Keep reading to know more tips that publishers should do to increase their revenue.
Tips to increase revenue from publishers
3) Be in the Leads Business
Publishers have been selling access to their email lists for years. What the advertiser wants from a purchased email blast and what they actually receive are two different things. The advertiser starts with high hopes. They work with the publisher to narrow down a list of contacts from the publishers database. (Remember, this is the same database that doesn’t know what digital content its contacts’ consume on the publishers website.) From there the publisher queries that database to find a segment of contacts that. Let’s say have a certain title or work for a certain company. The advertiser wants leads and sales opportunities as a result of their email blast. What they actually get though is an average open rate, an average click through rate and perhaps a few email addresses.
Now, imagine if you could say to your advertisers, “Our database is unlike others. Our database actually keeps a contact profile of each of our readers and subscribers. That profile includes a timeline of interactions that each contact takes on our website. So, we send your offer to a contact with a certain title, at a certain company and in a certain geography. We can also send your offer to contacts who have read articles about trends in your product category and who have read your product reviews, as well as your competitors.
How do you think your advertisers would react if you could do this?
Publishers who invest in focusing on the traffic they have, engaging readers with content and being in the lead business have the ability to do all of this. And they are generating high quality leads that turn into sales opportunities and revenue for their advertisers. As far as how this impacts the bottom line for publishers, well, HubSpot customer Seth Nichols of Cadalyst has seen his CPLs increase 120% and his lead generation revenue increase 32% in 9 months of using HubSpot.
4) Consider Sponsored Content and Contextual Ads
Emails aren’t the only way publishers can generate leads for their advertisers though. According to the Association of Media Magazine’s Factbook, 67% of digital magazine readers actually want to buy directly from magazine ads and 62% of readers want to buy directly from articles.
If you are a publisher that focuses on #1 and #2 above this is great news. Because it is simple to predict where your readers and subscribers are in the buying cycle for particular products that your advertisers want to sell to them.
Let’s say that based upon your readers’ contact timelines you know that they’ve read the article, “What you need to know about CAD WorkStations.” This might indicate that the people who read this article are at the early stages of the buying cycle for a CAD WorkStation. As a result, you decide to create a “top of the funnel” list of everyone who read this article. Then if any of those same readers read the article “3 Things you Need to Know about WorkStations” and then also download the “3 Reasons Management Should Support Your Workstation Replacement” whitepaper, a workflow would send these readers to a “middle of the funnel list.” Then after readers compare two product reviews, a workflow would send them to a “bottom of the funnel list.”
What lists allow publishers to do is deliver the right content, whether it be editorial by advertisers, to the right reader at the right time. Looking at this example below, there are plenty of opportunties and editorial for a reader to engage with “workstation” content.
Conclusion
The point is, if your readers want to buy from ads and articles, give them the opportunity to do so. And, if someone gets stuck in the buying cycle in the middle of your workflow, worst case scenario is that you generate a highly qualified lead that you can give to your advertiser. This is proof positive that relevant ads can generate not only clicks but leads. Of course, if the reader makes it to the end of the workflow, well, the cash register rings. Either way, you’ve come a long way from sending email blasts from a list. This is created in a database that knows nothing about what your readers’ consume on your website or what they are interested in purchasing.