Five on Friday: Loyalty, Ad Blocking and Product Promo

Featuring Digiday, Hollywood Reporter, Shopify, Marketing Tech News and Marketing Profs

Five on Friday: Loyalty

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Looking for an escape from the tragic news and heated politics of the week? Check out this week’s Five on Friday, chock full of ideas and tips for you to grow your subscription business. In today’s edition, Digiday explores how publishers are moving away from vanity metrics like pageviews and toward loyalty metrics like time spent on site. Also this week, the Hollywood Reporter looks at who is winning the streaming video war, Shopify offers five creative ways to promote a product, Marketing Profs shares tips on how to get a high search engine ranking, and Marketing Tech News shares five strategies for fighting ad blockers.

 

 

Publishers Move Away from Vanity Metrics and Look Toward Loyalty Instead 

 Ad Blocking and Product Promo

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Once upon a time, online newspapers focused on the number of monthly visitors or the number of clicks. While many still measure that information, loyalty is the new metric, says Digiday, and it is measured in different ways by different publishers. For example, the Dallas Morning News looks at returning visitors and time spent on site, while The Boston Globe and Seattle Times look at which stories convert readers into subscribers.

‘There’s been a movement away from pageviews as a key performance indicator. They’re often viewed as a vanity metric,’ said Devin Smith, a senior manager of audience development at The Boston Globe, the a recent Digiday article.

Other publishers like SF Gate, owned by Hearst, started looking a frequency of visits. They’ve found that readers who visit the site at least 10 times a month are 25 times more likely to convert from a reader into a subscriber. Put simply, quantity should not supersede or replace quality. Publishers should consider loyalty metrics to attract and retain new subscribers. Read more on this KPI shift in ‘In an era of loyalty, newspaper publishers focus on time spent and frequency,’ by Max Willens at Digiday.com.

Who Will Win the Streaming Video Wars?

Five on Friday: Loyalty

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It is hard to believe that streaming video has been around for more than a decade. Today’s streaming giants Amazon Video, Netflix and Hulu were the earliest adopters of the new technology, allowing subscribers to stream video content over the Internet. These companies and that technology has evolved quite a bit and many other players have come – and gone – during that time. But who is really hitting it out of the park? Tim Goodman pondered that question recently for the Hollywood Reporter in ‘Critic’s Notebook: Who Is Winning the Streaming War?

Goodman doesn’t pick favorites, but he highlights some key indicators that the streaming warms are heating up:

  • Netflix is spending big bucks to stockpile exclusive content. For example, last year Netflix made a $100 million four-year deal with ABC’s Shonda Rhimes of Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder fame. The company also made a $300 million dollar deal to screenwriter, director, producer Ryan Murphy.
  • According to Goodman, Amazon has budgeted $4.5 billion for original content and has paid $250 million for the rights to the Lord of the Rings movies.
  • Apple isn’t wowing anyone just yet. Though the company has reportedly committed $1 billion toward buying content, and there are rumors circulating that they may buy a back catalog of content. So far, there is nothing overly impressive from Apple that indicates that they are a major player in the SVOD market – but they have the resources and technology to make it happen.
  • Hulu has played around with its business model for years, but it seems to have settled on a tiered-SVOD with an added product, Hulu Live TV, which has the potential to do well among the skinny bundles. Hulu has also seen success with the award-winning Hulu original, The Handmaid’s Tale. It needs to ride that momentum and stay true to its (latest) business model to remain a top contender.

Read more of Goodman’s analysis on the streaming wars on HollywoodReporter.com.  

5 Creative Ways to Promote a Subscription Product or Service

 Ad Blocking and Product Promo

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Your subscription company has a new product or services to promote online. How are you going to get it in front of customers? Shopify offers 20 ways to promote your product. Here are five to consider:

  1. Email marketing: Thinking beyond standard emails, reach out to new subscribers with incentives to shop, send post-sale emails for seamless onboarding, and/or email prospective buyers who abandoned their carts before completing the sale.
  2. Media coverage: Product launches don’t always garner media attention, so find another newsworthy hook like donating products or services to a nonprofit, invite a celebrity to a product kickoff or reach out directly to bloggers and pitch story ideas that will interest their readers.
  3. Instagram: Buyers are visual, and Instagram has more than 400 million active users who see products cropping up in their feeds every day. Have your photographer take some unique images of your product or service in use, and consider stories, videos or contests to appeal to prospective subscribers.
  4. Pinterest: According to Shopify, 93 percent of active Pinterest users use the site to plan their purchases. One way they do this is by creating wish lists. This could be a particularly good potential market for subscription box companies like clothing and beauty boxes.
  5. Facebook: Facebook has moved beyond a social media platform to become an ecommerce channel with advertising opportunities, Facebook Shop, Facebook Live, and more.

For more great ideas, read ‘How to Promote a Product: 20 Creative Ideas to Try‘ on the Shopify blog.

Keyword Targeting: How to Earn a High Search Ranking

Five on Friday: Loyalty

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According to a recent article by Barry Feldman on Marketing Profs, only one things brings visitors to your website – online searches. His February 20 article included an infographic with some great ideas on how to earn a high search ranking for your subscription website. Here are a few highlights from that infographic:

  • Searches are based on keywords, so you need to understand how to select the right keywords.
  • Factors that affect your ranking: competitiveness of the keyword, on-page optimization, off-page factors that indicate authority
  • Choose clusters of keywords by topic
  • Long tail keyword phrases have less competition
  • Google has a number of free keyword tools to help you identify the right keywords for your subscription business (AdWords Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, Google Trends, etc.)
  • Use your keywords in all of your content (website, social media, in multimedia components, documents, when speaking, etc.)

For more tips like these, read Barry Feldman’s ‘Keyword Selection: The Key to Earning High Search Ranking‘ on MarketingProfs.com.

5 Strategies for Dealing with Ad Blocking 

 Ad Blocking and Product Promo

Source: Bigstock Photo

While we don’t write about it as often, ad blocking is still a growing problem for publishers. The use of ad blockers means their business models require adjustments as they try to compensate for lost ad revenue. It also means they need to find workarounds, so they don’t lose valuable readership. Marketing Tech News recently provided an update on the state of ad blocking and offered strategies for dealing with the problem.

  1. Whitelist or pay: Publishers like GQ have asked readers who use ad blockers to either whitelist their site, so ads can still be delivered, or pay to access content.
  2. Alternative ad formats: Publishers can try native or affiliate advertising that are more difficult for ad blockers to filter out. They also seem to be less intrusive and more palatable to readers.
  3. Diversify revenue: Paywalls, subscriptions and micropayments can help publishers recoup some of their ad revenue losses.
  4. Improve the user experience: Readers block ads because they are intrusive, tracking personal data and they are often annoying. By providing readers with a more pleasant ad experience, readers may be more likely to whitelist sites.
  5. Multi-pronged approach: There is no one-size-fits-all solutions for publishers. Each publisher has to decide what combination of strategies will work to help them to achieve their goals.

For more on ad blocking strategies, read ‘The State of Ad Blocking‘ by Jack Downey on MarketingTechNews.com.


That’s a wrap for this week’s Five on Friday. Have feedback to share, or future topics to suggest? I’d love to hear your ideas! Email me at [email protected]. Have a great weekend!

 

 

 

 

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