By Jon Durkee, COO at TrueData
Food blogger Yumna Jawad has recently spoken out about the importance of investing in a diversified content strategy that protects her business against major changes on any one social media platform. I think that publishers need to go a step further. In addition to diversification, publishers need to start acting like retailers, where data and insights are king and the customer journey dictates the entire marketing strategy.
Bigger Threats Than Ever
Publisher interest in Yumna’s diversification story is piqued. Publishers face an avalanche of upheaval: an uncertain future for TikTok, and changes by X, Meta and Google to reduce content safety oversight, which could decrease advertiser demand. Advertisers are embracing new forms of media buying including curation, which gives them audience buying precision, but leaves publishers out of the process. And AI is blowing up search, which means publishers need to dramatically change their “SEO” strategy to ensure they show up where they need to in a way that drives traffic.
New search behaviors are emerging quickly. More people start a retail search on Amazon than on Google. That creates issues for any publisher that has product-based content such as reviews. GenZ is likely to use video search and AI based search, which means that traditional SEO will do nothing to surface a publisher’s content for those people.
Publishers are in an Indiana Jones scenario, where the earth is crumbling beneath their feet while a giant boulder is rolling downhill straight at them.
Time to Take off the Gloves
Creating a stable content business to protect against the whims of big tech platforms isn’t a new concept. Meta’s changes to their feed years ago pushed many publishers to the brink. There are untold casualties of publishers over the past decade that failed to diversify, failed to evolve with Google’s shifting algorithms, or failed to differentiate in a crowded landscape.
Despite their dramatic back story, now is a particularly pivotal moment for publishers that are interested in sticking around for the future. Publishers can’t rely on an industry trade group or a government order to reign in big tech. It’s time to go on the offensive, and that means creating a strategy that gives publishers as much ownership and leverage as possible.
Scrappy retailers know they need to be easy to find, easy to buy, at the right price to as big an audience as possible. They use data and competitive intelligence to create smart strategies, and they’re heavily invested in technology to personalize customer experiences. Publishers can learn a lot from this approach.
Publishers have three major assets: content, audiences and data. Thinking like a retailer, publishers can do the following:
- Create the products audiences want: Retailers don’t show 30 second commercials on Instagram, they work with influencers to create authentic posts. They know that every customer touchpoint needs to be relevant for the environment. Publishers need to consider where their content can shine most effectively and shape it for that environment. Consider an auto publisher looking to attract audiences on the Metaverse, where someone might want to test drive a car in a 3-D simulation compared to another person who wants to read an article about the car’s drivability. These two different formats need to make sense in different contexts in a way that’s different and compelling. Publishers need to deliver high quality, memorable content within a platform that can’t be replicated.
- Be obsessed with the customer: Retailers say that they are “customer obsessed” all the time. Publishers don’t. It’s not that they don’t care about their audiences, they do very much, but they haven’t invested in audience insights, personalization and stickiness as much as retailers have. Most retailers know what their lifetime customer value is, many publishers don’t. Publishers should map out their audience journey and become obsessed with owning more of it. They should consider the value of loyalty programs, on-site identification and data capture, and CRM across the entire customer journey.
- Own and harness data: Big retailers spend millions on “martech” and ecommerce technology. Scrappy small retailers build their entire business around data capture so they can be competitive despite their small size. Platforms like iOS and Meta don’t give publishers the chance to collect insights and data. The more publishers can lean into interactions that they own, the more they can learn and grow. Publishers can also harness new data strategies like identity as a connective tissue across platforms.
There is a not-to-distant future where people speak to whatever device is closest and content loads on screen that’s tailored to their needs. Instead of navigating to specific apps, websites and search results, people will simply pull up videos, articles or even audio when they want it. If they aren’t playing the game right, publishers risk losing connection with their audiences as the platforms take over that experience. To avoid becoming a commodity, publishers need to have an obsession with their customers, truly differentiated content, and the data to drive smart decisions.
