Recently members of the CredSpark team attended the Business Information & Media Summit of 2024 (BIMS). After attending various sessions led by experts in the industry, including our very own Casey Cornelius, we noticed three key issues emerging time and again as challenges facing the B2B media industry.
1. We Need to Reduce Churn
It’s much more expensive to gain a new subscriber than retaining a current one. Here are key ways you can deepen your B2B brand’s relationship with your audience and make it essential to their professional lives
Focus on Content—and Build Community Around It..
The instant someone hits “subscribe now” is the instant they become a risk for churn. This is why it’s so vital to start building authentic connections with your audience immediately. One way to do that is to ensure your content is generating actual value for your audience. When you do this, you build a positive brand image, and keep your audience loyal to your offerings. Investing in content enhancements such as interactive content boosts overall interest and engagement, further strengthening your brand and product offerings.
Content strategy is so much more than just reducing churn. It’s about bringing your members and audience together, and your brand is that space where they gather to connect, transfer knowledge, and engage with one another.
Take MedPage Today for example, they came out with a weekly offering called ‘The Ethics Consult’. This was a weekly knowledge check that kept audiences coming back to the brand’s website. This ran for 37 weeks, and generated close to 100,000 responses.
2. Focus on First-Party Data & Insights Gathered From It.
How do you provide more value for your audience once you’ve created a vibrant community? Just ask. Interactive content is a great way to surface insights. Not only is it an effective way to continuously track and improve your product, but it shows your audience that you’re listening and what they need matters to you. Interactive content like surveys, quizzes, and gamification are great ways to spice things up while broadening the ways customers can interact with your website and brands.
We can’t stress how important it is to know your audience. It’s more than just their contact information. It’s their background, company, interests, activity, and other attributes that provides a more complete picture.. The biggest takeaway we had from BIMS? It’s something we heard from multiple speakers and experts: Know your audience. We couldn’t agree more.
Sienna Naturals understood the importance of first party data. By taking advantage of influencer marketing and personalization engines, they generated a 58% lead capture rate, and a 30% email opt-in rate. They were able to generate data about their audience’s attributes and personality types while keeping the interaction fun and engaging.
3. Focus on providing more value for sponsors.
Your revenue streams are the drivers to your business. Luckily, all the information we’ve provided so far happens to be exactly how you improve your revenue streams. With interactive content, your lead generation and qualification efforts are much more achievable and allow you to develop stronger relations with your sponsors and audience at the same time.
Generating more revenue for your business is no easy task, but it can definitely be easier. There’s two things sponsors want: qualified leads, and the proprietary data to support them. Leverage immersive, interactive experiences with sponsor content that generates deep insights to hyper-qualify leads. Further strengthen your pricing power for your advertising products with proprietary data.
The Business Journals put great focus on their lead qualification efforts. By using interactive content to boost the quality of their data collection, they were able to generate leads that were hyper qualified and created a new demand for their audience data. Not only did they fulfill a need for sponsors, they created a desire for their content. 81% of participants opted in to receive email communications.
What’s your next step? Let’s find out.
What we heard around the floor the most was all about audience and first party data. Luckily we’ve been experts in these areas for years now. Being at BIMS had confirmed what we already knew. Data is king and your audience should be at the forefront of your priorities. How can your organization leverage these insights? We’d be happy to help.
