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As a marketer in the magazine industry, do you have an overall strategy to learn more about your audience? How are you leveraging your research to attract and retain subscribers, and to secure more advertising sales? Subscriber research is multifaceted, but we can break it down into four main categories:

• Research to develop a circulation strategy
• Research to benchmark customer satisfaction
• Research to sell advertising
• Research to syndicate and sell to your advertisers

Developing your circulation strategy could mean many things. You may want to grow into a new market, launch a new magazine or develop a core marketing message. With many thousands of subscribers, you are sitting on a veritable goldmine of data, waiting to be collected. But first you need a plan.

Step 1) Define your objectives
What do you want to accomplish? This could be anything from attracting more prospects, retaining current subscribers, keeping subscribers satisfied, discovering new opportunities for content or winning more advertisers. Defining these key objectives will help you focus on the research that you need.

Step 2) What do you already know?
What sort of information do you already have, and what do you need to take action? Figuring this out will help you determine what sort of research you still need. If you have nothing, then begin by doing some secondary research to see what you may be able to find. Compiling research from the web will be a lot cheaper than conducting a failed survey.

Step 3) What gaps do you need to fill?
After you have collected all prior and secondary research, determine where you need to fill in the gaps in order to meet your objectives. Do you have…

• …very little useful information at all?
• …some defining characteristics of the information you would like to collect but no overall quantitative validation?
• …quantitative validation from previous studies?

If you already have the answers you need from a past report, you may not need to do any market research at all, unless you want to verify what you know, or think a time series including past data will allow you to understand trends.

Step 4) Build a research plan based on your objectives and the gaps in your knowledge
If you do not even have a framework around which to build a quantitative study, you will need to do some qualitative research. For example, if you are a specialty publisher focused on a small niche, a systematic schedule of customer visits will help you conceptualize how subscribers think about your publication(s). If your publication is larger and consumer oriented, focus groups, panels or open-ended surveys will prove invaluable.

After building a framework for how subscribers think about your magazine(s), you will use that to formulate a survey. Just because the 20-30 subscribers you interviewed in focus groups believe one way does not mean that the entire universe of your circulation agrees. Quantitative validation in the form of a subscriber survey will confirm what the entire population of your subscribers believes.

Step 5) Rinse and repeat
Over time, you’ll want to confirm and reconfirm your subscribers’ conceptualizations of what your magazine is all about. But the ongoing research must fit into a specific set of goals for your organization. For example, you may want to:

• Benchmark subscriber satisfaction overall, by segment and among various key attributes
• Conduct an ongoing competitive analysis of how your magazine performs in various attributes vs. other similar publications
• Continually explore new opportunities among your current customers to create new content, or launch new magazines
• Create sales materials around subscriber buying behavior that will show the effectiveness of advertising in your magazine vs. the competition
• Syndicate ongoing studies that you can sell to advertisers, helping them understand their potential universe of customers

Knowing your subscribers can prove invaluable. But before you send a survey or conduct a focus group, make sure that your market research tactics fit into an overall strategy, allowing you to leverage your collected data into an overall action plan that you can use to meet your business goals.

Spyglass Intelligence LLC has published A Competitive Assessment of the Top 12 Largest US Consumer Magazine Publishers, which you can purchase on Amazon.com.

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Michael Porter’s Five Forces is a framework for analyzing the potential profitability of an industry. Over the last ten years, the magazine publishing business has ridden a roller coaster of profits and losses due to the push of information online, financial calamity and the advent of the iPad. But overall, will profits eventually be squeezed by better technology, intense competition or new entrants?

The threat of the entry of new competitors
How hard is it to set up a new magazine? In a great article about magazine startup tactics, Dan Wiesner talks about what he does to launch a new magazine. With an eight-month budget of $20,000, a subsequent 5-6 month budget of $60,000 and a final 24-36 months at $40,000, Wiesner aggregated a list of 50,000 names and ended with a circulation of 40,000. So in three years and a relatively small amount of money, a competitor can be up, running and profitable.

This means that, for smaller magazine publishers, the threat of entry is huge. But larger publishers with circulations in the millions will have less to worry about from a new entrant. Their worries lie more with existing competitors who want to move into their space.

The threat of substitute products or services
This big threat has materialized over the last 10 years. The internet has eroded subscriber loyalty and offers advertisers a cheap, trackable marketing channel. With the iPad, magazine publishers are able to offer better services to advertisers, but the pressure for results-based marketing will be huge, especially in the age of Google.

Magazine publishers will need to find ways to mitigate this threat and prove the effectiveness of print marketing. More interactive advertising on tablets will help, as will subscriber surveys focused on the effectiveness of print ads within a certain, branded context. Without good differentiation, ad dollars will continue to leak into the search-engine-marketing world and away from magazine publishers.

The mass-market reach of consumer magazines also helps to differentiate advertising. Online advertising can reach various micro-audiences with different keywords, but creating a mass consumer psychology around certain products requires something more. The number of competitors in the magazine space dampens this advantage, so it is imperative that publishers work hard to delineate their focus on content, context and audience.

The bargaining power of customers (buyers)
Subscribers have some bargaining power vis-à-vis magazine publishers as great deal of content is now located online for free. Because prices are low, and consumers still crave a total, branded experience from certain magazines, it will be more important for magazines to keep their core focus rather than becoming generalist providers of content.

Advertisers have more bargaining power, especially with the substitute of cheap, trackable online marketing. Again, the challenge is to convince advertisers that a fully-branded, contextual, mass-market experience for their prospects is a necessity as well. Any qualitative or quantitative research to back up these attributes will be invaluable.

The bargaining power of suppliers
Suppliers to the magazine publishing business have very little power. Printers and journalists all compete for the same business. However, some personalities can exert a greater influence over content, like Oprah Winfrey or Rachael Ray. Celebrity-focused publications will lack some of this advantage.

The intensity of competitive rivalry
Competition in the industry can be fierce, especially within growing segments like food and health. But any competition will differ among brand-positioning models. For example, a niche publisher with a strong core focus will face less intense competition than a broad consumer magazine without such focus.

Overall assessment
The magazine publishing business certainly faces some strong challenges in terms of substitution and competitive rivalry. But with a strategy focused on leveraging core strengths can help to mitigate weakness on both these fronts. Some large, multi-brand publishers will do this well, organizing their magazines around core messages and audiences. Some will do it poorly and less profitably.

When management talks about strategy, they usually mean tactics or goals. If your strategy is to grow circulation year-over-year by 10%, or to spend more on pay-per-click campaigns, then you’re not really talking about strategy. Growing circulation is great, but just stating that you want to grow it is a goal, not a strategy. Along that vein, investing more in search-engine marketing or direct mail could be part of a broader strategy, but by themselves they are just tactics.

So what is a strategy? Putting it simply, it is using a point (or points) of leverage to your advantage over your competitors. A circulation strategy is therefore focusing on a core concept where you have a competitive advantage to grow your list of subscribers or attract advertisers. That core concept could involve your brand, various pieces of content, price, market reach or some other area where you possess a key competitive advantage.

For publishers who rely on paid circulation, this will be a one-step process of targeting a certain profile, providing content that satisfies some real or perceived need, and positioning your publication vs. competitors so that it occupies some unassailable niche. For publishers who rely on advertising, a strategy can become more muddled because revenue comes from selling access to the community you build. Your content needs to be focused to build your community, but you’re targeting a certain profile so you can sell them to advertisers, not necessarily so you can make money directly from circulation sales.

Let’s take The Economist and Business Week as two examples. The Economist charges about $110 per year for a subscription while Business Week only charges $40 per year. With almost 1.5 million subscribers, The Economist could take home more than $150 million in circulation revenue whereas Business Week would only take home around $37 million with its 923,000 subscribers.

What point of leverage could The Economist use against Business Week? The Economist is an international magazine with in-depth political, economics, business and financial coverage from a global perspective. While a CEO of a local, Midwest retailer may not read The Economist, a globe-trotting marketing manager at a specialty publishing company may. The opposite holds true for Business Week. Therefore, the leverage point for The Economist might be the internationality of its coverage, how it provides in-depth reporting and analysis on politics, business and economics in various parts of the globe. Business Week, on the other hand, could focus its message on being the everything-about-business publication, leveraging that message in a mainly American market.

For both these examples, content becomes the key to differentiating the publication. But in multi-brand publishing companies, this kind of focus does not always remain clear. In fact, a fundamental law of physics applies to the business world: corporate entropy. Over time, powerful editors or publishers may erode an initial positioning strategy by bringing more features into their own, favored publications. This cannibalizes other brands within the same company. Without an overarching positioning strategy with strong guidelines as to what constitutes focus, brands become muddled, and will not drive the circulation or advertising margins needed to survive.

What sort of circulation strategy will you pursue? What points of leverage exist that you can take advantage of? Here’s where effective market research can help you. Most of your subscribers are aware that other brands compete with yours in terms of content, attitude, coverage and format. In fact, many will have considered, or even subscribed to, those other brands while choosing your publication. Therefore, asking your own subscribers and prospects to rate your publication on various features separately, and in conjunction with their thinking on other publications, can help you determine whether the marketplace has already chosen your core focus.

A subscriber survey will help you see the competitive landscape for what it is, evaluating the positioning of your own publications vs. the array of competition they face. You will spot whether your publications even have a core content focus, or if the initial positioning strategy has eroded in the face of powerful corporate interests who want to promote their own content at the expense of the business as a whole.

Not only will focused content on a niche audience provide an effective strategy to grow your circulation, but it will also help advertisers judge the context in which they will promote their message. For example, if you want to sell a US-focused investment product to prospects within the United States, Business Week may be your best bet. But if you want to infuse the prestige of your luxury brand into an international audience of CEOs, you may choose The Economist. These are, of course, simple hypotheses based on a cursory look at each publication’s marketing messages. But testing similar hypotheses among many content features, across brands and with different audience segments will give you the quantitative validation you need to test your initial strategic hypothesis.

We all love to talk about closed-loop reporting, tracking our leads from the time they visit our website to when they sign on the line that is dotted (thank you Alec Baldwin). But open up your marketing automation reporting suite or web analytics platform, and chances are you’ll be lost in the hundreds of reports they show you. And you’re not even finished yet, because you still need to connect the dots to your CRM and see which opportunities have closed.

How do you look at all of this intelligently? Before you dive deep into your reports, you need to know what you want. Below is an outline of what you should look at to measure the success of your demand generation campaigns. This is not a complete list by a long shot, but hopefully it will help you put some framework around your metrics.

Metrics to consider	How does this help
Cost	How much does an effort or asset cost in money, time, or opportunity?
Engagement/interest	Are your prospects interested in your content? Do your various assets draw people to you? Do the emails you send specifically or the nurture tracks as a whole bring people to the content you want to showcase?
Conversion to MQL	Do your prospects convert to leads? At what percentage over time? Are you qualifying so many leads so that your sales team gets bogged down?
Conversion to SQL/SAL	Did sales qualify and accept the leads you sent them? If not, this metric can pinpoint any problems you have in your lead scoring programs.
Conversion to Opportunity	Are the leads sales qualified converting to opportunities? Do any specific content views or event attendance lift this metric?
Closed won vs. closed lost	Of those opportunities, which did your sales team close and which did they lose. Again, are there any correlations between this and what your prospects looked at or how you nurtured them?
Profit per closed opportunity	Use this to determine your acceptable cost per lead. How much effort will you put into acquiring a lead? How much would you invest in nurturing that same lead?

The metrics above should be measured over time to gauge the effectiveness of your funnel. But you should also measure the above by the other factors below.

Factors	Use the above metrics, but segment by the below factor
Initial source	Which sources (ie. SEM, tradeshows, advertising, etc.) bring you the best leads? Which ones cost more or less per lead?
Email	Which emails work and which don’t? Do some correlate to higher levels of engagement or higher numbers of closed opportunities?
Nurture track	As a whole, do some nurture tracks work well while others don’t? What kind of variables could you use to test different nurture tracks against each other?
Form	If you use different forms, does the number of questions you ask hurt engagement? Does it help somewhere down the line to improve sales?
Asset	Which assets (whitepapers, videos, webinars, etc.) correlate to higher sales? Which ones get the most engagement?
Content area	Do certain areas of content correlate to better or worse leads? Do some generate a lot of engagement by their place in the buying cycle?
Industry sector	Which industry sectors like which types of content? Which make the best, most profitable leads?
Job title	Maybe someone’s function makes them a decision maker and correlates to higher conversion rates. If yes, know this so you can nurture them more effectively.
Company budget	Do companies with higher budgets for your particular offering convert better or engage with different content?
Company revenue	Do larger companies equal better prospects? Do smaller companies find different areas more interesting?
Point in buying cycle	Do different efforts work depending on a point in the lead’s buying cycle? Is there a way to judge when a particular lead should go to sales?
Lead score	Is your lead scoring program configured to bring sales the optimal leads? If lower scores have higher conversion rate to sales accepted leads, then what could you change to bring sales better leads to begin with.

Narrowing this down some involves outlining your strategy. If you want more sales, imagine how you’ll get there and what you need to know for testing. And, of course, always test, every step of the way. A different email within a nurturing campaign that points to a new asset can ripple through your entire buying cycle. Tracking all the right numbers to begin with will help you see those effects so you can experiment over time and know what works, and what doesn’t.

B2B publishers can be slow adopters of new technology, bringing a healthy skepticism to the next big thing. Many times it is because they can solve the same problem for less money. Instead of adopting marketing automation, for example, a lot of publishers have developed their own database marketing systems to solve problems like driving activity-based campaigns.

But one area where marketing automation could be invaluable is turning individual subscriptions into large sales. In corporate sales, as with any marketing, content is king (and publishers are kings of content). But where they lack expertise is creating “meta-content”; that is, content about how their information helps companies on a large scale.

For individual subscribers, the solution is simple: offer a free trial and upsell based on their interaction with your publications. But when you want to move to bigger deals, some problems arise:

• Too many leads: You have thousands of subscribers, and all of them could be interested in a company-wide plan. How do you tell who is and who is not?
• No system to upsell further: A subscriber who is happy with her content won’t necessarily look at other purchases with you, or think much about how the content she reads is valued outside her immediate circle. You may send cross-sell efforts to her, but do you have a system to evaluate and market corporate-level subscriptions?
• No content to upsell further: You may be a king of the content you publish, but do you have content relevant to group subscription sales? For example, if you sell access to a database of financial results, you may have some copy on how that would help an individual. But do you have whitepapers, videos or case studies on how your information could fit into your clients’ businesses as a whole?

Marketing automation was developed for B2B marketers to work out these exact issues. As publishers, you may think that having lots of content and lots of leads solves the above problems for you. It doesn’t. But with a proper marketing automation platform integrated to a CRM system, you can start to…

1) Create and tag content: Here I’m talking about the specific information you publish PLUS the content about your content (meta-content). For example, how does your publication or database integrate with your customers’ needs? Where could they use your data in their business processes? How could a group subscription help different areas of your subscribers’ businesses? What other content do you have on offer that might be of help? Create a series of whitepapers, webcasts, videos, surveys and case studies. Segment them by:

1. Type of content – is the content news, data, a database, etc?
2. Buying cycle – would someone downloading the content do so out of curiosity or because they are ready to buy?
3. Demographic – is the content focused on a particular vertical industry, geographic location or job title?

2) Gate content and slowly build an intelligent lead profile: Make sure to gate your content. But use cookies to identify repeat visitors so you don’t have to always ask the same questions. When a lead looks at a white paper, ask for their name, company and email. Once they watch a demo video on how their product works, ask for different information like budget or a timeline to buy.

3) Send automatic campaigns to leads to showcase your “corporate” content: When someone subscribes to your product, send them a periodic email to judge interest in a corporate subscription. If they respond, you know there may be more interest.

4) Systematically follow up on any interest: Based on your tagging or information collected in progressive profiling, send automation campaigns to follow up with your leads with more content that might interest them, or with calls to action that will lead them to a next step.

5) Score leads and send them to sales based on real intent to buy: While nurturing leads automatically, you’ll be building a profile based on activity and fields. Before sending leads to a high-paid sales team, figure out how interested they are and whether they fit your buyer’s profile. You may want to send them to a telephone qualification team first. But make sure your lead scoring filters out any leads with only peripheral interest so that your most expensive sales resources aren’t busy chasing rainbows. You want sales to be excited about every lead you send them, and scoring will make that happen.

Each and every one of your subscribers had a particular business need that made them buy your publication. But looking at which subscribers are leads for a larger offering could mean the difference between an $800/year individual subscription and a $200,000 corporate license. In the latter, clients will integrate your information into various areas of their business, treating you more like a partner than a publisher.

A marketing automation program may seem superfluous and expensive, and $30,000+ a year can seem like an expensive way to email customers. But marketing automation is much more than sending email. Platforms like Marketo and Eloqua offer a way to conduct digital, one-on-one conversations with your subscribers and upsell them en masse. So consider how many new subscribers you’re missing, or how many possible corporate deals are ignored because you don’t have a systematic, intelligent way to evaluate your leads.