Carrie:  Embracing new media, expanding your audience reach and educating your advertisers on digital media attribution. Embracing new media, expanding your audience reach and educating your advertisers on digital media attribution. 

MGES: Can you give me some examples of new media that you’re selling?

Carrie:  The digital world is always evolving and our products and solutions need to stay ahead of the curve so we’re always looking at ways that we can embrace new media. I’ll give you a few examples of what we’re doing, starting with selling our digital inventory on the exchange which we started doing based on the buying-shift of ad agencies who started to shy away from direct, endemic site buys.  If you start to lose business to this shift in spending, you can sell your inventory on a private marketplace through a direct-deal with that agency, based on agreed-upon pricing.  

This allows them to buy and optimize media programmatically, without you compromising the value or relevance of your audience.  We have also been selling native content and video for quite some time now where the value proposition is the fact that the partner is leveraging our team of content experts to create the content, to reach our qualified audience for one year and for the partner to also own that content for distribution on their owned-channels which continues to work to drive organic traffic directly to them indefinitely.  We’re looking the new flexible native banners, too.  

We’ve been running native banners for years which drive 3-6x the CTR’s compared to traditional IAB Universal Ad Package sizes (increasing your revenue potential based on increased pricing) but we always struggled with agencies not purchasing native because they didn’t want to one-off creative. 

Now, agencies can run flexible native creative through 3rd party so they are more open to it and Google’s ad server (DFP who we use) offers new native advertising options where we simply request assets from partners like headlines, tag lines images and body copy and the ad expresses in various expressions across our site.  This enables us to build more cohesive native integrations that perform much better than traditional display, while also minimizing the set-up time for the campaigns, improving margins across the board.  The IAB also just released native guidelines to support this.

MGES:  You mentioned expanding reach – how do you know what to embrace and what to pass on?
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Carrie:  We start to think outside of our owned-channels when we start approaching a digital inventory ceiling or when a partner has really maxed-out their share-of-voice (SOV) on our direct channels.  We don’t want to foray into 3rd party channels right out of the gate, because we risk clients simply diversifying their campaign into 3rd party channels where margins are smaller so we always assess and expand our services based on the unique position of each of our markets but we’ll incorporate things like re-targeting, social media advertising where  you can either charge for a post on your page, or, you can do creative things like dark posts where you allow your advertisers to market to your audience but not show on your page or other avenues like distribution. 

We do a lot of paid distribution of content and videos through networks like Outbrain, Taboola and RocketFuel.  The idea here is that in year-one, the customer is really building their content and showcasing it on our site.  In year-two, we’re renewing the exposure on our site and are also helping them to reach look-alike audience through content networks.  You obviously have to have a media team in place to do this and again, the margins aren’t anything to write home about on these 3rd party programs but we’ve found that they help to make us ‘stickier’ with our partners.  We’re bringing them access to services that they may not be able to attain on their own and are bringing them cutting-edge programs which makes them look good to their board.

MGES:  You just produced a white paper on the value of print in the travel and tourism market place in 2017.  What did your research find?

Carrie:  Print is still very important in our industry.  We’ve been partnering with a leading 3rd party market research firm to conduct the State of the American Traveler research since 2007.  This study examines the consumer path-to-purchase in the travel space and print usage is the highest it’s ever been.  I think that this is because consumers are overwhelmed by the amount of choices and information out there and print is a trusted medium. According to a 2017 Marketing Sherpa study, print is the most credible medium whereas digital is the least credible.  

This ties to my earlier statement about educating our advertisers on measuring influence to sale.  In the tourism vertical, the path to purchase is incredibly complex.  American travelers are using 140 websites in the research and booking phase, up from 38 last year.  This means that the path to purchase is not linear, making attribution (for print AND digital), incredibly complex.  We educate our partners on the importance of setting up campaign tracking codes (we actually set them up for them if they do not submit) for all advertising so that they can start to ‘measure beyond the click’. 

Not all clicks are created equal so if you start to educate your partners on measuring the quality of the audience (looking at engagement and completion of site conversion goals), the data is going to speak for itself.  Afterall, we offer an incredibly unique and qualified audience that has a strong likelihood to convert.  It’s just about training your advertisers to look at the right metrics on their side.

MGES:  What do you see as the future of B2B media?

Carrie:  Unique story-telling is going to continue to be important, too.  As Google shifts from being a “referral engine” focused on directing traffic to outbound sites to being an “answer engine” focused on answering queries within their own eco-system, we need to re-think content strategies.  From basic things like utilizing Schema Mark-up Language to identify content on your site so that Google can index and present it as answer (for instance, we tag all of the ingredients in a recipe, how long it takes to make the dish etc. for a shrimp and crawfish recipe on our Louisiana clients site and now, that recipe is the “answer” when you search Google, driving more traffic to our site to more advanced story-telling tactics that cannot be replicated using new technologies like video, and interactive mapping like we did for our St Pete Clearwater client. 

We use a few personalization tactics like Get Smart Content where we can personalize messaging on our site based on various parameters.  For instance, organically, our content team uses it to change the conversion message for the site (ie: if someone has ordered our guide but not signed up for email, we push email opt-ins) but we also sell this too.  If a partner wants to target a drive-market audience, we can show a hero message on our home page to that audience through Get Smart Content.  There are more advanced options here like Acquia Lift, created by the inventers of Drupal.  This essentially sits on top of your CMS and dynamically recommends content to your site users based on how they are interacting with your site. 

MGES:  Thanks Carrie!

Best of Success,

Kathi Simonsen
President
MediaGrowth Executive Summit
mediagrowth.com
ksimonsen@mediagrowth.com