The entertainment industry has been complaining for years about its staggering losses due to piracy. However, even as the video, game, and music industries have evolved toward subscription and streaming business models, they continue to generate significant profits. Media firms still say that rampant thievery is costing them billions -- over $50 billion in 2017! Where’s the resolution to this conundrum?
Credit cards are a blessing and a curse for subscription publishers and monthly box merchants. Yes, auto-pay on a regular basis is sweet indeed, but it comes with the peril of card default. Cards expire or max out, customers dispute charges, and more ... but there are ways to minimize the detrimental effects of credit card declines and chargebacks on your subscription business.
Credit card transactions have topped three and a third TRILLION dollars. With that volume, even a tiny percent of misfires create problems on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. Companies that depend on card transactions, especially those who depend on recurring payments, need to be proactive in preparing for pitfalls.
Understanding how payments work is a key foundation to selecting the right vendors for your subscription or membership business. This guide will help you understand the mechanics of a payment, key terms, and the key players involved from the moment your customer submits a payment to your business, to when the money for that customer’s subscription gets into your bank account.
The idea of influencers is not a new one. In fact, they’ve been around for decades, often times in the form of a celebrities as company spokespeople. Remember Brooke Shields and her Calvins? O.J. Simpson for Hertz? William Shatner for Priceline.com? Joe Dimaggio and his Mr. Coffee? Those are all examples of influencers. The marketing world has evolved since then, but instead of having spokespeople, brands, including subscription companies, are now using (paid) influencers to promote and share their products and services. It is a subtler, but more meaningful approach. Let’s take a closer look.
In the last part of our series, Organic Search for Publishers, Kevin Novak explains how to create and scale a system for optimizing organic search across editorial, audience development, and other teams to drive readers deeper into a media property, and support revenue creation.
Kevin Novak continues his discussion on how to implement an effective SEO strategy. In part seven of Organic Search for Publishers, he explains where and how to use the keywords and phrases that are important for your business in your content and meta information. Kevin also goes deeper and explains what structured metadata is as well as why and how you should be leveraging that in your publication to more effectively communicate and provide context about your content for search engines.
Kevin Novak continues his discussion on how to implement an effective SEO strategy. In part six of Organic Search for Publishers, he explains and demonstrates the tools every editorial, marketing, and audience development team should use when determining what keywords will be used as part of their organic search strategy.
Kevin Novak continues his discussion on how to implement an effective SEO strategy. In part five of Organic Search for Publishers, he discusses the big mistake publishers make in their metadata, walks through how to choose the right long- and short-tail keywords for your business, shows examples of how a publisher should use keyword discovery tools and his favorite keyword discovery tools that publishers should use.
In part four of Organic Search for Publishers, Kevin Novak begins his discussion on how to implement an effective SEO strategy. He discusses the one big thing content publishers miss when optimizing their content for organic search: Contextualization. It’s not enough to publish an article, provide some metadata and links. TODAY content publishers need to provide contextualization for that article. That is, what will a reader achieve or get by acting with the content?
In part three of Organic Search for Publishers, Kevin Novak continues this theme but specifically educates members on keywords and why they are important. As Kevin explains, smart editorial organizations understand how their users are finding them through longer and longer search queries and leveraging this information to create more traction with their SEO efforts and other marketing programs.
In part two of Organic Search for Publishers, Kevin Novak walks through why segmentation of your subscribers (and prospects) and talking to them in their own voice are so important to an effective organic search strategy. In Organic Search for Publishers: Why Segmentation and Voice are Important, you will learn how why it’s imperative to get beyond internal thinking that can create false target segments and related content that true customers will not identify with. You will also understand why looking eternally to understand the vocabulary and nuances of how each segment communicates and finds information will be a key cornerstone to your organic search program.
In part one of Organic Search for Publishers, Kevin Novak walks through the basics of what organic search is and more importantly, why organic search is still relevant in the age of social media. If you are not achieving 55% to 75% of inbound traffic from organic, you are underperforming. The new reality of organic search is that you must accommodate and deliver engaging content that is easily discoverable. In Organic Search for Publishers: Understanding the Basics, you will learn how people search for information and how they find and engage with your content. In addition, you will understand the key signals a search engine uses to determine if your content is presented to someone doing a search.
Marketing Automation and lead generation continues to be a key challenge for subscription marketers. Kevin Novak, Subscription Insider Guide to Leveraging Technology, walks through a primer (and 30-page PDF slide how-to deck) on how to generate high-quality leads using lead scoring using marketing automation, behavioral and interaction data to move the lead from awareness to decision quickly and effectively.
Building Customer-Focused Products: An Insider’s Guide to Market Research, is a series compiled by product owners with decades of experience in creating and launching successful subscription products. In How to Prioritize Actions Based on Research, Diane Pierson, Subscription Insider Guide to Building Subscription Products outlines our Readiness Model for prioritizing what product opportunities you should target.
