So you, as professionals in the media and publishing business, how do you counter that? How do you even begin to ward off the competition and create some kind of readership loyalty? Content cut through is the holy grail for media and publishing firms – but you don’t stand a chance if you don’t have a clear understanding of your audience.

Surprisingly in this day and age, a lot of medium and small publishers only have basic audience management processes and systems in place. They might have a good range of titles across a number of media – digital, social, published, live – and have a well-established, loyal audience, but they aren’t able to define their audience well, or understand how engaged that audience is. And until they do, they are limiting their revenue generation potential.

Here are three important steps to effective audience management:

1. Audience profiling: having a clean, central database of audience information, complete with real time updates, is one of the first steps. The next stage is integrating demographic information – data such as profession, location etc – with behavioural information (website activity, content they look at, the topics that interest them etc). All of a sudden, publishers are able to build a more accurate profile of their audience and the more accurate the profile, the more relevant the content and the more valuable the proposition to advertisers.
2. Segmentation: grouping an audience according to shared characteristics or requirements means better, more targeted communication and enables publishers to provide accurate data to advertisers. The ability to slice and dice readership data to drive outbound communication is vital.
3. Increasing engagement: analysis of data from websites and email campaigns – think click throughs, likes, shares, conversions etc – will build the behavioural picture of the audience and when integrated with demographic information, you can begin to build a three-dimensional picture of your audience and use that insight to boost engagement. Targeted and timely content, considered marketing, relevant offers – using your smarts when it comes to targeting your audience will win favour and build loyalty.

There is no cure-all for creating content cut through and building brand loyalty, but working with your audience in a thoughtful, intelligent way is a good start. And customer relationship management (CRM) can help you do that. A single platform that integrates all elements of audience management will give you crystal clear insight into your audience, their profile and how they behave.

To learn more about how CRM can help you manage your audience, read our whitepaper “How media and publishing companies can improve audience management” or contact one of our team on: +44 118 3030 100

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