There is no doubt as to the value in audience data when it comes to helping publishers monetize content more effectively. Yet, it’s becoming increasingly clear that audience data provides the most value when it is integrated with a publisher’s content management system. 

There are numerous advantages to data-focused integrations and we’ll discuss a few today:

For the Customer

Without question, audience data integration ultimately provides the customer with the most valuable content at the most appropriate time. How?  When publishers can keep track of what kind of information is most-valued and helpful to their readers, they can enhance the reader experience by delivering relevant content in context.  Audience data integrated with a CMS becomes actionable data; automating tactics to increase traffic, time on site, purchases and to forward other publisher goals.

Knowing the audience becomes second nature, and responsiveness to audience needs becomes part of the editorial workflow. It’s that simple. Customers gain access to premium content immediately.

In the BtoB world, that often means that customers are consistently supported with useful knowledge that helps to make their lives easier. With those kinds of results, visiting the site and purchasing more becomes second nature to them.

For The Publisher

Centralization

With all your audience data in one place, you get a comprehensive picture that allows you to understand your audience and your revenue potential for capturing leads, selling more products and creating new products. AND you can act on that data by employing various integrations.  For example, ePublishing customers use integrations to support:

Subscriptions

Customers register completely on site and their information is integrated with the publisher’s circulation or fulfillment system. Publishers can then market additional relevant products related to subscriptions and automatically send renewal reminders. Additional integrations help easily manage bulk online subscriptions for large corporate users and control access.

Marketing/Promotions

Using integrated eMail tools, publishers can track response to marketing campaigns including when they run trial offers to market new subscriptions and upgrades, to determine which generate the most revenue and where new audience segments may exist.  Automatically synching audience data gathered on your publication website makes it easy to sort and segment email lists by topic preferences, products purchased, or articles viewed.

Registrations

Customer profile data is synchronized between registration and circulation systems, to support targeted marketing, while automated online registration allows users to gain access immediately to important events and related materials.

Behavioral Targeting

With data integrations that track engagement and interests, not only do you get a clear idea of what your current audience wants and needs, but also of where you can develop and expand niche audiences. You can identify audience personas and drill your content down to deliver it, easily, to the most appropriate readers.

Advertising

With integrated data, publishers are gaining greater ability to identify custom audience segments and present richer data to advertisers. Publishers are presenting a more comprehensive picture to potential advertisers and also discovering non-intuitive qualities of their audience that can be used to enrich advertisements. These richer assets make for more accurately targeted ads.

Events

A recent post on the ABM website shared some relevant insights on how integrated data can support greater event monetization, citing that nearly half of the BtoB industry’s annual media revenue comes from events. Some of the ways to use integrated data to support events include:

• Using engagement activity to determine the appropriate theme for an event
• Targeting more precisely prospective attendees and engaging them more directly
• Providing on-site personalization with mobile apps and targeted emails
• Creating more effective methods of follow up via email and forums or webinars. 

Which leads us to the value of email service provider integrations. This will be discussed more in depth in our next post. Stay tuned!