Tag: Audience data

UGC Contributors Are Now Integral to Successful Content Strategies

You’ve put in the hard yards, integrated an effective Digital Experience Platform (DXP) with engagement and moderation solutions, and finally established a safe space for your audience community. With a community framework in place and a moderation solution in action – use this new found spare time to give due praise to the golden geese of your flock: the User Generated Content (UGC) Contributors. 

First things first: who are the high energy User Generated Content Contributors eager to publicly make their mark? Can their contributions be used as aspirational behaviour for other more passive users? If so, what are some ways to go about this that don’t feel disingenuous?

Positive reinforcement is a sure way to encourage users further down your audience funnel and strengthen retention. By putting the contributions of your community up on a pedestal, you are not only rewarding those ultra-valuable UGC Contributors with recognition, but you also broadcast to your community and beyond the kind of behaviour your brand values and celebrates. 

The returns on your efforts once you’ve integrated a solid UGC Contributor element to your existing audience-first content strategy will be ample revenue gains (in both ad and subscriptions) and a consistently expanding community of users steadily flowing through your audience funnel.

In order to determine how best to integrate UGC Creators into your strategy, you’ll need to first consider what tools and techniques are available to you, how to optimize the efficacy of UGC Content, and most importantly – how to do it in a way that uplifts your brand and drives its success.

 

Highlight Users Comments

On a smaller day-to-day basis, implementing a pinned comment strategy is a great way to highlight members of your community as well as set the tone for budding conversations. 

In some cases, having your editorial/content team kick off the discussion in the comments section with a pinned comment as a conversation starter can lead to immediate engagement and user contributions. Once those user comments roll in, swap out your comment with a user contribution that endorses your brand values, sets the tone, and encourages others to join in.

 

Editor’s Pick

Think about where you can reach different audiences at different stages of the audience funnel. 

If your editorial team sends out a newsletter, including a piece of UGC in an ‘Editor’s Pick’ segment is a great way to show you value the contributions of your community members and it gives registered members a reason to bring their own opinions and perspectives to the table in the hopes of being featured as well. 

To reach audiences that may not be signed up for newsletters, building these Editor’s Picks into readily available on-site content can inspire registered users and connect with as of yet unregistered visitors. Sharing these contributions with a broader audience has the potential to, once again, establish an aspirational behaviour for other users to strive for and improve engagement.

 

Badges

Not unlike highlighting what your UGC Contributors have shared, badges are a way for you to distinguish between different types of users engaging with your content and help foster a unique community specific to your site. Rewards beget rewards in this case, as users who have put in the time and energy to earn a badge of their own are far more likely to keep up their efforts and stay active and engaged.

 

Conclusion

At the end of the day, the audiences that seek out content and invest their time, energy, and money into your publication are the bread and butter of the publishing world. When we take their interests to heart and celebrate their loyalty and time spent on our platforms, we learn more and more about them through their data offerings and can in turn continue to provide them with the high-value interest focused content that they deserve.

Behind the Data: 78% Of Consumers Give Their Loyalty To Brands That Treat Them as Individuals

It’s very easy for publishers to lose sight of the fact that the readers who consume the content they produce are, in fact, individuals. As much as publishers want to profile their readers and establish common themes or pain points that resonate with their collective tastes and interests, it’s important never to lose sight of the fact that each reader is his or her own individual.

Publishers can’t allow themselves to lose sight of those facts while collecting audience data in an effort to stimulate audience-growth strategies. Everyone wants to feel like they’re valued, and that a publisher offers a user experience that’s unique to their specific preferences. A reader who feels valued and appreciated through personalized content recommendations is far more likely to become brand loyal, which is the pathway to earning subscription revenue from loyal readers.

Majorities of readers reward brands that earn their loyalty

Here are some helpful facts to paint a clearer picture. According to the 2022 Digital Consumer Trends Index, as many as 78% of consumers admit to having a favorite brand because that brand rewards them for their loyalty. This could be expressed in the form of discounted subscription rates, or a free month of access to premium content.

Additionally, 74% of those same consumers prefer brands that treat them as individuals. It further validates the point that every person has unique tastes and preferences. When a reader visits a website to engage with new content, they want to believe that the content was created specifically for them. They want to feel as if the entire user experience is built to appeal to their unique interests.

Readers provide plenty of incentive for publishers to earn their loyalty. Over 70% of readers say their favorite brand is a business that strives to build a relationship with them. Another 64% say their favorite brand rewards their loyalty with surprise benefits, and 58% cite their favorite brand as the one that treats them like a VIP.

Everyone wants to feel like they’re special. Publishers that know how to create those feelings among their readers earn that invaluable brand loyalty.

First-party data shines a light on how to personalize content

Here’s the truth: 90% of readers respond positively to personalized experiences. As publishers, it’s essential to speak to individual readers using messaging that appeals to their interests. It’s through this approach that publishers show the humanity behind their brand identities, effectively communicating as one individual to another.

First-party data is how to create that personalized engagement and boost reader loyalty. First-party data enables publishers to learn specific details about individual buyers and monitor any change in those behaviors over time. Publishers use these insights to build rich audience profiles to develop behavioral patterns of their most avid readers.

A data-driven content strategy prioritizes personalization

Using these audience profiles, content creators produce highly personalized content across the entire website. Audience segmentation is one of the building blocks of a content strategy that’s informed by behavioral data.

Once you begin segmenting your readers, you can go a step further and analyze where in the subscription journey different types of readers happen to fall. Segment readers between new visitors, known readers, and subscribed loyalists to build richer details of how people respond to your content.

Using an audience insights solution, all of this data can be pulled into a dashboard that your creative team can review at their convenience. Creators can review the journeys taken by current subscribers to understand what types of content converted them into brand loyal readers. With those insights in hand, a data-driven content strategy can flourish and ultimately guide more readers to cross that threshold into the realm of becoming loyal subscribers.

Profile readers, build loyalty, boost subscriptions

Rich audience profiles tell creators how individual readers will respond to freshly created content. Using those insights, your creative team can double down on creating the types of stories that foster greater reader engagement. By relying on first-party data to direct the content strategy, you successfully create those personalized experiences that foster reader loyalty.

As data-driven content strategies develop over time, it’s important to never lose sight of the fact that the audiences that you depend on for first-party data, helpful insights, and subscription revenue are all made up of individuals. Individual readers have their own tastes and preferences, but it’s incumbent on publishers to learn about those interests so that readers are incentivized to provide more first-party data or, as they become fully brand loyal, subscription revenue.

Loyalty Plays: The Next Era Of Retention

There’s an old saying in marketing that “it costs more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one.” Some studies have shown it can cost up to five times more to focus solely on customer acquisition at the disservice of customer retention.

Publishers who focus solely on registration and pumping out as much content as possible often neglect relationships with existing readers. By taking stock of current relationships and finding new ways to reward subscribed readers for brand loyalty, publishers are far more likely to improve customer retention rates.

Don’t devalue retention: it’s more profitable than you know

There’s money to be made in retention, even with a slight move of the needle in the right direction. According to a Harvard Business School study, improving customer retention rates by as little as 5% can improve profitability by 25%. In some cases, profits can rise up to 95%.

Those findings are similar to research conducted by Gartner, which determined that 80% of business profits come from 20% of existing customers. Additionally, the success rate of converting an existing reader into a paying subscriber ranges between a 60% to 70% success rate. Conversely, the success rate of converting a new reader into a subscriber ranges between 5% and 20%.

The bottom line is that there’s plenty of value to be found in reader retention. Publishers just need the right approach and the right resources to engage with existing readers to convert them into brand loyal subscribers.

Personalization fosters loyalty and retention

Communicating with your existing readers using personalized content experiences is the best way to earn reader loyalty. What and how you communicate with your readers makes all the difference between retaining their business and losing their interest.

For example, if you were to publish generic content week after week, it’s hard for readers to see the value in the experience. Instead, the audience sentiment will be that you’re just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. The content loses all of your brand’s personality that first resonated with readers, increasing the likelihood that they churn and never return to your site.

On the other hand, personalized content that appeals to specific reader interests is far more engaging to your audience. By demonstrating that your creative team understands their readers, and chooses to publish content that adds greater value to their experience with your website, you have a winning formula to improve retention rates and, hopefully, subscription rates.

Collect first-party data to gain those audience insights

One of the best ways to boost audience engagement and increase the value that readers experience from your publication is to encourage their engagement with your community. Encourage your authors to add the first comment to freshly produced content in an effort to kickstart a conversation with your readers. Encourage your audience to post their thoughts and use a commenting moderation tool to analyze the sentiment shared by your readers.

As more comments are submitted, you automatically build a wealth of first-party data that you can leverage to gain more insight into your reader tastes and preferences. You can pick up on things like what themes within the content people react towards, and you can measure the preference for one type of author over another.

Once you collect enough first-party data to really understand your audience, you can revamp your content strategy into a data-driven initiative. Focus the subject matter of your content around the themes, topics, and interests that your data informs you is what matters most to your readers. Show your avid community that you listen to their responses by producing more of the content they’ve indicated is what they want. This is how you build a loyal following that is likely to provide customer lifetime value for years to come.

Incentivize readers to act with special recognitions

To encourage further debate around your content, you can assign badges to comments that generate responses from other readers. Show your most valuable readers and/or subscribers that you recognize their contributions to the discussion, proving to them that they’re considered VIPs among your reading audience. Earn that reader loyalty and reap the fruits of those labors!

Funnel Functionality: Maximize Conversions From The Top Down

It’s a publisher’s dream to view the analytics on recently published content, especially when the data shows a healthy volume of pageviews and reader engagement. The data validates that the topic was a strategic win for your publication as it brings readers onto your website where you can monetize their interest in your content.

One of the challenges that publishers can run into is reader retainment. The initial influx of traffic is great for morale, but it’s hard to maintain that positive outlook if bounce rates are high and pages per session are low.

Hope can still be preserved in these situations. By creating a vibrant community of passionately engaged readers, you lay the groundwork to guide more people through your subscription funnel. When you have enough readers willfully contributing their own comments to topical discussions, they’re more engaged in your site experience. This is the key to earning that customer loyalty.

Featured Comments From The Journalists Kick Off Lively Discussions

PostMedia is a media conglomerate with multiple publishing sites. They implemented what was known as the first comment initiative, a plan that incentivized content creators to leave the first comment on their published stories. It was an initiative implemented across 15 publications, and it worked like a charm. Over the span of three months, PostMedia reported a 380% increase in total average comments, and a 55% increase in registrations per news article.

An editorial commenting strategy kickstarts the debate around the published topic, which incentivizes more readers to participate. Over 60% of news commenters or comment readers prefer when journalists participate in community discussions. By inspiring your own creators to open the doors to commenting and community participation, you can convert more passive readers into active commenters.

This is a great way to build vibrant community forums that inspire more readers to share their thoughts and opinions about the content. You want more readers to think this way because each instance of participation is a valuable piece of first-party data that you can leverage. You’ll learn about your readers’ interests and passions, which you can use to engage with them again in the future. Use those insights to personalize future content experiences so that you guide them further down the funnel towards becoming a paying subscriber.

Featured Comments Seamlessly Increase User Registrations

Sportsnet is the leading sports media brand in Canada and, like PostMedia, they saw an opportunity to guide readers through the funnel using the comments section on posted content. Traditionally, Sportsnet posts included a “load comments” button that readers would have to click to open the comments section.

The Sportsnet team suspected this button was disrupting the reader experience and discouraging engagement. As a pilot program, Sportsnet removed the button and replaced it with the top featured user comments that had the most reader engagement. Using Viafoura’s audience engagement solution, the test results showed a 262% increase in the number of comments from readers, and an 80% increase in time spent on page by those commenters.

Most importantly, Sportsnet was able to insert registration forms for readers to participate in community discussions. This resulted in a 14% increase in registrations per million pageviews, a massive ROI for their efforts. Registered users have a conversion rate that’s 45 times higher than non-registered users, making this a crucial piece of the subscription revenue model.

Use Insights From Existing Commenters To Guide More Readers Through The Funnel

Once users are registered, you can categorize them as “known” readers. This means you have enough first-party data from their engagement with your website to build rich audience profiles.

You can look at comments left on existing content to gain a better understanding of reader tastes, preferences, and sensibilities. You can also work backwards from those comments and identify what pages registered users viewed that ultimately led them to engage with a particular piece of content. Using an audience insights tool, you can determine how much time registered users spend on pages, how many pages they viewed, and other key pieces of data.

With these profiles, you now have a clearer understanding of what inspires readers to register so they can participate in community discussions. Now, you can use those insights to feed your content recommendation modules, and create highly personalized experiences for new readers.

Make sure you show featured comments on each new article so more new readers feel inspired to add their own opinion to the discussion. This is how you can guide more qualified readers to journey through the funnel on your website towards the path of registration.

HotNewHipHop focuses on showcasing artists and driving audience engagement with Viafoura

HotNewHipHop (HNHH) is an online publication that covers daily news about hip hop and pop culture, including streetwear, sports, and sneakers. In addition to its editorial news content, HotNewHipHop also produces original features and many video series. The site has been nominated multiple times for the BET Hip Hop Awards in the category, “The best Hip Hop Platform.”

HNHH empowers artists by letting them showcase their music to real hip hop fans while its members enjoy the latest and hottest in hip hop singles, mixtapes, videos and news. Saro Derbedrossian, CEO says that “HotNewHipHop is partnering with Viafoura so we can focus on providing our highly engaged community with a platform for lively discussions and civilized discourse, while also driving registrations and unlocking first party data. Our members will get an unparalleled personalized experience that will ensure they register, keep coming back and spend more time on our site.”

With the use of Viafoura’s full suite of services and features including Conversations, Custom Badging, AMA, Engagement Starter, and  Automated Moderation,  HotNewHipHop’s users will be able to build their identity on the HNHH platform. Whether it’s through sharing their opinions on the latest news, rating songs or album releases, the opportunities for registered users are endless.

“We’re very excited to partner with HotNewHipHop to bring a new layer of engagement and civility to their site,” says Dalia Vainer,  Director of Customer Success. With their eclectic, unique and highly-engaged community, we’re looking forward to unlocking brand new first party data to feed back to their editorial, product and commercial teams! We’re also very proud to welcome another Canadian customer to our collective!”

New Data: 40% of Your Subscribers Are Sleeping On Your Content

Let’s say you’ve effectively done all of the right things to acquire new subscribers. You’ve created really interesting content and pushed it out for your readers to consume. Before you know it, you’ve monetized your efforts with a new batch of converted paid subscribers.

That’s the good news, and an accomplishment that your publishing team should be proud to hold up as a gold medal. The journey doesn’t end when readers agree to subscribe, though. Once you have new subscribers, you need to monitor how actively engaged those subscribers are with the content on your website.

Who Are The Active Subscribers And Who Are The Sleeping Subscribers?

You want to organize your subscribers into different tiers based on their level of engagement with the website. Bucket users into labels of active subscribers, who are the ones that visit and engage the site on a near daily basis, and sleeping subscribers, which describes people who seldom return to the site after they become subscribers.

Your active subscribers are your highest valued customers with the greatest potential customer lifetime value (CLTV). These subscribers visit your site daily or weekly to consume fresh content, and they’ll often engage in community activities, such as commenting or participating in lively discussions with other readers. When the time comes for the subscription to renew, there’s little chance that a churn will occur instead.

On the other end of the spectrum are your “sleeping subscribers.” These subscribers have paid for a subscription, which is a good thing. According to your audience insights and analytics platforms, they haven’t visited the website since they completed the subscription form.

Studies have shown that sleeping subscribers make up approximately 40% of a publisher’s subscription base. Sleeping subscribers have the highest probability to churn before the subscription renewal, so it’s vitally important to re-engage and retain as many of those subscriptions as feasibly possible.

Remind Sleeping Subscribers Their Journey With Your Publication Has Only Begun

There’s an old saying in the publishing space that 80% of recurring revenue comes from 20% of paid subscribers. Essentially, this means that subscribers who are the most active and the most engaged with your content are responsible for providing the bulk of subscription revenue to your publication.

The driving reason for this challenge is that up to half of your existing subscriber base is not motivated to come back to the site. Once they complete the subscription, they feel their journey with your website has come to an end. As a successful publishing business, your job is to remind them that the journey has only begun.

According to the American Press Institute, only 31% of publishers target low-engagement subscribers with re-engagement campaigns before their subscription renewal dates come up. That means your business can be one of the three out of ten that forms a successful re-engagement strategy to convert the sleepers into active users.

Re-engagement is the most important step in this process. If subscribers are not engaged with your content, they’re likely to balk when the renewal charge comes up on their bank statements. A churn is likely to occur… Unless you can win them back over and remind them why they subscribed to your website in the first place.

First-Party Data Is The Alarm To Wake Sleeping Subscribers

Using an audience insights platform to collect first-party data, you have the necessary touchpoints to form rich audience profiles of your subscribers. Build those profiles so that you can gain a better understanding of how to wake up the sleepers.

You can view the articles they consumed that led them to go beyond the paywall. You can identify topics that resonated to drive the subscription in the first place. You can see what authors they followed, or community discussions they participated in that really shone a light on their passion for a subject.

All of these touchpoints are examples of first-party data that tell you what motivated your sleeping subscribers to pay for your content in the first place. Use that knowledge to build highly personalized emails and activate re-engagement campaigns to awaken those sleepers and guide them back to your publishing experience.

Send Personalized Emails To Shake The Sleepers Awake

Since you’ve collected the audience data and built out the profiles, you already know the best way to re-engage with your sleeping subscribers. Now, you just need to create the messaging to facilitate that re-engagement strategy.

Use your content recommendation module to pull out the articles that align with the topics which led your sleepers to initially subscribe for your content. Once the recommendation engine feeds you the suggestions, drop the links into highly personalized newsletter email templates. Create messaging that triggers the same passion as the articles that led the sleepers on their initial journey with your site to reinvoke those same feelings.

By reminding them of that experience, the sleepers will wake up and they’ll follow those links back to your site. This is when you can create a whole new personalized experience to convert sleeping subscribers into active subscribers with the highest CLTV potential.

Data Is King: Personal Experiences Boost Conversions By 30%

What’s your preferred experience with published content? Would you prefer a site that feeds you generic articles, or a publisher that knows how to personalize the content you see? The obvious answer is the second option. A personalized website is far more enjoyable as it provides the topics, opinions, and commentary that speak directly to your unique set of interests.

Some publications are better at personalization than others. These publications know how to identify if an article, or even a headline, will encourage readers to spend more time on the site. Their content is informative and capable of adding value to the reader’s experience so they feel compelled to consume the story. They also know how to use highly targeted links within the articles to drive up clickthrough rates.

By adopting personalization as part of an overarching content strategy, publishers remain connected to readers who are very protective of what they consume. There’s a rising trend of “selective news avoidance” all over the world. According to CNN, only 23% of people get their news from news websites. Young people, in particular, are more likely to use social media for news updates.

Can Personalized Content Trump News Avoidance?

Reuters Institute commissioned their annual Digital News Report. The study analyzed a YouGov survey of 93,000 participants from 46 different countries. Among the key findings was a growing lack of trust in newsworthy content, a problem with its strongest foothold in the United States. Only 26% of US respondents say they trust the news, a three point decline from 2021, and the lowest positive sentiment among all surveyed nations.

Common reasons cited for selective news avoidance have to do with growing polarization, perceived media bias, and a sense of too much politics in the news. But a senior Reuters executive, who helped commission the Digital News Report, says the issue goes much deeper.

“A large number of those who selectively avoid the news say the news has a negative effect on their mood,” says Rasmus K. Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Click-Bait Headlines Or Insightful Titles: Which Is The Best Approach?

What are the primary causes for news avoidance? According to the International Institute of Information Technology – Hyderabad (IIIT-H), one of the reasons could be that some publishers rely too frequently on “click-bait headlines.”

In a research study entitled “Clickbait’s Impact On Visual Attention-An Eye Tracker Study,” IIIT-H studied gaze-fixation from 60 participants to measure the amount of visual attention paid by readers to different articles. One group of articles had click-bait headlines, while the other group used educational titles. The results found that click-bait headlines received far less visual attention from readers than articles with non-click-bait headlines.

Click-bait headlines promote a misleading title separate from the crux and context of the article content. According to IIIT-H, people feel duped by misleading headlines, feeling a disconnection between the promoted title and the body of the article. They abandon the page rather than continue the experience, reducing total engagement rates.

Instead of creating false headlines to trigger quick clickthrough rates, successful publishers create thought provoking titles, encouraging readers to consume the entire article. The best way to create headlines that generate engagement is to develop a deeper understanding of what resonates with the intended reading audience. To gain those audience insights, you can use the power of first-party data to align engagement strategies with audience preferences.

First-Party Data Is The Intersection For Creators And Readers

Two of the best examples of first-party data are pageviews and time on-site. You can rest assured that people are intrigued by your content if both of these numbers are trending in the upward direction.

Aim to develop a deeper understanding of what best resonates with your readers. You can identify commonalities in things like the tone of the articles, the positioning of the headlines, common topical themes, and certain keywords that appear in articles with the highest amount of reader engagement.

Your creative team can access these findings in your audience insights platform dashboard to view the results for themselves. They can view the data and clearly identify which articles earn the most engagement from readers. This will help them pivot the content strategy to focus on future stories that support greater audience engagement.

Profile, Personalize, Perform: The Power Of First-Party Data

There’s a lot of power to be wielded with first-party data, which gives your publication a leg up on competitors. Your audience insights platform stores demographic details about your readers, including variables like age, location, backgrounds, and past consumption behaviors on your website. Pool these insights together into rich audience profiles that tell your creators how different types of readers are likely to engage with the content.

You can also segment your audience into different buckets: new readers, known readers, and subscribed readers. The difference in each audience category is measured by their degree of engagement with your website. New readers are fresh to the site, which means there’s very little behavioral data to profile. Known readers are people who have provided at least one example of first-party demographic data that you can use to start building your profiles. Subscribed readers are those who have fully converted and actively paid for premium access to your best content.

As you build your audience profiles, focus intently on the subscribed audience. Look back at the patterns that led people on the journey to fill out the subscription form. What were the articles they read? What common topics or themes were prevalent in those stories? Where did they spend the most time on your site?

Using these enriched profiles, coupled with the data you have on your top performing content, you have all of the necessary information to personalize what readers experience the next time they visit your site. You can deploy highly segmented examples of content that appeal to different readers at each stage in the consumption journey with your website.

Focus on creating personalized content that enables those deep journeys, which should help boost subscription conversion rates by 30%. Watch those pageview and time on-site metrics shoot through the roof by deploying this strategic approach!

Community-Focused Tools And Tactics To Hit KPI and ROI Goals

This was originally posted on INMA.

If your current Digital Experience Platform(DXP) isn’t serving your community, or rather, is not enabling your organization to serve, sustain, and expand your community, then it’s not worth your money. 

Furthermore, if you are fortunate enough to be host to a community, particularly one that enjoys engaging with and discovering the realm of their interests that you’ve created, you’re sitting on a gold mine of growth potential and first party data. 

It’s no secret that an active, non-toxic community is a powerful driver of audience growth, but in order to make the most of community driven conversion opportunities there are some preparatory measures that can be taken. 

Community Foundation

Before we begin honing in on the inner-workings of your community, take stock of the tools and strategies you currently have in place and assess whether or not they are providing a worthwhile ROI. Some questions to ask as you set about this task are:

Infrastructure and Discoverability

Does your site’s architecture drive visitors intuitively to where the community is at its best, or are there a number of barriers in their way? 

Consider where on their journey users are confronted with a sign-up form of some sort. Then, evaluate if there’s greater potential for conversion by giving them a bit of free reign to see the value you have to offer elsewhere. Giving unregistered users enough access to see but not join on-site discussions or special events like a live Ask-Me-Anything community chat could be just the kind of content that is worth their time and, subsequently, their registered first-party data. 

Does your current comment interface and strategy help or hinder engagement?

Providing users with the means to easily jump into the comments section and join discussions is an effective way to improve engagement. Recently, Viafoura partnered up with News-Press & Gazette Co. (NPG) to help them over-haul their prior approach to comment sections that relied on manual approval, resulting in endless queues of user contributions stuck in limbo. After integrating Viafoura’s Automated Moderation onto their platform, NPG saw a drastic improvement in their overall engagement as well as the complete reactivation of previously stagnant communities across a number of their sites.

Community Health

Have you and your teams taken measures to ensure that when new visitors arrive they’re greeted by a wholesome and inviting community? 

If some of the first things visitors see are comments and discussions rife with vitriol and toxicity, they won’t stay long – if at all. In order to keep the peace and foster a welcoming space for newcomers, it’s imperative that you provide clear and concise community guidelines. These guidelines will assist in the preservation of your community’s well being by giving its members and your moderation teams consistent parameters to follow while reinforcing your brand values and interests while doing so. 

In order to scale down some of the more taxing and meticulous moderation tasks (profanity, hate speech etc.), adopting an Intelligent Moderation Engine is a turn-key solution for immediate deflection of toxicity. 

Create a Playground of Engagement

Plainly: creating an engaging and discoverable user experience (UX) will invigorate your audience. As publishers, there is an obvious responsibility to provide your readers with high-quality content that stands out in the vast and highly saturated digital media landscape. More specifically, as digital publishers, the journey that users go on as they experience your site and its content is just as important.

A digital media platform that gives its users a range of capabilities to engage – be it through exploration, discovery, or community – is guaranteed a far higher chance of earning consistent growth in registrations, longer time spent on-site, and an increasingly concise understanding of their audience’s behaviour and interests. All of which can contribute to an improvement in ad-revenue by providing you with the data necessary to prove the worth of your premium ad space to potential partners.

Topic and Author Follows

Topic and Author following capabilities are highly engaging points of conversion and excellent data collection avenues. By tracking what content and which authors are being followed via built in analytics, editorial and content strategies can be adjusted to meet the evident interests being shown in the declarative data that comes from these community specific actions.

In terms of engagement, users who follow particular authors or topics also have a far higher propensity for return visits because of the notifications they’ll receive when more content tied to what they follow is published.

Conclusion

In this digital age where an extensive and engaging digital experience platform is paramount to the success and longevity of digital media organizations, taking the time to create rewarding and enjoyable experiences for your audience communities is the least we can do. With the right tools and approach to a community focused growth strategy, publishers will make short work of achieving their ROIs and surpassing previous KPI goals.

Top Revenue Diversification Streams For Publishers

At the root of every digital publication is an inherent goal to educate, interest, and engage with the intended audience. By providing relevant and informative content to the end users, publishers create thoughtful and fulfilling relationships with their readers. A consistent stream of high quality content motivates readers to return to the site and continue to consume the content.

The cycle repeats itself until the reader develops an affinity for the publishing brand. Visiting the website for the latest updates on the news of the day becomes part of a daily habit. As that habit becomes a growing need, those same readers become brand loyal users. These are the people with the highest potential to become paying subscribers for your top quality content.

All of that is well and good for building a loyal audience of passionate and engaged readers. But how do you monetize those efforts, and how can you introduce new revenue streams to scale growth higher and faster while maintaining publication standards and providing quality journalism? That’s what we’re going to discuss here.

Challenges for revenue-driven publication leaders

Increasing revenue requires a proactive push for subscriptions and a delivery of highly targeted ad inserts as part of an affiliate marketing program. The good news is that, according to Pew Research Center, 86% of American citizens get their news through a smartphone, tablet, or computer.

More importantly, over half of respondents said they prefer consuming content through these devices as opposed to TV, radio, or podcasts. This means there does remain a sizable audience to monetize from through revenue diversification strategies.

The bad news is that, as polarization deepens throughout the population, the amount of trust in journalism has waned. This is a particularly growing problem for US publishers.

According to a study published by Statista, United States citizens rank lowest on a list of 40 countries whose residents say they trust the media. Only 26% of surveyed Americans say they trust the news media. By contrast, 37% of neighboring Mexicans say they trust the media, while 42% of neighboring Canadians admit they trust their news sources.

All of these insights emphasize why there’s such a strong need for a high quality content strategy. Aligning content production to the tastes and interests of the intended audience is essential to boost onsite engagement. That’s what allows you to run affiliate marketing campaigns with select partners.

Examples of revenue diversification channels

As a business model, it’s always critical to live by the adage “never put all of your eggs in one basket.” The more you can diversify means of generating revenue, the less likely you are to falter if one of those channels stops performing at the level that your business needs. When it comes to revenue diversification strategies, knowing how to utilize each of the channels available to grow your brand is vital to scaling new growth.

So what are some of the channels available for your revenue diversification strategy? Here’s a quick breakdown of each and how best to use them to your advantage.

Subscription models: win them over with quality

This is probably the most straightforward revenue generating model for publications. By convincing more of your reading audience to pay for access to your top shelf content, you’re earning direct value out of each posted story across your publication.

Many readers actively want to add their own opinions to a published piece of content. If you gate access to the comments section and the community behind it, you incentivize those readers to become paying customers.

In exchange, they gain the means to participate in lively discussions with other engaged readers. It’s a two way relationship that benefits the reader and your publication. You just need to guide people to that decision by doubling down on high quality content that increases their propensity to respond.

E-commerce strategies: target the right offers to the right people

It goes without saying that data is essential for any digital experience to become a successful venture. However, the type of data makes all the difference between publications that have something to sell to their e-commerce affiliates and those that don’t.

First-party data has become the backbone of any e-commerce engagement strategy. It’s by using first-party data that targeted shopping experiences are provided to the audience. This type of data allows you to build highly informative audience profiles in which you can segment your readers by their interests and what types of content best capture their attention.

By curating these profiles, you can coordinate with your e-commerce affiliates to create relevant shopping experiences for the intended audiences. Align the offers to the reader’s passions, which you can determine based on the content they consume. This is how you improve the user experience and make some extra money through your affiliates.

Affiliate links: personalize ad inserts for maximum effectiveness

This is a very similar approach to your e-commerce strategy. Using first-party data and the profiles you create from it, your affiliates can customize the ad inserts they promote to specific types of readers on your site.

Customization and personalization are the best ways to generate views, clicks, and engagement from targeted advertising. Show your affiliates details about the end audience so that they can create highly curated messaging, images, videos, and other forms of content to connect with the audience. If done successfully, they should see a healthy return for their efforts.

Flexible commercial models: putting it together

Imagine if you could give your affiliate partners the ability to form a trusted partnership built around reliable, audience-driven, first-party data. How much more valuable would a relationship with your publication be to those affiliates as opposed to a standard commercial revenue vendor type relationship that other publishers will offer? There’s no question: you gain a significant competitive advantage by offering a commercial revenue partnership.

The first-party data you possess and the audience profiles you build allow affiliates to send out promotions that will earn engagement. People end up coming to your site and the site of your affiliates. It’s more scalable, more flexible, and more beneficial for everyone involved.

Conclusion

With an analytical approach to the data available to you, a definitive goal, and an audience-first content strategy, the right revenue growth tactics will become increasingly evident. Keep in mind that each of the above approaches, while uniquely effective, may not align with your brand and its interests – which is OK! Carefully curate strategies that are in alignment with your brand’s overarching POV and they will in turn effectively serve the long term goals of your organization and contribute to the growth of your audience and, subsequently, your revenue.

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