Four keys of online audience development

In my role as subcommittee chair for online audience development for the Digital Media Council of the American Business Media trade group (boy, that's a mouthful), I'm embarking on a mission to learn the tactics and techniques that Internet-centric media companies are using to attract and retain site traffic, registered users, e-newsletter subscribers and opt-in leads for advertisers.

Thanks to Maxine Minar, COO of PostNewsweek Tech Media, and chair of ABM's Circulation Committee, I was able to speak with Anne Holland, president of Marketing Sherpa in an attempt to find speakers on this topic. By the way, if you've read Malcom Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, Anne is a Connector--a person who has the gift for meeting and knowing everybody in the space of online marketing. Not only is it her job to find out what techniques are working best for online marketers, but her site itself must embody the best of these techniques to attract and retain visitors.

In my brief talk with Anne (and we're planning to speak again soon) I discerned four techniques that Internet-centric media companies are using for what Pennwell's Tom Cintorino likes to call Zero Cost Audience Development. Well maybe not zero cost, but a heck of a lot cheaper than telephoning 50,000 readers at three bucks a pop:

1. Search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Seems obvious, but how many publishers do this? It's one thing if you make widgets, and want to list high in the rankings for widgets. But if you publish media in a given space, the huge number of topics that your publication or Web site covers makes SEO/SEM a totally different challenge. Take our magazine, Packaging World. We have identified well over 100 categories in our space, both product and topic oriented. That doesn't count landing pages for specific digital magazines and e-newsletters. Nor does it count landing pages for advertiser lead gen ads. It's a whole different ball of wax than trying to show up high in the rankings for keywords related to widgets. Yet it's become clear to me that it's absolutely necessary. Anyone who knows SEO vendors that specialize in working with publishers, let me know!

2. Co-registration. This is easier said than done for publishers that sell advertising, but basically the idea is that anytime someone signs up for an e-newsletter subscription on another Web site that's topically related to your Web site, you negotiate a relationship whereby your newsletter subscription is offered as another checkbox on that other Web site's e-newsletter sign-up form. The company Co-Reg Complete offers software for this, and I'm trying to reach them to find examples of publishers who are using this tactic successfully. Not surprisingly, Marketing Sherpa uses this tactic on a lot of marketing vendor sites. One advantage: They have a paid content model, so there's no conflict of interest. I'd like to see an example of an ad-supported publisher doing this with suppliers in their space.

3. Landing page optimization. I know most publishers aren't using this technique. The idea is that the very design and layout of the sign-up page (for our purposes, called the landing page, the place where the moment of truth occurs, when readers decide whether or not to opt in to your site, newsletter, magazine, advertiser white paper, etc.) greatly influences the number of readers who "convert" or complete the form. By testing different versions of the page, you can increase conversion by up to several hundred percent. This is much less difficult than it used to be. There's A/B testing, which most people are familiar with, but a more sophisticated technique is multivariate testing, which allows you to test several variables at once without designing specific Web pages for all the specific permutations of the variables. There is a whole crop of vendors that will help with this, including Optimost, Site Tuners, Vertster and Offermatica. Most of these folks serve the e-commerce field, where landing page optimization is much more common. But publishers have a lot to learn from the e-commerce guys.

4. Tracking/analytics. This is the adroit use of Web analytics programs to give you feedback on metrics that are meaningful to publishers. How many people subscribed to which e-newsletter products, and which were the most effective sources of traffic, both internally and externally? If you're doing paid search, which keyword groups yielded the best ROI? Which should be scrapped? Anyone doing paid search without tying it to some ROI metric is throwing their money down the drain. In my limited experience, Web anaylitcs programs overwhelm publishers with interesting but unactionable ndata without giving publishers specific metrics that make sense for their business. That's because publishers often don't know how to communicate what they want to measure to the analytics vendors.

There's more to come. Anyone interested in cooperating with me on this study of online audience development should call me at 312/238-9315 or e-mail me. Definitely plan on attending ABM's event in New York City on March 16, 2006 to learn more.