Your Database Sucks.

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Your Database Sucks. 5 Ways to Fix it and Drive More Ad Revenue

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

Introduction

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Identifying Database Problems / Your Database is a black hole.

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/ Wasting time and money with manual work.

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/ There’s no connection between your database and your content.

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/ Your database doesn’t keep up with your target audience.

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/ You have no way to show measurable ROI to advertisers.

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Fixing Your Database Problems / Take a closer look at your database.

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/ Build Your Database (the right way).

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/ Strengthen the connection between your database and your content.

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/ Boost results through segmentation.

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/ Demonstrate ROI.

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Conclusion

HUBSPOT • Your Database Sucks • 2015

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS.

Juliana Nicholson is a Marketing Manager at HubSpot, working to help media companies transform the way they think about attracting, converting, and closing audiences for themselves and their advertisers. FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER. @JB_NICHOLSON

Katie Carlin is an Inbound Marketing Specialist on HubSpot’s Media team. She specializes in helping media companies engage with their audiences, generate advertiser ROI and create new revenue streams using inbound marketing. FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER. @KATIECARLIN_

INTRODUCTION As a media company of any size, you invest a good percentage of your advertising dollars on traditional marketing strategies to bring customers to your door. Through your website content, print advertising and other methods, you’re able to generate leads and guide them through the sales funnel. Your database plays a part in the process as you use the contact information you’ve obtained and certain demographic information to nurture potential

It’s sometimes difficult to recognize that your database is in a shambles, but you surely must realize that your marketing efforts have stagnated. The primary problem is that you’ve been focusing too many of your resources on broadening your database, increasing its size so that you can reach out to more prospects: the more clicks and impressions, the better. But how well is your huge database working for you when you’re not getting in front of

customers.

people that are really interested in buying what you—or your advertisers—have to offer.

However, no amount of money invested or time spent will help you if your database information lives in silos, unconnected from your other marketing efforts. Lacking a unified database restricts you from painting a complete picture of your readers, rendering you unable to make the most of the buying habits and behavioral information you collect from site visitors and subscribers. You can commit a higher advertising budget, but increased exposure won’t do much good when it just leads to sending untargeted blasts of content to increasingly annoyed recipients being bombarded by information that doesn’t appeal to them.

HUBSPOT • Your Database Sucks • 2015

The issue really comes down to depth rather than breadth, which might run contrary to your marketing approach status quo. A deep database is what you should be striving for, one that captures data regarding the habits, behaviors and business pains of your prospects. Not only is this the type of data that separates qualified prospects from email blast recipients, it’s also the type of database advertisers will pay top dollar to get in front of. While the bad news is that your database IS broken, the bright side is that you CAN fix it. Repair starts with first understanding and identifying the current database issues that are hindering your marketing efforts.

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IDENTIFYING DATABASE PROBLEMS Repair starts with first understanding and identifying the current database issues that are hindering your marketing efforts.

Problem #1: Your database is a black hole. • You’re relying on raw data alone to make strategic marketing and sales decisions. You have tons of subscribers and know where they came from, but this information does nothing to tell you how to nurture these prospects for both your own purposes or those of your advertisers. In order to present them with content they need now, you must know where these people are in the sales funnel. • You’re only giving your database a twice-a-year checkup. You can’t know the best ways to fix your database and drive more ad revenue if you’re not giving it the attention it deserves. Inaccurate or outdated information is the scourge of your database. Regular monitoring and maintenance is necessary if you want to get out of it what you put in. • You don’t know how big your database is, so you have no guidance on whether it’s growing, shrinking or festering. The truth is that marketing databases corrode due to subscribers moving away from companies, changing their email address and other factors. Lack of guidance is a direct cause of mismanagement, wherein you’re unable to identify your most valuable subscribers because you don’t know the characteristics of someone who’s truly engaged. • Your lack of knowledge about your database negatively impacts your business. Useless information actually costs your company money. Worried about high database management expenses? Think about the cost of tossing away advertising dollars because you sent information to non-existent email addresses. Also, it’s important to heed the impression you’re presenting, including your sender score and the satisfaction levels of your advertisers.

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Problem #2: Wasting time and money with manual work. • You have to manually cross-reference fulfillment, email, event, and subscriber data. Many publishers pour too much time and effort into syncing data when they could be spending it developing strategy around what’s in the database itself. Your efforts should be focused on running your business, not trying to find ways to tie together siloed pieces of user information. • You spend countless hours wading through data. Database management is time consuming and thankless. You’re constantly uploading and downloading lists, auditing for outdated information and other tedious activities that don’t result in a stronger connection with your subscribers. Entering tons of data doesn’t result in measurable improvement, it just increases your email blast list. You can spend hours managing your database, but a broken system won’t tell you that you’re reaching the right type of reader.

Manual work doesn’t scale. No matter how much your publication grows, the number of hours in your day will not change. As the size of your database increases, so too does your time commitment.

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Problem #3: There’s no connection between your database and your content. • You have no idea how, why or when your target audience is connecting with your company. Recognizing that there’s a lack of connection is important when looking at ways to fix your database and drive more ad revenue. Every detail within your database should have meaning. • Your most reliable means of identifying trends is impersonal surveys. Think of the impression you get when asked to complete a survey. It doesn’t lend credibility to the company who’s content you read every day when they are constantly seeking information from you. • Your audience is faceless and meaningless. A broken database prevents you from making a personal connection with your target audience. You lack credibility for yourself and your advertisers when you don’t treat readers like they are valuable. • You aren’t adding value for your audience members by giving them content they’re interested in—whether that’s content to encourage them to become subscribers, or targeted content from your advertisers.

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Problem #4: Your database doesn’t keep up with your target audience. • Your data remains static and dormant. Just as trends in your market change, so do the interests and purchase intent of your target audience. You can’t know what they’re talking about or where they’re hanging out online. Even worse, you can’t focus your message on the right people if you can’t reach them to begin with. • Your information may be inaccurate or out-of-date. The best, most engaging content in the world is useless if it never finds its way to it’s intended recipients. Your well-developed, focused materials fall on deaf ears when your database information isn’t kept current. And if you’re only personalizing on the information someone provides in a survey or by a single email interaction, what about everything that happens in between? While you’re reading this ebook, your audience is taking actions on your website that could help you more effectively engage with them.

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Problem #5: You have no way to show measurable ROI to advertisers. • You’re only measuring top-of-the-funnel metrics. Clicks and impressions don’t equal leads. Your advertisers are in the business of turning profits, just as your company and any other enterprise out there are. It’s impossible to demonstrate how valuable your product or service is unless you give them concrete numbers to crunch. True, they might see great things as far as website visits, clicks through to a landing page, or visitor forms filled out, but this doesn’t show ROI. Only by delivering verifiable, qualified leads do you provide results. • You’re trying to use clicks and impressions to determine quantifiable ROI. Return on investment is a concrete number that relates input directly to output. You’ve invested considerable effort in attempts to generate interest from your target audience; now it’s time to put a dollar value on your work. When trying to find ways to fix your database and drive more ad revenue, don’t overlook the importance of the bottom line: profits. • You aren’t connecting your advertising with tangible return on investment for your advertiser. If you can’t prove that advertising with your media outlet is effective, you’re probably leaving money on the table, as advertisers are likely to walk away to another media outlet that can provide ROI information.

When trying to find ways to fix your database and drive more ad revenue, don’t overlook the importance of the bottom line: profits.

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FIXING YOUR DATABASE PROBLEMS Like we said, the good news is that even the most broken, siloed databases can be nursed back to health. To help you get started, we’ve laid out a few simple steps.

1. Take a closer look at your database. Get rid of the evil black hole when attempting different ways to fix your database and drive more ad revenue. Your database isn’t such a dark and scary thing when you make sense of the information it contains. The key is keeping the right details and getting rid of anything that doesn’t help you segment and target your audience. Once you’ve isolated the information most valuable to your publication (likely this includes fulfillment information, subscribers, email newsletters, event attendees, and CRM data) you’ll need a system to unite each of these data points. There’s no feeling more defeating than inputting data into fields and clicking a button to initiate a sync sequence in your database. Implement technology that can collect all of this information and house it under one-contact record. This will allow you to focus on the human element of marketing strategy and development.

Spot Check: One way to ensure your database is being consistently refreshed is with re-engagement campaigns. These ensure that you aren’t just suppressing unengaged users, but giving them an option to opt back in and engage with content they actually love. A re-engaged contact is one of the more profitable ways to fix your database and drive more ad revenue. It serves as a reminder that your company is a valuable source of information and that their needs matter.

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2. Build Your Database (the right way)

Now that you’ve got the right pieces of information talking to each other in your database, it’s time to focus on continuing to grow your database. Rather than purchasing lists of contacts, which often results in high unsubscribe and low-engagement rates, develop your database through inbound marketing techniques—such as pre-transactional offers, CTAs, forms, and landing pages. The key is thinking about top-of-the-funnel, middle-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-thefunnel offers you can leverage to get new contacts into your database as someone new interacts with your website. This will help you develop your database with users who are genuinely interested in your content—priming you to drive more revenue from subscriptions and advertisers. As you grow your database, remember to ask users to volunteer information that will be useful to you in the future, then find new ways to take action and engage prospects. Once you have your database under control, your marketing efforts can be opened up to an exciting new world. Imagine a scenario where you know what content will appeal to which audience members, before they even ask for it.

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3. Strengthen the connection between your database and your content. The days of your database being nothing more than a repository for information are long gone. Today’s solutions enhance the details you’ve collected by providing tools for turning information into value. Your database must have the ability to respond to your needs, not vice versa. Your database needs responsive capabilities. This means it reacts to the actions that your audience members take with your online content in real time. It also means creating a two-way street in which actions taken on site content triggers data-point collection, and then using that same data to fuel the content that appears on your site. Bring your data to life by giving context to contacts. Imagine being able to marry the demographic data you already have with behavioral data from your website— creating a fuller and more comprehensive picture of each and every single audience member in real time. If someone visits a specific section of your site, watches a video, clicks on an ad, visits a page but doesn’t take a desired action— no problem. All of that information goes on their contact record, so you can follow up with them later. Once you have this picture, you can serve them emails and website content that they want. Not only does this help you increase engagement, but it also helps your advertisers get sponsored content and ads in front of the right eyes based on your audience’s interests.

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4. Boost results through segmentation. When you’re able to identify common ground among your audience’s behaviors and interests, you can segment them based on these categories. This enables you to target the right people, with the right message, at the right time. You can send targeted messages (sponsored content, ads, or your own marketing offers) based on actions people have taken on your site. Additionally, analyzing this database information can help you come up with new topics for your content strategy if you’re in need of inspiration. Let’s say for instance we’re talking about a newspaper’s website. If someone visited the auto section, read an article about financing, indicated on a form that they are interested in purchasing a car in the next 6 months, and they read content about foreign cars—you might send them a newsletter highlighting a story about BMW’s new cars or perhaps serve them sponsored content from a local BMW dealership. This is also why a responsive database is important. If someone is no longer qualified based on the actions they are taking, you will no longer reach out to them with that specific offer. Media companies have traditionally been about breadth, but advertisers are looking for depth. Segmenting allows you to turn your audience into a more valuable asset for advertisers. Instead of spraying your entire list with untargeted content, you can segment a specific list (or sub-audience) to receive a targeted message that aligns with their interests. Segmentation adds value for both your audience because they receive editorial and advertising content they are interested in, and your advertisers who can deliver their message to a more qualified audience. Not to mention, being strategic with content also protects the health of your database and prevents email fatigue.

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5. Demonstrate ROI. Start by addressing the issue of attribution when looking at ways to fix your database and drive more ad revenue. Gone are the days of correlations and best guesses. Advertisers now demand direct correlations between their spend and their sales. But how can you definitively demonstrate ROI to your advertisers if you can’t attribute the results they’re seeing to your audience and campaigns? Using a responsive database, you can keep track of everyone who clicks on your advertisers’ ads or sponsored content, which means that you can provide attribution information and quantify the ROI on their investment. Rather than focus on clicks and impressions, meaningless numbers that don’t provide any distinction between a real lead and an accidental visitor, measure success in qualified leads and sales pipeline. Ultimately this mindset translates into driving more revenue from your database by selling inbound media campaigns. You can do this by segmenting your database and serving sponsored content to a targeted list to produce qualified leads. These leads are attributable your media company and because they are action and intent based, they are also more valuable to your advertisers—which means you can charge more for them than you would a banner ad campaign.

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CONCLUSION

Driving more revenue from your database isn’t possible until you fix the cracks in your current system. While this can’t be magically achieved overnight or with the flick of a switch, it can be done by: • Unifying and cleaning up your existing siloed databases • Growing your audience database the right way • Connecting your database to your website and email content • Using your database to prove advertiser ROI Sometimes we overlook the database as a key component of an online marketing approach, but the truth is that it might be the most crucial element. Your database is what gives meaning to the content you publish and how you interact on social media. It’s how you generate new audience members, engage with existing audience members, and drive leads for your advertisers. It may not be a piece of real estate or other physical piece of property, but your database is an asset nevertheless. It’s up to you to enrich its value.

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HUBSPOT’S ALL-IN-ONE MARKETING SOFTWARE HELPS MEDIA COMPANIES. BETTER UNDERSTAND SITE TRAFFIC

BROADEN YOUR REVENUE STRATEGY

When it comes to your audience, knowledge is power. Pair onsite behavior with contact data to transform your readers into your most valuable asset.

Look beyond traditional digital products to offer advertisers new pipelines that generate recurring revenue.

INCREASE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT

PROVE INCREASED ADVERTISER ROI

Convert casual readers into subscribers to increase time on site, analyze purchase intent, and build out robust audience intelligence.

Sell more than clicks and impressions to serve advertisers actions that matter. Deliver sales qualified leads and close the loop to attribute campaigns to real revenue.

INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE? Request A Demo

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