are willing to take that same stand today.
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The Samurai Responds

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:53:13 -0500

I understand and appreciate my friend and industry colleague Tony Silber’s confusion over my recent stand defending print’s value and my refusal to accept customers’ blithe dismissal of the medium in favor of an exclusive online or lead-gen marketing strategy.

So, I thought it was worth clarifying my thoughts, which admittedly might have been influenced by falling a bit too hard for a literary metaphor. Most publishers have many children. Print. Banners. Newsletters. Lead generation. Webinars. And more. No one—including Tony—is saying print is dead or will disappear entirely from the mix. But we all admit print is quite ill. That "child" needs help, not neglect.

I refuse to acquiesce like most salespeople (and many publishers) and simply sell whatever is hot right now. That’s why it’s so rare in the industry for publishers to use outside rep firms—we all know that reps simply sell whatever is moving easily and we get no dedicated sales effort. It’s human nature for salespeople to hawk whatever is easiest to sell, instead of what we may believe is important to sell. It would be easy to just agree with clients’ assertions that print is dead. That’s where the danger lies. If we, as an industry, stop trying to sell print, it’s death becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We all know that our advertisers’ customers rely upon a huge variety of different influences (print, trade shows, word-of-mouth, online search, etc…) to understand a product and a brand and make a purchase. Everyone—publishers and marketers alike—talks about an integrated marketing plan being the most effective way to sell product. But marketers (and CFOs demanding accountability) would love to just live on “actionable leads” alone. Like children, they would love to just live on dessert. But in order to be healthy, they need to eat their vegetables too, and that’s where we come in.

We need to pitch integrated plans. We’re not samurais, limited to only one weapon and One Way. But one of those weapons is print and I am warning that if we do not sell it hard, if we just let it wither, it will do just that. So I don’t accept a marketer dismissing print out of hand. And to sell print in the modern environment my company has amassed a toolbox of data and measurements that get marketers very close to their desired accountability. (I will blog on that in the near future.)

As a media company serving the software development market, we are on the leading edge and have been selling lead generation actively for than four years and we run well over 125 individual programs per year. I have seen the future of that business and it’s not a happy conclusion I am drawing. It’s a downwardly spiraling commodity business where a lead is a lead is a lead and the source doesn’t matter.

Even on a very practical level, few marketers buy lead-gen or online programs on contract—they may buy a quarter at a time at best. Print is still bought annually (more than half in my case) in November and December of the year prior. I can go ahead and let my sales team blandly agree with the customer and laugh at the funny antiquated notion of—imagine!—print advertising, and we might sell 400 pages that walk through our reluctantly held-open door. Or we can fight like hell and get 500 pages—extra business that my lazy competitors didn’t bother to go after hard enough. That translates into a lot of money and I’m going to fight for it. That’s why I’m getting my team fired up about print and I suggest that others do the same.

I agree with Tony: We need to deal with the radical, deep and permanent changes in our industry. We need to grasp and learn how to master the future—and for the record, BZ Media and Ted Bahr are actively involved in doing this. BUT I see an industry that is agreeing too readily with marketers in the trendy and complete dismissal of print and that is dangerous. And that’s why I’m not giving an inch.
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How To Promote Online Events

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:18:16 -0500

Online events, such as Webinars, are a cost-effective ways to build your business. Unfortunately, too many are promoted poorly because they’re not promoted enough. This approach leaves money on the table and hinders the growth of your customer file.

However, you can capture those lost dollars by developing a strategic online campaign—a series of coordinated messages fired off during a specific timeframe. Each message or “contact” builds on the previous efforts, giving the series momentum and intensity.

A campaign gives you added advantages: Multiple opportunities to reach prospects, an ongoing conversation rather than a single hit-or-miss contact, the chance to bond with your audience and build a mutually beneficial long-term relationship.

Campaigns can be roughly divided into three stages: Before the event, concurrent with the event, and following the event. Here’s a recent case study to illustrate each phase. Weiss Publishing has become a master at selling with campaigns. Their Weiss Global Forum, a video conference scheduled for August 13, was free, but was nonetheless promoted relentlessly, creating exceptional value in the minds of readers. In addition to emails, it was also promoted in the company’s free daily e-zine.

The campaign began in earnest nine days earlier with a dedicated email sent on August 4. Prospects received a new email almost every day thereafter. Each message employed a different hook: Tying the video to timely news items, emphasizing the historic significance of the topic, trumpeting the credentials of the speakers and so on. The emails also counted down the hours until registration closed.

The second stage began the day after the video aired. Weiss sent an email with an invitation to view it for those who missed it or wanted to see it again. To keep interest high, they issued daily emails and framed their messages with a variety of classic direct-response techniques: Teasing prospects with highlights from the video as a way to sample it, asking registrants for their feedback to forge a stronger connection with their audience, and then sharing that feedback in yet another email and gaining social endorsements at the same time.

Of course, each contact was an effort to get new people to register, but these messages went a step further: They also contained genuinely valuable information—a key element for building long-term customer loyalty and distinguishing them from mere “sales” efforts.

The third and final part of the campaign began on August 17 with an announcement that the video would go offline on a specific date. Besides spurring action with a deadline, the messages also relied on time-tested psychological tactics to get a response. Whereas the first stage of the campaign pushed the greed button (secrets for prosperity to be revealed in the video), these emails stoked the prospects’ fear of missing out on something momentous (the risk to their well-being by not registering, guilt-tripping them for failing to respond to previous invitations).

In this final round of messages, another kind of countdown clock was used.

By all accounts, the campaign was a success. More than 18 separate contacts were used, excluding e-zine ads. The loyalty of existing Weiss customers deepened and the goodwill of future subscribers was established. In short, rapport was created that will likely lead to more sales whenever Weiss promotes a paid event.

But even if you don’t have the resources to mount an extensive campaign, you can still reap significant benefits. For example, KCI Communications enacted a more modest campaign for their paid Webinar; yet they were able to sell 133 slots and picked up a few additional sales after the event.

This brings us to the question of whether you should archive your events.

Many marketers keep them available indefinitely. Since they’re great lead-generating products, their long-tail viability can be exploited. Others maintain a one-time only policy. If you don’t archive your productions, then make them more exclusive by emphasizing the scarcity principle in your messages: Prospects more sharply crave the things they can’t have. Use that to your advantage.
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I’m Not Giving an Inch

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:32:02 -0500

Did you ever read “Sometimes a Great Notion” by Ken Kesey? Yes, the Ken Kesey with the psychedelic bus. Before the Merry Pranksters and after his successful “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Kesey penned this novel, one of the great works of American fiction, a sprawling tale of the struggles of a northwest logging family, the conflict between brothers, the small independent logging company the family owns and their fights against larger timber interests.

The most recurring metaphor in the book is fighting progress, alluded to in the form of the Stamper family home, which is built on a bend of a great river that is constantly eroding away the property. Over the years the Stampers built a crude series of barriers, wired posts and piers to prevent this from happening, but the river is relentless, as rivers will be. Some of the most vivid passages in the book portray the father and older brothers’ attempts to keep the river from destroying the property, typically out in the night in vicious storms, lashing the piers back together, fighting the river of progress, the river of change. The book was made into a film starring Henry Fonda and Paul Newman, with the tagline embodying the philosophy of Henry Stamper, “Never Give an Inch.”

So, what does all this have to do with magazine publishing? Out west last week, I was pitching print (along with our online properties) to marketers who thought I had landed there from another planet. To one, print was so alien that he took a genuine interest in it. It was a novelty. More and more marketers start conversations by letting you know that they’re not doing print as a matter of fact. Many of my competitors and fellow high-tech publishers have given up, letting the river flow, and you can see the results in the steadily eroding group of high-tech titles still in print. I can’t quite explain why, but like Henry Stamper, I refuse to yield. I refuse to bend to the times, to just accept the advertiser’s misguided notions that print is dead and not even worth talking about. While I’m happy to sell a few white papers at the end of the call, most of the time I’m taking them out to the woodshed to disabuse them of their anti-print bias—whether they buy it today or not.

It’s up to those of us in the industry to stand up passionately for what we believe in and what we know to be true. The easy days of print as an accepted medium are over. Washed well downstream. But we know people are still reading our publications, and becoming aware of and interested in companies through the print ads. It’s up to us to lash together the arguments and fight.

We’re deep into contract season and I’m getting on planes to visit customers. And I'm not giving an inch.
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Boating Industry, Magazines Less Buoyant This Year

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:57:10 -0400

In this down economy, it isn’t any big surprise that automotive and financial have been two of the hardest-hit markets. Out of the 12 advertising categories tracked by the Publishers Information Bureau, they saw the steepest declines through the first nine months, with ad pages falling 47.3 percent and 47 percent, respectively.
Another industry that’s taken a beating this year is boating. I was reading the editor’s note yesterday on boating trade publication Soundings Trade Only’s Web site, written by Bill Sisson (he was my editor when I worked as a staff writer at Trade Only’s consumer-side sister Soundings magazine a few years ago—he now oversees editorial for both titles). In it, Sisson looked back over the last 12 months, detailing the dramatic impact the down economy has had on the boating industry.

One takeaway I found, well, astounding:
The job loss estimates are staggering for an industry our size. By some accounts, as many as 200,000 jobs—perhaps 75 percent of the work force—have vanished since 2005, with the vast majority of those coming from manufacturing.
And, inevitably, as that industry declined, so has the consumer boating magazine market. Through the first three quarters, the seven titles tracked by PIB averaged a 38.1 percent loss in ad pages. (I didn’t include Power Cruising since it folded in March). The industry average in ad page declines was 27.2 percent.

“When demand evaporated and wholesale credit became difficult to get, builders and dealers did their best to hold onto their cash,” Sisson told me of the declines in the boating industry. “Companies went into survival mode, shutting or slowing production lines, furloughing workers, cutting costs wherever they could, including their advertising budgets.”

Sounds a lot like what’s happened in magazine publishing. While Soundings has felt the same declines as other boating magazines (“we’ve held up as well as most, and better than some”), Sisson said magazine publishers in his market will need to keep a careful watch over expense control, as well continue to diversify their product portfolios beyond the printed page.

“Boating titles will need to develop a broad strategy for maintaining their current audience, winning new readers and viewers, and offering advertisers and other partners a 360-degree program for reaching target audiences,” he said.

Looking forward, Sisson hopes new products will help jumpstart demand in the boating industry. He said the industry is looking at the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show next week as a barometer of sorts for how sales might fare in the coming months.

But are people actually budgeting for a new 40-footer this year? Maybe an Average Joe like me isn’t, but a die-hard boater might be, right?

Ad Page Totals Through the Third Quarter:
TITLE
2009 2008 % CHNG
Boating 320.26 648.30
-50.6
Boating Life
168.88 457.90 -63.1
Cruising World
625.19 763.32 -18.1
Motorboating
278.33 374.84 -25.7
Power & Motoryacht
674.55 1,531.79 -56.0
Sailing World
286.44
369.66 -22.5
Yachting
968.25 1,403.62 -31.0

Source: PIB

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‘Serious’ U.K. Publications Band Together for Marketing Push

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:37:19 -0400

Is there a shortage of people reading “serious” magazines across the Atlantic?

Fifteen U.K.-based magazine publishers think so. They’ve formed the Cultural Publications Group, a joint marketing venture tasked with showing “the breadth of titles that are available at the more serious end of the market.”

The idea behind the initiative, so the group says, is to expose their magazines to a wider audience. Magazines participating in the collaboration include BBC Music, The Spectator, New Scientist, and The Week, among others.

Over the next several weeks, more than 1.3 million leaflets will be distributed (800,000 inside the group’s magazines, the rest in other magazines and newspapers) directing readers to a Web site where they can browse the group’s magazines and order subscriptions.

And, depending on how many issues are ordered, some subscription prices have been discounted more than 70 percent. One offer, for three issues of Lonely Planet magazine, for example, costs roughly $1.60. Another offer, for six issues of The Week, is free. That’s right. Completely free.

Haven’t we seen enough evidence that discounting subscriptions, especially during a time when advertising dollars are evaporating, doesn’t work? Sure, publishers get a few extra subscribers for a short time but what does it matter if they can’t turn those numbers into ad dollars? Selling a sub for pennies on the dollar (or a pence on the pound) doesn’t do much for a publisher’s bottom line.

To be fair, though, not all of the Cultural Publications Group’s subs are at bargain basement prices. For instance, while a three-issue order of BBC Music costs less than $5, a 39-issue order will cost more than $180.

And, the folks at Cultural Publications Group seem hopeful the effort will result in considerable ROI in terms of data sharing. “The value to the publishers is that it (should) help them gain more subscribers at a very low cost per order,” group co-organizer Don Brown wrote in an email to me this week. Brown—who serves as business development director for ThreePM, the company that built the group’s Web site and manages the subscription operation—was involved in an earlier iteration of the Cultural Publications Group from 2002 to 2005.

“All the magazines taking part are very savvy sub marketers and derive most of their revenue from their subscription income,” Brown continued. “The promotion allows them to cross sell to the other group members and to have visibility in media that they may not ordinarily be able to afford … The related benefit is that because all response data will be shared among the group, titles will be able to target the third party media that has been most successful for them.”

Interesting. So, might we expect to see a similar group pop up on this side of the pond, made up of magazines like the Economist and the Atlantic? I doubt it.
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TITLE	2009	2008	% CHNG
Boating	320.26	648.30	-50.6
Boating Life	168.88	457.90	-63.1
Cruising World	625.19	763.32	-18.1
Motorboating	278.33	374.84	-25.7
Power & Motoryacht	674.55	1,531.79	-56.0
Sailing World	286.44	369.66	-22.5
Yachting	968.25	1,403.62	-31.0