Case Study: The Day Publishing Company

Transcription

1 Case Study: The Day Publishing Company Innovations in Audience Engagement Peter G. Marsh May 2014

2 About The Day The Day is a local news media company based in New London, Connecticut. Established in 1881, The Day covers a 20-town region in eastern Connecticut with a daily and Sunday print readership of nearly 100,000, and a website (theday.com) that generates more than four million page views a month. The Day and theday.com together reach almost 80 percent of all adults in Connecticut s shoreline communities. This makes The Day the strongest newspaper-website combination among news websites in the region, as measured by the Alliance for Audited Media. More than 60,000 people are registered users on theday.com, and more than 20,000 are paying subscribers. The Day was one of the first newspaper companies in the United States to introduce a membership model, and the company has won numerous awards from the International News Media Association (INMA), as well as a 2012 Editor & Publisher EPPY award for best marketing website. The Day won Newspaper of the Year and the Best Daily Newspaper Award from the New England Press Association. It has also twice won the Horace Greeley Award for courage and outstanding effectiveness in serving the public and the American Society of Newspaper Editors Example of Excellence in Small Newspaper award. Focus on Engagement, Targeting and Personalization Michael Moses is the Director of Marketing at The Day. He describes his team s mission as being built to deliver relevant engagements to our audiences throughout the market. The foundation for this engagement is a rich database of 220,000 households in Southeastern Connecticut. The key to our database is that everything comes through one point of entry, says Mr. Moses. This includes circulation data, contest data, and online membership information. Audience data also comes from the NEWSCYCLE Audience platform, which collects online activity from a variety of sources, including anonymous website visitors, frequent visitors, registered users, and social media channels. Mr. Moses adds: Our database provides us with deep demographics and multi-layered data. From this foundation, we continually strive to take the level of engagement and step it up. Every touch with our audiences raises the engagement to a point where the relevance is that much more significant. Targeted engagement is key to The Day s success in reaching and developing its audiences. Currently, Mr. Moses and his team generate over 1.8 million targeted s per month. Regular surveys of various audience segments 2014 NEWSCYCLE Solutions 2

3 have helped The Day to confirm that a focus on local news, events and advertising present the best opportunities for growth. Local audiences say they value The Day s website because the news is updated frequently (a total of 19 hours each day), and because users can interact through services such as blogs, videos and online chats. As part of this engagement process, the NEWSCYCLE Audience platform makes recommendations to 88 percent of the visitors who come to theday.com. These recommendations suggest content that may be of interest to each visitor based on things like browsing activity, as well as the explicit preferences of registered users. At The Day, NEWSCYCLE Audience is currently tracking 350,000 anonymous users and 39,000 registered users across 26 segments. During a one-month period, content recommended by NEWSCYCLE Audience was clicked on average 18 percent of the time. Even more impressive, the bounce rate on The Day s homepage was reduced by almost 40 percent after NEWSCYCLE Audience was launched. The bounce rate for mobile users is now less than 10 percent. This means that visitors are more highly engaged, and are staying longer, when Readers spend 84 percent more time on article pages recommended by NEWSCYCLE Audience they visit the site. According to Google Analytics, the average time-on-site for each visitor to The Day s website is 4 minutes, 41 seconds. Furthermore, readers spend 84 percent more time on article pages recommended by NEWSCYCLE Audience than on article pages without recommended content. Accelerating Local Engagement with Rewards Program In 2011, The Day launched an innovative membership rewards program called Passport for its local audiences. Subscribers of The Day newspaper are automatically enrolled in Passport as soon as they register online. Digitalonly subscribers are also eligible for membership in Passport as part of their online subscriptions. Once registered, Passport members receive discounts from local restaurants and area attractions, along with member-only events and giveaways throughout the year. According to Mr. Moses, the key to this value-added membership program is The Day s database. Powered by Leap Media, the Passport database helps to deepen member engagement and build brand affinity. Passport members get exclusive access to contests and giveaways, says Mr. Moses. The registration s for these contests are like gold and are sent, in turn, to our advertisers. To be successful, Mr. Moses and his team focus on generating a steady cadence of giveaways and rewards, and also on refreshing the Passport site daily with valuable content. Targeted s and social media marketing programs help to keep the Passport members informed and engaged. The Day s sales and marketing 2014 NEWSCYCLE Solutions 3

4 teams work with local advertisers to create dynamic promotional campaigns. And, the cycle of engagement is completed by sharing the customer data that is collected through participation in contests, giveaways and member-only events. Relevancy Rules As an independently owned company, The Day is able to respond quickly and collaboratively to market challenges, competitive pressures, and the opportunities presented by new technologies. Each week, a steering committee meeting is held, involving The Day s publisher, IT Director, Managing Editor, Ad Director, and Marketing Director. The main benefits of these meetings, according to Mr. Moses, is 100 percent buy-in and total collaboration with the newsroom and all other departments. A notable validation of this successful team approach is a change The Day made to its strategy. Previously, a general content-rich was sent to 50,000 of The Day s opt-in subscribers. The team knew it had a problem when the response rates on these s dropped to less than 10 percent. Because technology allows us to package up relevant content, we changed to a model where we now deliver specific category s five times a week, says Mr. Moses. As a result, we found that our open rates more than doubled when we delivered relevant, targeted content. The targeted category s contain 75 percent editorial content, and these messages serve as a platform for sponsored content. Examples of these sponsored content platforms are Wheels and Home Source. Both products are created entirely from The Day s marketing department, not the newsroom. And, they are highly targeted and highly relevant. Home Source, for instance, is ed to readers who are predisposed to buying a house, or who are into gardening, etc. This opens up a funnel of engagement to people who are specifically interested in the products, says Mr. Moses. From concept to deployment, we can build out our local initiatives in a more timely fashion than ever before. The Day, which uses the NEWSCYCLE Digital web content management system for its website, is looking to produce even more native content on this platform. In doing so, Mr. Moses is creating a content generating machine. The team consists of a small group of designers and content creators, who are part of the marketing department. To help promote standards and ensure quality, the team has produced a native content style guide, as well as a detailed policies and procedures manual for all sponsored content. By shifting the responsibility for creating sponsored content from the editorial department to marketing, The Day was able to add newsroom staff to help create even more intense local coverage. An increase in local original content helps advertisers tell their stories to local audiences. Once again, Mr. Moses credits The Day s collaborative team spirit with making this possible: From concept to deployment, we can build out our local initiatives in a more timely fashion than ever before NEWSCYCLE Solutions 4

5 Measurable Success In a presentation at the February 2014 INMA Innovative Advertising Seminar, The Day s publisher, Gary Farrugia, positioned his company s engagement strategy as follows: Bring innovation to our communities by adapting technology that improves communications. In doing so, the database becomes the central nervous system of the business. The Day s strategic goals are built around three pillars: (1) technology improves content delivery to multiple platforms; (2) better content enhances value to readers and wins new customers; and (3) database and marketing content creators connect buyers to sellers. From 2011 to 2014, digital-only membership increased by 410 percent. The success of this strategy is apparent in the company s metrics. From 2011 to 2014, The Day increased its Sunday print readership by 49 percent, and its four-day-per-week subscriptions by 38 percent. During this same period, digital-only membership increased by a whopping 410 percent. The number of registered users on theday.com has increased by nine percent since January These registered users are rewarded with highly targeted and relevant content recommendations generated automatically from NEWSCYCLE Audience when they visit the website. In return, user registration information creates a target-rich prospecting list for memberships, s and online specialty products, as well as a goldmine of new marketplace opportunities for local advertisers. New Initiatives The Day plans to invest further in tools and technologies to further increase audience engagement. Among other things, the company is currently investigating platforms for augmented reality, video serving, and mobile app development. One of the most recent initiatives at The Day involving NEWSCYCLE Audience is the integration with the Google DoubleClick for Publisher (DFP) platform, which enables the automated delivery of targeted advertising to theday. com site visitors. The latest integration with DFP uses a one-click web services interface to synchronize NEWSCYCLE Audience segments with the DFP targeting workflow. As a result, The Day s Ad Ops team does not have to manually update segmentation criteria in both systems. In addition, it is now possible to synchronize granular user data, such as gender, education and age range. This allows for even greater advertiser niche targeting. The latest NEWSCYCLE Audience integration also allows The Day to track and build impression inventory for all ad placements on the website. Once again, there is no need for Ad Ops to use a separate system to project inventory for different customer segments. Instead, this can be done using the built-in DFP reporting tools. Finally, new ad campaigns can be quickly created to take advantage of The Day s rich audience data. Any placement on the site can now be available for user targeting, which helps to ensure that each display ad will be matched to the right user NEWSCYCLE Solutions 5

6 In Closing As a newspaper company, The Day is certainly unique in terms of its organization structure. The company is owned by a trust, which devotes its attention to operating the newspaper and supporting a charitable foundation. This arrangement ensures that the newspaper will remain independent and locally-owned. It also ensures that the company will continue to serve an important corporate citizenship role in supporting charities within The Day s primary circulation area. From a technology and innovation perspective, this independence allows The Day to be unusually agile in conceiving, testing and deploying new ideas. The success is evident in The Day s database-driven sales strategy that has increased the company s multi-channel presence in its market and continues to seek high-potential target readers. Remember, these are all building blocks, advises Mr. Moses. Do not minimize the importance of the database. Make sure that each project is conceived and deployed with total collaboration, and focus your efforts completely on execution. To be successful, you can t take any of this out of the equation. About NEWSCYCLE Solutions NEWSCYCLE Solutions, which was formed by the combination of DTI, SAXOTECH, Atex AdBase and MediaSpan, delivers the most complete range of software solutions for the global news media industry, including news content management, advertising, circulation, audience, and analytics. NEWSCYCLE Solutions is a trusted technology partner serving more than 750 media companies with 8,000 properties across more than 30 countries on 6 continents. The company is headquartered in Bloomington, MN and has U.S. offices in Florida, Michigan and Utah; with international offices in Canada, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit NEWSCYCLE Solutions NEWSCYCLE Solutions. All rights reserved.