This white paper outlines a model for successful business publishing that can foster growth and greater profitability, without a major investment.
Click here for a PDF of the white paper. 
Many business publishers continue to face weak or even declining advertising sales, still hoping for a turnaround. In the meantime, the economy has steadily grown for the last several years without providing much relief for many of them.
Today’s successful publishers are those who are introducing a broad range of additional products and services to meet changing reader and advertiser needs.
This integrated media and marketing model requires people with vision to apply it to your business, and new technology to facilitate the implementation of integrated media and marketing strategies.
What Ails Print Media?
For readers, the major problem with print media is that it doesn’t address all of the ways they want to get information. They still like to read magazines, but increasing numbers of people like e-mail newsletters, blogs, RSS feeds, Web sites, and even special events or conferences. And they’ll give permission (!) to accept these communications vehicles.
For advertisers, the major problem with print media is that it’s difficult to measure. Despite research showing that people do indeed read print publications, advertisers often fail to feel much of a sales kick when they unleash campaigns, finding it hard to justify the expenditures.
Simply put, publishers have not adjusted their products and costs in line with the way people obtain information today, or the way marketers divvy up budgets. While many print media companies still have 80 percent or more of their costs tied up in print publications, research suggests that the typical American only gets 50 percent of information from traditional media, according to a recent study by Ball State University. Most publishers get more than two-thirds of their revenue from advertising, when the latest surveys have found that marketers now spend nearly two-thirds of their dollars on “below-the-line” marketing.
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How Media Can Profit
The opportunity for publishers is to recognize that they have critical assets highly sought by:
- Consumers and business people seeking information, entertainment, and experiences.
- Marketers seeking their audiences and marketplace expertise in order to improve business development.
What Integrated Media and Marketing Mean to Publishers
If you define publishing as bringing audiences and marketers together, then publishers can benefit by stepping back and figuring out how they can profit, rather than suffer, from the shift toward integrated marketing.
Integrated Media and Marketing involves coming up with a diverse set of information and marketing products that meet the changing needs of consumers and business people and marketers, reducing the emphasis on print, and increasing focus on e-mail, Web sites, events and trade shows, and even marketing support services. Often, this approach justifies creating a marketing services group (to create Web sites, custom published materials, white papers, etc.) to help advertisers find integrated solutions to meeting their business goals.
Publishers profit by helping marketers build their own permission-based databases they can use for their own target marketing or provide solutions that aid in lead followup from all marketing efforts. Once clients understand the benefits of having permission-based databases of people who have opted in to receive information, they become hungry for more of the strategies and tactics that get them more names and build better relationships.
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How to Make the Change
Talent. The biggest challenge for publishers to go “beyond” advertising is to think beyond advertising, easier said than done for traditional ad executives. The key is finding talent by identifying other publishing companies that have fully diversified their businesses, or by looking in your marketing department for people who already are building ad hoc programs for clients and would like to do more.
Don’t forget market relationships and expertise. While it’s critical to separate marketing services, custom publishing, events and shows, from editorial and ad sales, process-oriented publishers have not profited as much from these ancillary services when they separate them from the people who really know the individual markets. The publishing world is filled with failed examples of companies that tried to improve efficiencies of Web sites and trade shows by creating autonomous units.
A zero-based cost analysis. The publisher can benefit from a zero-based assessment to determine how much their information structure depends on print and advertising, and how that aligns with what’s going on in their marketplace. This assessment may well yield an opportunity to significantly reduce the amount of expenses related to print and postage, in favor of increased use of e-mail, RSS, and Web communications, events or road shows, or even marketing services and custom publishing.
New products, lower costs.
The result of the assessment process could be:
- A determination to cut print frequency in place of a range of new alternative products.
- The addition of new e-mail newsletters.
- Creation of a how-to and reference Web strategy.
- Creation of new, more targeted marketing strategies to help clients build permission-based databases
- Creation of a marketing services group to help companies profit from that permission through multi-faceted communications such as Web sites, white papers, or events.
Technology. Today, publishers can take advantage of technology to significantly improve the economics and efficiency of integrated media and marketing.Technology makes it economical for any size publisher to manage every media and marketing touchpoint through an integrated platform.
Training. One of the biggest challenges is getting salespeople to make the shift from selling advertising to selling solutions. This requires a change in mindset and expertise that is not easy to instill.
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Content Is King
Media’s key asset is the ability to build audiences and credibility. Delivering content or entertainment that people want rests at the heart of a successful integrated media and marketing company. If publishers cheapen their editorial with self-serving or advertiser-driven content, they will defeat their purpose: the ability to develop distinct, active audiences. Rather than promote marketer-driven content, the integrated media and marketing solution depends on building willing audiences, and that can only be accomplished with desirable, compelling
content.
The Outcome
Media companies that want to succeed will have make to make the shift in order to survive. A new, younger generation is coming up through the ranks that better understands how people today are receiving information. The time is ripe to break down old business model barriers and usher in a renewed era of growth in publishing.
This white paper was written and produced by Selling Communications Inc., distributor of Solata integrated media and marketing technology to the publishing world.
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