Amongst the speakers at this month’s inaugural FIPP Middle East and North Africa conference was a woman trying to sell the impossible.
Her name is Carola York, managing director of Jellyfish CoNNect. She was discussing strategies for maximising subscription acquisitions in a market where paid subscriptions have not traditionally been a focus for publishers and are alien concepts to most consumers.
Yet utilising digital marketing campaigns to sell print, digital and app subscriptions is her forte and she’s determined to prove that such campaigns can work in the region. For the publishing world to thrive, we’d best hope they do.
How do you go from free to paid subscriptions? How do you build reader loyalty? How do publishers ensure a return on investment? How, in a world where increasingly no one wants to pay for anything, do you encourage them to spend?
“People are willing to pay for quality content,” she says. “Publications that will succeed will be those that understand their reader’s needs and provide great content for them. [But] to encourage readers to start to pay for something that they previously free, publishers are likely to have to offer something extra – something that has real value to justify a subscription price. For B2B publishers with free controlled circulation magazines, they could charge for access to an online offering – an online data/analysis resource is often a good route to go down. For consumer publishers, it could be a great app with extra content. For example, a weekly magazine could have an app with daily updated content, or a car magazine could have an app with fantastic video content.”
Key to York’s strategy is a strong emphasis on pay per click (PPC) and paid search to drive subscriptions and dominate the digital landscape. She states that PPC, together with a magazine’s organic presence, can reinforce a brand and its profile with prospective customers. Paid search can also allow publishers to create a purpose-built, subscription sales focussed ad that grabs the attention of prospective consumers. She also argues that non-brand ads often start user journeys. But how possible is it to dominate the digital landscape this way?
“Using paid search to grow subscription volumes is most cost effective when people are searching for a magazine brand, so building the volume of brand searches is crucial to increase subscription volumes and to keep the cost per acquisition down,” says York. “More and more publishers are pulling back on traditional brand advertising – advertising like TV, in-magazine/newspaper page ads, direct mail etc – and when this happens, the volume of brand searches often falls.
“But in the digital world building brand profile can be done cost-effectively through digital display advertising (whether using programmatic display or channels such as GDN, Taboola, Outbrain etc) and using content in the ads used in these campaigns is a great way to get people to link brand, to good content, to ‘something I want to read more about’. And given digital display is trackable (unlike most traditional marketing channels) you can clearly understand how many people are seeing your ads and interacting with them – and also what part each channel is playing in starting a user’s digital journey towards subscribing so you can understand which are the best digital channels to use.”
How optimistic is York that what she suggest for publishers globally could work in the Middle East?
“The Middle East hasn’t traditionally been a subscription driven market. But for those who are looking to see if they can grow subscription volumes, using digital is a great place to start. It’s quick to set up, easy to track and easy to test different ad creative and offers to see what will work best. And you don’t need huge budgets either.”
