When the kids try to convince lo-tech grandma to get a smartphone, they focus on the benefits. “You can see what your grandkids are up to and chat with us!” Once grandma gets comfortable with a smartphone, she wants more storage and processing power. Those are features. The rule I learned back in the 1980s…
Summary: Speaking clearly goes along with thinking clearly, which is why you should avoid silly lingo and trendy words. I recently read this in a post on LinkedIn. “[M]edia organizations need to establish a relationship and give easy ways for the subscriber to stay connected.” Sorry to break it to you, but nobody in the…
Renewals are crucial to subscription publishing models, and engagement is crucial to renewals. This page lists some questions to ask about your retention efforts, and some ideas about measurement and tools. I’m sure you’re justifiably proud of the good service you provide, but here’s a hard truth: access to your content is not a benefit…
There’s no single answer to this problem because everybody’s needs are different, but here are some general guidelines. 1. Ask if technology is really the answer. Technology is great and allows us to do amazing things. But remember that when your only tool is a hammer, you want to bang on every problem, and when…
Marketing and IT staff are very different — in their training, talents, personalities, and how their performance is measured. In this first of a series of three articles, I will give some guidelines on how these very different groups can work together successfully. Part 1 – Marketing and IT professionals have very different personalities and…
In Part 1 of this 3-part series on how to get marketing to work with IT I discussed how different the marketing and IT perspectives can be, and I gave a few suggestions on how to bridge the gap. The most important, in my opinion, is that a marketing department needs a “marketing technologist” —…
This is the last of my 3-part series on what marketing needs to know about IT. Here are links to part 1 and part 2. Be Diplomatic There’s a huge cultural gap between marketing and IT, and the sort of things that work in a sales or marketing environment might not work in a techie…
Takeaway: It doesn’t matter what “audiences” want. It matters what your audience wants. Publishers should be wary of trend analysis that doesn’t take demographics into account because it can lead to a skewed understanding of the audience and their preferences. For example, Booktok might seem like a great way to get “crowdsourced” information about what…
In the last issue, I mentioned why we should be skeptical of 3rd-party advertising claims. Along those lines, is attention measurement a real thing, or is it another way for the ad sales industry to snow people with BS metrics? Some “attention measurement” technologies require special apps and permission to track eye movements. Are people…
In brief … “Lots of people” doesn’t mean “lots of your people.” One company’s success might be an outlier. Consider the opportunity cost before you invest in TikTok. From time to time we get a new dose of “everybody’s doing this, we should do it too.” Such advice stems from a laudable desire to notice…
ROI is very important, but it’s also a bit of a myth. It’s tempting to think that ROI should be easy on the internet. After all, websites run on computers, and e-stores use databases, and we can track links and clicks and such, so that when you boil it all down it’s just math. We…
You need to understand your customer’s experience with your brand so you can be proactive and deliberate in how you interact with your customers. One tool to help with that is a customer journey map, or diagram. But if you don’t follow these steps below, you might end up with a vision with no substance….
By adding benefit language to their paywalls! Why are newspapers dying? There are lots of reasons, but one contributing factor may be their paywall and subscription offers. Sorry to be blunt, but they’re pretty awful. I spent a few hours reviewing paywall messages on dozens of newspaper websites, and what I found was uniformly unimpressive….
You should be A/B testing your offer pages, but in this article I’ll explain one thing you have to keep in mind while you’re doing it. Apparently I’ve read 13 articles from The Guardian in the past year, so they asked me to pony up. Here’s part of the message. An erosion of democratic norms….
An upcoming Apple privacy change is going to make your open rates unreliable. Here’s what you need to know, and do. Open rates are one of the basic metrics that email marketers follow, but that number is about to go wonky. Apple’s update will allow iOS users to hide whether or not they open an…