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Is your circulation flat? Are you having trouble attracting new subscribers? Do you want to expand your offerings to new markets? If yes, then consider launching a new paid subscription product. However, success in your vertical doesn’t always equal an easy launch, even with your existing customers. But you can thrive with a concrete action plan that depends on quality market research. Below is an 8-step guide to launching a new publication that includes the circulation-marketing areas you need to consider.

Step 1) Strategy – define your targets and their needs

Many B2B publishers focus on a certain type of content for a specific sort of customer. This can prove quite lucrative within a defined market, but can be frustrating if you want to move into other niches. You’re effectively trapped in your silo. To figure out a strategy for generating more revenue, you have to choose between:

A)     Focusing on the niche you already service, but with additional products

B)      Breaking out of your vertical and selling a version of your content to a different industry

With A) you know your customers, or can get to know them. You have an inkling of the content they may want to buy in the future. And you have a ready list of industry professionals who already trust you enough to purchase from you.

For breaking into a new vertical (B), consider hiring a “connector”, someone who knows the ins and outs of customers in the industry that you want to target. This person will know who to call to gather information for your product launch.

Selling new content to existing customers will be easier but, in either scenario, you must identify an emotional need for your prospects and define how your new product satisfies that need. Call it a hypothesis for now and, in step 2), you’ll start testing that hypothesis.

Step 2) Market Research

Before you launch a new publication, talk to your prospective subscribers to answer the below questions…

1. Is your product viable? Is there demand for what you want to launch?
2. What are your prospects’ needs? Which pain points will shape their buying behavior? Does your new content help them solve any pressing problems?
3. How do your prospects identify themselves? Do they call themselves “pulp and paper marketers” or “litigators in southern California”?
4. What specialized language do your prospects use to describe the problems you want to help them solve?
5. Where are your prospects? What do they read? What groups do they join? Which events do they attend? What do they visit on the web?
6. Who are your potential competitors? Do they possess any weaknesses or strengths that you should be aware of?

You’ll want to talk to your prospects by calling them, going to the events that they attend and posting questions on social networks. This part of your research, while valuable as a first toe in the water, is not a systematic analysis. Before developing your publication, you’ll need to create a more comprehensive look at your prospects, which you can get from:

• Focus groups: This is a good start to more methodical research. The open discussion format lets your prospects brainstorm ideas for you, and will help you define which questions to ask in a survey. Make sure you have some objectives and open-ended questions in mind so you get the most out of your group.
• Online surveys: If you possess a quality email list (the best being your own customers), then conduct your survey online. Formulate questions about your new publication that will also answer the 6 questions you have above. With the report you compile, you’ll know where to find your prospects, which content will excite them, the copy that will peak their interest and where your publication’s strengths will lie relative to the competition.
• Phone surveys: Without a pre-existing relationship to your prospects, online surveys won’t generate a lot of responses. For launching into a new vertical, you may need to conduct phone surveys to get the data you want. It will be costlier, but well worth the price when you launch your successful new publication.

Step 3) Develop your publication

Once you know your target audience and their most pressing needs, your content team can begin developing an editorial calendar to meet those needs. As part of the process, your company must determine…

1. What information you will publish to satisfy your prospective subscribers
2. How you will collect this information (examples below):
   • Surveys
   • Interviews with industry contacts
   • Agglomeration of other news
   • Analysis of existing public information
3. How you will present this information:
   • What will be the unique brand of the publication?
   • How will this brand fit into your company’s family of products?
   • How long will the publication be (how much content is needed)?
   • How often will this information be distributed?
4. The overall value this new publication brings to your company. Consider:
   • How many potential subscribers exist in your target market
   • Reasonable price points
   • How quickly you can reach your optimal market share
   • Whether your new product will cannibalize any existing business

When developing the product, editorial will take the lead, but marketing must provide insight from the customer’s point of view and finance will help determine the overall net present value. Make sure your teams work together, have clear objectives and take all possible factors into account.

Step 4) Marketing copy and strategy

Marketing must now decide how to bring your new content to market. In doing so, focus on what you learned in your research, which will help you:

1. Formulate copy
2. Buy lists
3. Advertise in other publications
4. Attend events
5. Purchase the right search-engine-marketing keywords (SEM)
6. Optimize your site for organic search (SEO)

Know who you are targeting, why they need your content and where to find them. If the market research done in step 2) didn’t answer these questions, formulate another survey or focus group so that your strategy is defined by customer needs.

Step 5) Marketing funnel

What does your funnel look like? How will prospects learn about your publication, try it out, subscribe, renew and tell their colleagues?

Your initial marketing will likely offer prospects a free trial to your product, and you will try to sell them on the value of a paid subscription. Upon conversion, you bill your new customers and start renewing anywhere from 3 to 9 months before their subscription expires. You should also consider a formalized referral program to give subscribers incentives to market for you.

A few different trial options are available, and all of them are appropriate depending on the content you’re offering and the niche you offer it to.

• Pure free trial: This lets someone receive your content without any promise of paying for it in the future. A pure free trial will last anywhere from 2 to 8 weeks depending on the value of the content. If you offer a downloadable directory, you’ll want to avoid using any kind of free trial. But if your information is ongoing news and you’ve just launched a product, this will enable your prospects to sign up without too much commitment.
• Credit card free trial: Here you offer a trial period where the subscriber doesn’t pay, but she must submit her credit card to secure access to the information she wants. The credit card is billed at the end of the trial unless the subscriber cancels beforehand. The barrier to entry here is higher, but you’ll end up with a much better conversion rate.
• Soft offer: An easier method to fulfill, a soft offer simply follows on the billing cycle of the product. You tell a subscriber to sign up for a year, send him and invoice and let him know he can cancel before the credit period runs out, which is usually 1-2 months. The advantage is that, once the subscriber pays, he doesn’t have any non-revenue-accruing time on his subscription.
• Hard offer: Here you don’t even offer a trial. This is best for a database-based product where the subscriber could submit a form, download all your content and walk away without ever paying. In this case, you’ll want to give some sample or demo to showcase your content.
• Recurring monthly offer: This takes the sting out of a whole year subscription, making it feel like less of a commitment for your customer. But beware. While it may seem like these folks will renew forever, customers change addresses, move jobs and cancel their credit cards. Have a system in place to catch them when they stop paying. And make sure you know the local legislation on “’til-forbid” renewals.
• Pure free trial with custom upsell: Use this when you want to charge your customers a different price based on their demographics. For example, say you sell access to a resume database (non-downloadable). One of your customers is Manpower and the other is a small, 20-person company that rarely hires. You give them both the trial and, during the trial, you judge that Manpower places far greater value on the information you’re selling. So you adjust their price upwards and the small company’s downward before converting them to the paid version of your database.

Step 6) Fulfillment

Fulfill your product so that your subscribers never fall through the cracks, either in terms of content delivery, renewals or payments.

• Delivery: How will your product be delivered? Will it live online on a gated website? If so, then you need a real-time-updating database that allows access upon subscription and cuts it off upon non-payment, expiration or cancellation. If it is a print publication, who will print it every week? Who will mail it? How will your list of active subscribers make it to your printer and mailer?
• Frequency: Fulfillment systems use frequency to know how often they need to report on your subscribers, how often ongoing marketing efforts are batched and when to cut off unpaid or expired subscriptions. Usually the batch frequency will be the same as the publication frequency.
• Reporting: Think about what kind of reports you want your fulfillment house to do. Which data are necessary for you to know that your marketing is successful? What time periods are important? For examples, see my article on the 11 essential metrics for circulation marketers.
• Free trial, billing and renewal efforts: Outline which efforts you plan to send to renew your subscribers. How many and how varied will depend on your publication’s price and profitability. For example, if you have a publication that costs $10 per year, you won’t want to include two telephone renewal efforts that may cost $4 per call. But if you’re a specialized publisher selling your newsletter for $1,000 per year, you will want multiple emails, direct mailings and telephone calls at different points in the subscriber’s free trial, billing and renewal schedules.

Generally, marketing is about offering…

• The right product
• To the right person
• At the right time
• For the right price
• In the right place

If your product is profitable enough, offer renewals that reach out by email, phone and direct mail over 6-9 months, possibly even including a discount a couple months after expire. Free trials, being harder to convert and therefore less profitable, will require less effort.

Step 7) Marketing channels

How will you reach your customers? Do you hope they will search on Google and find you? Are your existing customers the best source of leads for your new publication? Do you have direct mail or telemarketing lists at your disposal?

A good strategy will combine market research with your overall campaign plan. If your target market uses LinkedIn, make sure to post snippets of your content as LinkedIn discussions. If they search for needed information on Google, you may need an SEO specialist and some AdWords campaigns.

Be sure to follow the marketing principle outlined in step 6). Your prospect needs to be the right person, want the right product, at the right time, for the right price in the right place. So play with your offers, try promotions on various lists and approach them in different ways, including (but not limited to) events, social media, search engines, advertising in other publications, over the phone, in the mail, over email, on webinars or other areas where your niche is active.

Spreading out your offers along different lines of communication will also remind prospects that your publication is right for them. Though we tend to track promotions on a one-by-one basis using ROI, there is an art to marketing where people need to trust you before they buy. So a first direct mailer may flop in terms of ROI, but also serves to prep your audience for a later email or phone call.

Step 8) Launch

Put together steps 1) through 7) and you’re ready to launch your product. Keep to a strict editorial and marketing calendar, make sure the fulfillment processes you’ve set up are working well, and keep asking your prospective subscribers questions about how they relate to your new offerings. Keep up with marketing, even if the initial results aren’t promising. Some brands take time and critical mass to build. Most importantly, keep an open dialog with your customers by using surveys and social media to fine tune what you’re offering and how you market it.

You know your industry, you focus on what your subscribers need and have a set formula on how to deliver it. Tracking your marketing results from start to finish, you’re able to understand your customer’s behavior on the web, how they renew and what channels work best for them. You even know the content that engages them most from your web analytics tools. So why even do market research? Why compile a customer survey and ask what your subscribers want when you already know?

Market research can help your business. As a general principle, basing marketing around your subscribers’ needs rather than your own intuition is a good strategy. Your customers have specific pain points they helped solve by buying your publication, and laying down a marketing strategy without taking their needs into account risks alienating yourself from what drives your business. Below are three main areas where market research can help you.

Grow your circulation

Circ marketers are diligently analyzing marketing results, web analytics and customer behavior to figure out what tricks will work to put net circulation on an upward trajectory. So where does market research fit?

• Learn the compelling reasons your subscribers buy your publication: You may know how customers find you and what content they like, but why did they buy your publication in the first place? What problem did you help them solve? Knowing this can inform the communications you use to different segments of your target market. It can also help uncover new lists to purchase.
• Find out what specialized language your subscribers use: How do your subscribers talk about the information that you sell them? Figuring this out can help you write better marketing copy, develop more effective search-engine-marketing campaigns and compile a more targeted overall strategy to market your publications.
• Investigate where your subscribers spend their time: Which channels do your subscribers use? What do they read? Which events do they attend? Can you replicate your marketing in those areas to drive more orders?
• Explore your publication’s strengths and weaknesses: Making sure you compare favorably to your competitors gives you the edge in your industry. And if you don’t, you’ll have an action plan to improve specific areas of your content.

Increase renewal rates

Looking at customer behavior can help you assess what types of efforts to send, when to send them and which offers to present. But again, marketing research can help you:

• Refine your message: Remind your customers of the emotional need they had to buy your publication. Not knowing this will cost your company subscribers.
• Assess your content’s weaknesses: You need a barometer to correct problems with editorial and make your subscribers happy before they expire or cancel.

Learn any reasons for subscriber dissatisfaction: Perhaps developing new content, improving customer service or approaching customers in a different way will help you retain them. If anything is happening that might lose you subscribers, know about it before it’s too late.

Evaluate new opportunities

Specialty publishers often find themselves trapped in a certain industry, unsure of how to expand their businesses. Success in one vertical doesn’t always mean sales in another. And just because you have a captive audience for one type of content doesn’t mean your subscribers will be motivated to buy something else from you.

• Systematically evaluate areas where you could launch new content: Is there a real pain point you’re helping to solve in the area you want to launch? Will there be a critical mass of subscribers to make your publication successful?
• Discover why your customers trust you: Can you capitalize on that trust to build new business with them using different content?
• Complete due diligence to properly assess a launch: When breaking into a new vertical, ask prospects if they have the same compelling arguments to subscribe as your current customers. What types of content do they want to see? Is their need strong enough to buy from you?

Conclusion

Good market research will have objectives tied to it. Whatever the strategy you pursue, asking your customers what they think can be a great guide to the direction you should take. If you wonder what your copy should say, how to approach your customers and what benefits to showcase in your marketing, there is only one easy answer: ask your customers.

You need web marketing to reach your target market. But when your prospects interact with your publications online, what do they do? Do they jump off your page? Do they find one article, stick with it and never visit anywhere else on your site? How well do they convert to paid subscribers? Below are some basic web metrics you need to know to effectively market your publications online.

1) Click-thru rate

Click-thrus are how visitors come to your site (they “click through” from an email or keyword campaign). Mostly, you want higher click-thru rates, but not if your funnel does little to drive visitors to the next step. Paying for clicks with search-engine-marketing campaigns is a great way to generate quality traffic, but if there’s no apparent goal upon a visitor’s arrival to your landing page, then you’re wasting money.

But with Google Adwords campaigns, don’t wish for a low click-thru rate regardless of your funnel. Because Google wants to make money, click-thru rates are more important than bids when deciding which position your ad will get. To illustrate this, consider two ads. A has a 10% click-thru rate and B a 1% click-thru rate. For B to make Google as much money as A, they need to pay 10x the amount that the first ad bids. If A bids $3 per click, B will need to bid $30 to reach the same slot. And if you’re not in the top 3, you won’t get much Adwords traffic.

2) Cost per click

How much do you invest for someone to click and enter your site? This is important because, presumably, you track your visitor-to-trial conversion rate and your trial-to-paid-subscription conversion rate. Therefore, you know the approximate value of each new website visitor.

For example, if you sell a newsletter for $1,000 per year, and you convert 5% of visitors to trials and 20% of trials to paid subscribers, then out of 100 visitors, you’ll get 5 trials and 1 paid sub for a 1% overall net conversion rate. That means your 100 visitors yielded $1,000. A click from outside your site is worth $10 to you. In your online marketing, you can therefore profitably spend $9.99 to buy your click.

Keep track of how much your clicks cost per Google campaign, per keyword group and any other way you think makes sense. In this way, you optimize your online campaigns for a better ROI.

3) Unique visitors

When marketers look for an overall metric by which to judge the popularity of their site, they used to talk about hits, which is the number of client requests made to your web server. With greater sophistication in web tracking, we now look at unique visitors.

Unique visitors are the individual people who come to your website, and it is probably the best overarching metric to use in circulation as it ties most closely to a subscriber. Tracking visits helps you determine how well your funnel works in converting visitors to members to paid subscribers.

As a side note, sometimes the number of unique visitors will look wrong depending on your time filters. For example, let’s say you records the number of unique visitors and find 2,000, 3,000, 2,500 and 2,500 over four weeks (10,000 total). But filtering over the entire four-week period gives you 9,000 visitors. How can this be? A visitor who returns in weeks 1 and 2 will be counted twice in the first search, but only once in the second.

4) Pages per visit

This metric shows engagement. When 10,000 visitors look at 30,000 pages, you average 3 pages per visit. This will change from week to week. If you have an extremely popular article, pages/visitor could drop as more readers only look at that single article. That doesn’t mean your website has failed, it just points out how users experience your brand over time.

5) Conversion rate

Track all the rates at which your marketing converts people to the next step. In web metrics, conversions refer specifically to moving a unique visitor to a specific goal. Most likely, the goal is the thank you page of a free trial form, but it could also be a particularly important download or engagement in a social media campaign. Track conversions on every step of the way but, most importantly, make sure you know how many visitors become trial subscribers.

6) Cost per conversion

Like cost per click, this will help you determine whether your Adwords campaigns are working. Knowing your free-to-paid rate, you can calculate how much to pay for a conversion. If you find yourself happy with your cost per click, but with no conversions, then give your site’s users a stronger push to a form or ask for less information from visitors who you want to sign up.

7) Bounce rate

A bounce rate shows how many visitors abandon your site at a certain spot. Each of your pages has a bounce rate, and high bounce rates are normally frowned upon. But in some scenarios, a high bounce rate is good. At an FAQ or customer service page, a high bounce rate indicates that customers have found their answer and are ready to move on. But if you have a high home page bounce rate, it means your content isn’t sticky. During big redesigns, pay attention to this metric to determine success or failure in showcasing your content.

8) Return visits

How many visitors do you get who are new? You’ll want to drive this percentage upwards when you’re campaigning to new audiences. As publishers with a lot of recurring visitors, this rate will be far higher than other businesses.

9) Time on site

Another way to evaluate the stickiness and quality of your content is to see how long your visitors spend on each page. By classifying your articles, you can determine where subscribers spend the most time. This will help you figure out which content to offer more.

Other things to look at

Path analysis: Figuring out the paths your users take through your site can help you understand their behavior and where they may be getting stuck.

Traffic sources: Where does your traffic come from? Hopefully you have a good mix of organic and paid search, social media visits and links from other websites. Seeing how your traffic comes to you can tell you a lot about who your customers are and what they care about.

Geographic locations: Where do your visitors live? Are you ignoring a huge potential market in The Netherlands, where visitors stream onto your site only to discover that you publish North American-specific content?

Service providers: Do any service providers stand out amongst your visitors? If you still have a lot of unidentified visitors (meaning those who haven’t signed up for anything), you may want to look here to identify any larger organizations where lots of visitors come to you. Maybe you could call those companies to sell them a site license or research the content they want to buy.

Browsers: Which browsers do your visitors use? Are they coming from their iPads? Have you made sure your site is optimized for the Android, which 10% of your visitors use?

Your web site is complicated, and it is the biggest door today through which your subscribers will find your content. So make sure you understand what they like, how long they stay, how engaged they are and, most importantly, that they can take the actions which will make your business successful.

After flying back to the relative quiet of my home in Oregon, I took some time to think about the Direct Marketing Association’s yearly Circulation Marketing Day. The conference was a great opportunity to learn new things and meet other circulation marketers. Below are 10 things I learned plus some questions I had on further reflection.

1) Big publishers are ahead of the game on mobile devices (because they have to be)

Tablets are changing the way publishers present and sell their online content. Forrester projects that, by 2016, 82 million Americans will use tablet computers. At the conference, publishers called tablets their “second chance” to properly sell web content. Indeed, they give publishers far more flexibility in giving their subscribers an interactive brand experience.

In my opinion, reading a magazine on a tablet is far nicer than reading the same content on a laptop. For a great example, check out The Economist app, which gives users a pretty slick presentation of its articles.

2) In driving ROI, there is no match for great database marketing

Database marketing promises great returns on investment for the publishers who can do it right. A good, custom-built database can mimic and surpass many well-known marketing automation platforms by allowing customer segmentation based on demographic and activity, presenting offers based on past behavior, renewing and approaching customers in the media they prefer and making sure advertisements for discounts only reach the prospects they are meant for.

3) Excel is still the visual analytics tool of choice for publishing executives

From what I saw and heard at Circ Day, Excel remains the most-used tool for presenting and consuming analytical information. Other reporting mechanisms have proven too difficult to use across organizations as marketers and other information consumers tend to ask for data they can manipulate and transform themselves. Despite its limitations, it looks like Excel is here to stay.

4) Things are definitely looking up

As the economy recovers, publishers are excited to sell more content online and transform their businesses in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The mood seemed upbeat, as evidenced by the “Back in the Black” theme. But attendees understood that selling information would not be the same as before. Still, they are more confident that their journalists produce enough value to charge for it, regardless of the medium.

5) Great creative comes from the gut

I always trust tests and analysis as the best way to develop creative. But testing creative doesn’t let you out of your self-imposed box. Sometimes you need to rely on your gut to completely revamp the marketing pieces you send, and your prospects will thank you with higher conversion rates.

6) Future revenue will come from a mix of pay-wall content and advertising

Publishers will no longer rely exclusively on advertising for their revenue. Good content created by professional journalists has value, and shouldn’t always be free. Going even further, paid content may even convince advertisers that their prospective audience is more committed to the information community in which they are participating.

7) An email and landing page are really the same campaign

This sounds like common sense, but a lot of marketers design an email first and think of the landing page as the afterthought. Marketers should think of both as a single campaign to help drive customer conversions.

8) It really does take a village

From all the keynote speakers who had done wonderful things with their businesses, we heard that it takes a team. If you want to do testing, database marketing, develop content for the myriad mobile devices out there and produce great creative, you need an amazing team of professionals who can get it done.

9) For some, get the email address. For others, get the money.

Some publishers find more value securing as many email addresses as possible, and then moving prospects to a credit card form. Others like prospects to fill out all their information at once. If you value a larger database, it makes sense to ask first for an email before scaring away potential signups with a credit card form. But if net sales mean more, get the commitment up front. If you’re not sure which option will work better for you, test!

10) Everyone loves a bookmark, especially in publishing

I hope everyone enjoyed the bookmark I handed out on Circ Day. Here is the full article on the 11 Essential Metrics for Paid Circulation Marketers. If any of you have different formulas for calculating lifetime value, I would love to see them.

4 Questions

1) Will micro- and segment- advertising take off with Tablets?

Yes, tablets create a total brand experience for information consumers, and they allow publishers to place ads in much the same fashion as in print publications. But how will tablets allow for advertising segmentation? For example, will publications be able to serve up ads based on users’ geographic area or other, self-entered demographic information?

2) How far will publishers push progressive profiling?

Some publishers are asking first for an email address and following up with a full form. What about asking for an email, then billing information and then filling in certain demographics each time a subscriber visits your site? The questions could be listed in a sidebar and not required. Interested subscribers could fill them in and give you more information on how to help them. Later on, that information could be used for segmented advertising or serving custom content.

3) Are publishers selling themselves short on email analytics?

In one presentation with email results, I saw mentions of open rates, clickthrus and conversions. But with more powerful email analytics tools available (check out Litmus), you can also track the below:

–          Who read, scanned or skimmed your email

–          Which email client they used

–          Whether they forwarded or printed your email

Using these, you can know your email recipients’ engagement, and you can determine which email clients IT needs to code for. You can also connect this data to individuals and use it to target emails. For example, you could send iPhone users emails on your next new app.

4) A lot of publishers have great data on their customers, understanding them by their purchase actions. Where does market research fit?

One thing that struck me about Circ Day was how well publishers know their customers by their actions.  But they didn’t say much about speaking directly to subscribers in the form of a focus group or survey. Do publishers have effective market research that they can incorporate into their offer copy? Do they survey subscribers to discover new content to launch? Do they have a strategy to connect questionnaires and reporting to their business objectives? See my article on how to create a great survey.

Are you drowning in data? Do you dread the day when your manager asks you about a certain metric that you didn’t even know about? The amount of data produced by circulation marketing builds up fast. From web engagement to lifetime value, it can be hard to represent everything in a concise way that stakeholders understand and appreciate.

An Excel graph is the basic form of data visualization we almost all work with. It shows us trends over time, and it is easily understood in the few moments a manager has to look at it. But the human brain can comprehend a lot more than a trend line, even in a few moments. And with new products like Tableau Software and Tibco Software to help us, we need to go further in helping our stakeholders understand all the various metrics that affect our businesses.

How would visual analytics help a typical circulation marketer? For one, more items can be graphed in the same space. A typical excel graph allows for two, possibly three dimensions – x for time, y for quantity and bubble size for a different quantity. But a product like Tableau Software allows you to use x, y and size like Excel, but also color, geographic maps, patterns, shapes and filters for other dimensions.

In this circulation marketing dashboard example, we see a circulation report, renewal report and geographic representation of subscribers. But contained in each chart are multiple dimensions we can use to view our data. In the circulation graph, the number of new orders is represented with both a label and the thickness of the line, whereas color shows publication. For the renewal report, thickness shows the size of each expire pool so you can tell where a low renewal rate will really hit your net circulation. Filters on the left side allow you to drill down into the numbers for a single publication. The map breaks down all paid subscribers by country and by industry segment.

In analyzing lists, response rates, new orders, circulation, renewals, lifetime value, satisfaction and what happens on the web, we need to get smarter about the reports that we produce. Excel tables will still have their place as the source data to feed our visual dashboards, but because we need to get more information into less space, we must start using more sophisticated visual analytics tools.