Tag: first party data

How To Optimize Your Digital Community for Success

Is your media organization struggling to identify the next steps it should take to create innovative and profitable digital experiences? 

To help you find some clarity, Viafoura President and COO Mark Zohar joined Christoph Trappe, an industry thought leader, on an episode of the Business Storytelling Podcast. 

Throughout the podcast, Zohar sheds light on how the future of growth and success in the media industry will ultimately come down to building better digital communities. 

“COVID and all the things that have impacted us negatively has opened up this positive idea that we need to connect more and we need to connect better [with] digital communities,” Zohar tells Trappe. 

If establishing a thriving digital community is uncharted territory for your business, dig into highlights from the podcast below for some critical guidance and industry best practices.

What Is a Digital Community?

When you think of a community in the physical world, you probably think of a group of people who are connected based on their interests. The same is true for a digital community — it’s a group of real people who regularly engage with one another online through a host company around a common interest.

Zohar says that many digital community builders focus on creating a one-to-many community, where the host brand connects with users to encourage product feedback or promotion. 

“That one-to-many digital community… is very transactional and doesn’t really work well,” states Zohar. “[The] best communities are the many-to-many communities, where we have this very interactive, very spontaneous, very organic affiliation engagement between community members [and] the community host.”

As brands engage and nurture their digital communities, they’re able to satisfy their audience’s need for engagement, gather actionable audience information and unleash revenue-generating power from the people within their communities.

Unlocking the Full Power of Your Community

At the moment, social media gives brands a place to engage with followers. However, brands have no control over their communities on these third-party platforms — and this lack of control prevents brands from owning the relationships with their communities and audience data. 

“Most brands who own a digital strategy want to now have a direct relationship with their community,” Zohar highlights. “They want to have that community also present on their own sites, in their own native apps [and] across their organization.”

With full control over your community, you can provide your audience with interactive and customized experiences directly on your owned and operated channels. You’ll also gain precious first-party user data, which will allow you to tailor your content and advertising strategies according to your audience’s interests and behaviors. 

As mentioned in the podcast, the end goal for building a digital community is to transform anonymous audiences into known, loyal community members. 

“Allow your community members to interact with one another, to connect with one another, to follow one another on your owned and operated channels,” says Zohar. “If you do, what that will result in is retention, re-engagement and a place that people will want to come back to.”

Encouraging On-Site Engagement

Before you can build a digital community, you’ll need to figure out how you can capture the interest of your audience members continuously.

“You can’t create a community unless there’s value for the community,” Zohar explains.  

In other words, you have to offer up exciting on-site experiences to convince people to participate in your online community. Only then will they give up their data to register or pay a subscription fee.

Allowing visitors to create social connections through conversations and live chats or access relevant and personalized content feeds can help you prove the value of your company’s community.

Content moderation is another critical part of establishing your digital properties as a healthy, worthwhile environment for engagement. 

According to Zohar, people that want to join a digital community are often pursuing meaningful conversations in a social environment that’s respectful and civil. 

Community hosts can implement a sophisticated moderation system to protect their social spaces from offensive behavior, keeping conversation meaningful and inviting.

It’s also important for community hosts to engage directly with their visitors, whether that be by highlighting good behavior in the community or prompting discussion.

At the moment, sustainability lies in your ability to monetize your audience. And, as you now know, you can unlock reader loyalty and revenue by establishing a highly engaged, interconnected community around your company. 

For more information on how to run better digital communities, you can view the entire podcast here.

Four Exciting Reasons for Media Leaders To Be Optimistic About the Year Ahead

2020 was disrupted by a deadly virus, shrinking budgets, nonstop work and misinformation, challenging even the most well-established media organizations. Thankfully, change is on the horizon. 

Media companies that have powered through this chaotic and unpredictable period are now well-positioned to embrace a brighter future.

“While the pandemic has not changed where the industry was heading, it has cut the time to get there from years to months, with the virus rapidly accelerating trends like a move to digital and working from home,” two writers state on FIPP’s website. “And even though such quick transformation has come as a shock to publishers, it presents plenty of opportunities to bounce back strongly in 2021.”

Industry leaders must now take a step back to identify and take hold of new opportunities to succeed and get excited in this strange, new world. 

To get started, here are four reasons why the year ahead will help to revive your sense of optimism in the future of your business.

Benefiting From Larger Audiences

Due to the pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests and U.S. election, media organizations saw their digital audiences climb in size throughout 2020. 

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center even revealed that digital news consumers now prefer catching up on the news by visiting media websites directly. 

Entertainment-focused media companies, like Netflix, also saw their audiences increase last year as more people sought to escape from reality and stay busy at home.

Between the internet users looking for trustworthy news coverage and those seeking entertainment, media organizations have larger audiences to nurture and monetize. And companies that can prove their ongoing value this year will benefit from sustainable reader revenue.

More specifically, the coming months will be an opportunity for media companies to engage and convert their visitors into long-term, profitable brand supporters.

The End of Trump’s Reign

Media companies have a love-hate relationship with Trump. On the one hand, the past four years and the 2020 presidential election were extremely eventful thanks to Trump, which made for excellent news content and led to a boom in news subscriptions. And yet, Trump popularized the belief that media promotes fake news and reduced trust in media. 

“The last four years have been marked by a deliberate and systemic attack on the press by the president of the United States,” explains Gabriel Escobar, editor and senior vice president of The Philadelphia Inquirer. “It has — I suspect — contributed to the lack of trust in journalism which was not great to begin with.”

The transition to Biden’s presidency means that news media companies can finally begin rebuilding their relationships with audiences, restoring trust in the news.

The Rise of First-Party Data

Anyone who deals with audience data will know that third-party cookies are crumbling, triggering an industry-wide shift from third-party to first-party data strategies. 

However, the elimination of third-party cookie usage isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

First-party cookies allow media companies to learn more about their audience members and personalize experiences directly on their websites or apps.

In fact, Kayleigh Barber, a senior reporter at Digiday, highlights how Future plc “has seen a range of 50-70% better performance on campaigns that use its first-party audience segment data than campaigns that rely on third-party data.” 

By refocusing on first-party data, media companies can understand the identities, habits and preferences of their digital community members and serve them better in the future.

Moving Toward Virtual Events

Virtual events have completely replaced in-person events over the last few months. Gradually, media leaders have discovered that virtual events are cheaper and easier to organize, have no attendee limits and lend themselves better to interactive discussion sessions. 

“As we enter 2021, the era of virtual events — even in a post-pandemic world — is here to stay, at least as one way for news organizations to hold these gatherings,” says Rick Berke, the co-founder and editor of Stat, a news media company. 

It’s clear that even in-person events in the future will need to be supported with virtual elements to maximize attendee engagement. 

Although recent months have created a series of hurdles for media companies to jump over, organizations that have survived until this point are stronger than ever. Media leaders can now look forward to forging strong connections to their audiences with their newfound knowledge in the year ahead. 

Four Things Companies Are Doing to Take Their Subscription Strategies to the Next Level

Earning reader revenue isn’t a simple task in the media industry. Even with a paywall in place, those precious subscriptions won’t start pouring in on their own. Not unless your company has a strong subscription strategy.

So what kinds of subscription-driving tactics can delight visitors and convince them to become dedicated community members?

“We see subscribers weighing up personal benefits, such as distinctive content, convenience, and value, with perceived benefits for society,” state the authors of Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020.

This means that companies must cater to the needs and interests of consumers while serving their entire communities to create loyal subscribers.

For those of you who are hoping to strengthen your existing subscription strategy, there are several tactics worth trying out. Let’s look at some of the effective subscription strategies that publishers have recently implemented for some inspiration.

Personalizing the Visitor Experience With Audience Data

Audience data is a powerful tool that media companies can use to enrich their subscription strategies, satisfying the needs and desires of consumers.  

ARA, a Spanish publisher in Barcelona, credits its 3,200 new subscribers largely to its use of first-party audience data. The media company closely assessed its community members to tailor their experiences to their behaviors and content interests.

“We want to know where our audiences are, how they consume, how they read our news and we started to produce more according to these audiences,” says Georgina Ferri Todera, the chief revenue and innovation officer at ARA. “But the first step was knowing more about our audiences.”

The Wall Street Journal has also recognized the need to start collecting audience data to personalize its subscribers’ experience. As a result, subscribers are more likely to have a positive digital experience and remain loyal to the brand.

Communicating Directly With Audiences

If you’re not sure what could make your company’s content and on-site experience more appealing to consumers, you can always turn to your audience for answers. 

TIME, for instance, asked consumers directly about what resources it could provide to help people during the early stages of the pandemic. 

“People told us what they want and we fulfilled it for them,” explains Maya Draisin, SVP of progress marketing at TIME. “And they responded with 1.5 million views.”

In general, your audience is your compass. By following their directions and fulfilling their needs, you can reinforce the value of your company’s content and subscription program.

Opting Out of Big Tech Platforms

For professionals in the digital world, the instinct to promote content across multiple social media and news aggregation channels is only natural. Many people expect to attract greater audiences and more subscribers by promoting content on third-party websites. 

However, this approach can actually be counterproductive to your subscription program. Not only do consumers lack trust in the content on big tech platforms, but your company also loses revenue as well as precious audience data to the host platform. 

The New York Times is one of the latest media companies to recognize the value of creating direct relationships with readers on its own properties. 

After opting out of Apple’s news aggregation platform, the Time’s COO, Meredith Kopit Levien, stated that the company can form a “direct path for sending those readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers, and the nature of our business rules.”

Build a direct relationship with readers to, therefore, earn their trust and forge daily habits that lead to long-term subscription growth.

Working Audience Engagement Into the Subscription Plan

While there’s no single right way to use a paywall, some publishers see merit in engaging audiences before revealing a subscription message. 

This process helps consumers feel connected to media companies, and then when they’re active enough online, guides them to become loyal subscribers. 

Slate is one of many publishers that have implemented this strategy. 

“If you want people to join or subscribe, asking them to do it voluntarily is not quite enough,” explains Dan Check, CEO of Slate. 

You can encourage on-site audience engagement through interactive tools and exceptional journalism before and after visitors subscribe to your services.

Go beyond your paywall by strengthening your company’s connection to its audience. 

Whether you choose to replicate these strategies on your digital properties or not, your ability to increase your loyal subscribers all comes down to engaging and understanding consumers. Tie these core actions into your subscription strategy to create and retain a strong community of brand advocates.

Five Common Mistakes Media Companies Make That Lead to Subscriber Churn

Subscribers are helping to fund the media industry right now. And in order to maximize reader revenue, companies are working to perfect their subscription strategies.

Juan Señor, president at a media consulting company, explains that “many publishers can expect to get up to 50% of their revenues from reader revenue, and [that number’s] growing.”

However, this boom in reader revenue doesn’t come without a major challenge: subscriber churn. As media companies begin to see interest in coronavirus content tapering off, they’re fighting tooth and nail to keep readers loyal and paying. 

But reducing subscriber churn doesn’t have to be a complicated task… especially if you know what’s causing it. To help prevent you from losing precious, paying community members, here are a few common mistakes your media company should avoid making at all costs.

1. Allowing Toxic Comments to Exist

While hosting user commenting tools is a powerful way to engage visitors, letting people post offensive content comes with consequences. Some of these consequences can include trolls and community-wide disengagement. 

In fact, nearly 50% of members will remove themselves from a platform when they see incivility from user comments. Many advertisers and advertising platforms also don’t want to be associated with any type of offensive content. 

By protecting the quality of conversations through an effective moderation solution, you’ll protect your brand’s reputation and ability to monetize its community.

2. Not Leveraging First-Party Data

Any insight you can get into the behavior and interests of your visitors is extremely useful. It can be used to improve their experience with your brand and strengthen the relevance of your content. 

“Companies that are able to produce insights from content, audiences and commerce transactions will be the most successful going forward,” Kristen O’Hara, the chief business officer at Hearst Magazines, tells Digiday. 

Plus, now that third-party cookies are being phased out by internet browsers, businesses must focus on gathering and analyzing first-party data. Failure to do so could prevent you from knowing how to keep your community members interested in your content and willing to pay for a subscription. 

3. Leaving Subscribers Unengaged

Many media companies believe that the process of engaging visitors must continue until they convert into a member or subscriber. But onsite audience engagement shouldn’t stop after this conversion point.

Without engaging your subscribers, they can become disengaged and churn.

“Once people come across your content the key is to make it easy, accessible and engaging in the hope they will come back,” says Chris Waiting, CEO of The Conversation.This rings true for visitors at every step in their digital journey — whether it’s their first visit to your website or they’ve already subscribed.

4. Focusing on Building a Community on Social Media Instead of on Your Website

There are thousands of active users on social media. Some media companies are, therefore, tempted to use it as their primary way to connect with consumers. 

Unfortunately, companies don’t have much control over user data, who sees their content or the quality of conversations on social media, and are subject to comments from trolls and bots.

The New York Times’ COO, Meredith Kopit Levien, stresses the importance of building “a direct path for sending… readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers, and the nature of our business rules.”

Social media, and any other type of content aggregation platform, removes that element of control over readers for businesses. It also prevents you from reaching, understanding and engaging the subscribers that you’ve already earned.

5. Not Positioning Your Brand to Be Trustworthy

Robbie Kellman Baxter, a strategy consultant, explains that consumers pay for subscriptions because “they trust your [organization] to solve their problem, or achieve their goal, forever.” 

No matter what kind of content your media company creates, it’s essential that your company is a trustworthy resource for consumers. 

But brands can jeopardize this trust through several actions: like allowing toxicity to exist in social spaces, running your trustworthy content near misinformation on third-party platforms or even not being transparent enough with your audience. 

You can’t expect consumers to continue paying for your services if they don’t believe in your brand. To position your brand as a trustworthy resource, be sure you’re meeting your community’s needs, serving up reliable content, and are taking steps to keep them safe. 

It can be easy for any media company to make a simple mistake that has detrimental effects. Thankfully, you now have everything you need to avoid these common pitfalls and continue on the path toward success and sustainability.

Week of Oct. 5th-11th: Your Media News Update

During the course of the last week, the media and publishing industry has been talking about some very important and thought-provoking issues:

  • Publishers are scrambling to expand their revenue channels while navigating through the challenges presented by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 
  • Mergers and acquisitions are all the rage as publishers attempt to expand their content offerings and appeal to niche audiences
  • Valuations of privately-owned publishers are skyrocketing but at the expense of employees

To learn more and stay up to date with the latest and greatest newsmakers of the past week, keep reading about the topics below.

Publishers Scramble for Revenue-Generating Alternatives Post-GDPR

For many publishers, the ever-evolving legalities surrounding the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and loss of third-party cookies on Safari and Firefox browsers represents an inconvenient, potential threat to programmatic ad revenue.  

To combat the restrictions, publishers are trying to figure out ways to monetize their first-party data by creating audience identifiers that help clients target the right people at scale. With this approach, publishers won’t need to rely on third-party cookies.

In some cases, this has led to more granular targeting on their own digital properties around audience intents, behaviors, sentiments and interests. For others, this involves selling first-party data, which will be used for targeting audiences outside of their own properties. 

News Corp is one of the publishers actively pursuing beyond-the-cookie strategies that prioritize identifying audiences with first-party rather than third-party cookies. The organization issues a news ID for individual readers so they can be identified without the use of third-party cookies. To date, the media group has created 590 million global anonymized user IDs. 

Being able to track each known user means that companies can identify the behaviors and appetites within their communities, providing valuable insights around readers’ habits and preferences. 

Others are also pushing hard to convert anonymous users into known users based on first-party data. Insider spent the last year developing hundreds of millions of reader IDs, mapping first-party data that isn’t personally identifiable but provides in-depth insights into reader behaviors, interests and intents. As a result, the company is able to create effective targeting segments for marketers.

Sports media companies are also only beginning to realize now that fan engagement data is key to building audience loyalty and revenue. 

The Financial Times, on the other hand, is focusing on putting efforts towards capitalizing on private deals — specifically programmatic-guaranteed deals. 

Meanwhile, The Washington Post has created a first-party data ad targeting tool that offers detailed contextual targeting capabilities along with user-intent predictions for marketers. The publisher aims to provide targeting options for advertising clients who want to wean themselves away from third-party cookies.

Digital Publishers Are Expanding Their Audiences by Focusing on Niche Interests

In pursuit of audience expansion, digital publishers are buying up smaller, niche publishing companies and are launching new verticals focused on those specific interest areas. 

A growing trend among publishers, the industry as a whole is looking to achieve greater leverage against ad giants Google and Facebook. Three recent announcements are clear proof points that the focus on niche content is how publishers are trying to distinguish themselves within the market:

  • IAC’s Dotdash — a media organization that owns 10 publishers — just purchased Liquor.com, its fourth acquisition this year of niche vertical content.
  • Vice Media’s male-dominated content will now be more inclusive with a deal to acquire Refinery29, a popular publisher with younger female audiences interested in their lifestyle and entertainment verticals. 
  • Bustle Media Group (BMG), a female-focused digital media company, is launching a tech-focused news site called Input in November, bringing BMG’s total site count to eight. Over the past year, BMG also acquired science-focused site Inverse, culture-focused The Outline, and pop-culture-focused Nylon in a bid to attract more diverse audiences. 

Niche outlets are able to help publishers not only expand their audience reach but also their ability to target ads based on interests. This is the main advantage tech giants already have, which easily persuades marketers to sacrifice their precious ad dollars. 

By mimicking this core benefit — interest-based ad targeting on their own properties — publishers can increase their share of the pie. For example, Dotdash is bundling its assets into four groups, including “health and wellness,” “finance” and “food, beverage and home” to make it easier to pitch to certain brand categories by interest area.

Digital Publishing All-Stock Deals Are the New Normal

Investors are no longer interested in funding media companies that are not growing quickly. As a result, the growing trend is making all-stock deals as the last and best option for publishers and their investors. 

While mergers and acquisitions have dominated media headlines this year, some of the biggest have been all or mostly stock-based deals, including the three most recent ones:

Stock deal valuations are essentially what someone else values the stock to be worth. And the only way to know this is to either go public or to sell the company to someone else. It’s up to the seller and the buyer to make up and agree upon the value. The stock isn’t traded on a public exchange, so while the relative values are meaningful, the overall value is virtually meaningless.

Another big issue is that all-stock acquisitions often mean that whatever common stock employees held is now worth much less. That can make it harder to keep the talent they have, as well as recruit new talent.

Viafoura Releases Next Generation Viafoura Engagement Cloud for Media Companies

Enhanced solution empowers media brands to drive subscriber rates and online engagement, demonstrating competitive value to advertisers

TORONTO (August 23, 2017): Viafoura, a leader in engagement, commenting and moderation tools, today announces the release of its upgraded Next Generation Engagement Cloud. Optimized to encourage audience participation, registration and subscription within online communities, the enhanced solution provides media brands with the tools and first-party user behavior data necessary to support their market value.

As the only Engagement Cloud for media companies, Viafoura understands the importance of establishing and cultivating an engaged and loyal online community. Clients using the next generation platform can expect to see a rise in their website’s engagement metrics due to the complete redesign of the real-time commenting user experience. This enhanced experience includes new engagement capabilities such as follow features, notification feed and news tray, web push notifications, automated moderation and more.

The addition of follow features allows users to “follow” authors, other users, pages, sections and topics to receive real-time updates in their notification feed. The new web push notifications give brands the added ability to deliver breaking news alerts when users are off-site. They also give brands the opportunity to alert users of new replies, likes and followers, due to the platform’s one-of-a-kind integration with commenting features.

“With these new integrated tools, media companies can use Viafoura to take their audience development strategy to the next level.”
—Jesse Moeinifar, Viafoura founder and CEO

“Instead of leaving engagement to social media and, thus, losing out on invaluable first-party user data and on-site interactions, our platform empowers media brands to build relationships with customers directly on their owned channels. This is achieved by giving brands direct access to on-site engagement tools and user behavior data,” said Viafoura’s founder and CEO, Jesse Moeinifar.

The newly-added user behavior data provided by Viafoura includes pageviews, attention time and return visits. This complements the platform’s existing data collection on a brand’s audience, community and specific campaigns. Viafoura API’s connect this first-party data with marketing and sales platforms (i.e. DFP, BI, Paywall, CRM, DMP) to drive actionable analytics and revenue. With this information, brands can deliver more relevant content, such as emails and re-purposed, user-generated content, to cultivate continued engagement among their target audience, thus increasing revenue.

To learn more about Viafoura’s Next Generation Viafoura Engagement Cloud, visit the company’s blog at www.viafourastage.wpengine.com/blog or contact sales@viafoura.com.

Interested in learning more?

Connect with us today to learn how Viafoura can help you build, manage and monetize your audience.

Connect Now
Exit mobile version