With pressure on traditional advertising revenue streams, firms are striving to derive income from other sources and a popular target is the internet – now, I realise this isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s interesting to see how one of our non-financial services clients is trying to move into this area.
Classically, one major objection to display advertising is the inability to correlate expenditure to business – in these straightened times, financial directors become obsessively defensive with regard to budgets and extremely demanding that every penny spent is accountable. In this environment, our client is a very successful B2B publisher operating in a niche, technical area and found that during the latter part of 2008 and throughout 2009 advertising revenues were in decline (a common scenario). His proposition is aimed at purchasing professionals with an award-winning editorial team and now operates both in the UK, Mainland Europe and next year extends into the United States.
What should he do?
His core major clients were telling him “move digital” – it’s cheaper, cuts out your postal distribution costs and obviates the need for paper and printing. However, things were not that simple – he had spent a substantial sum on his circulation database research and has, probably, one of the most developed databases in the industry; a definite differentiator and a real benefit in terms of his proposition – simply going digital was not that easy.
So, some readership research was undertaken – what became clear from a sample taken from a readership of some 30,000 readers was interesting. Typically, the internet was used as part of initial research but everyone questioned wanted to keep a paper magazine from which to read and use as reference material – an endorsement of the value-add of the editorial approach. The answer seemed to be an integrated proposition, taking content from the paper publications and driving it into a tailor-made website – the site enables full text search on all the content that has been published, together with the opportunity to drive more newsworthy, topical items in real-time.
The site launched in early June and the experience to date has been tremendous – in the first two weeks of operation, the site has generated some 22,000 page views with advertisers and sponsors given the opportunity to acquire live leads from the site – it is this degree of accountability that advertisers find especially attractive. The other area that seems to be working is that traditional revenues are not being replaced by the move to digital – they are seen as complementary activities and so he is able to continue to offer a full spectrum of both print and digital.
Finally, as the web presence extends, it does give a springboard for further digital marketing opportunities – building a specific community, blogs and site interaction with the editorial team will be possible – a good example of sensible digital adoption.
