Circulation Management - August 29, 2008
Inside the Brand Audit
It's not just about magazines anymore. How can a publisher most effectively audit its audience?
By Heidi Spangler
As circulation has evolved into audience development, circulation professionals are faced with a new set of challenges. Publishers are developing Web sites that offer more content and our subscribers can choose from dozens of newsletters and digital products, some delivered on a daily basis. Today’s audience development professional is learning SEO and monitoring Web traffic, tracking newsletter open and click rates, appending demographics to internal lists, de-duping show attendee lists against subscriber lists, targeting potential audiences for podcasts and Webinars, and analyzing audience demographics to come up with new product ideas. All the while, we’re keeping a watchful eye on our print subscribers, encouraging them to maintain their print subscriptions and trying to engage them in the other products that make up our brand.
As we present our audience with a variety of products, the problem that we face is that not all of our customers want to receive every product we offer, and they don't necessarily have to subscribe to our print publication to be a member of our audience. Sometimes they prefer to receive a few newsletters on the specific subjects that interest them and sometimes they would rather just go to the Web site to get the information they need. The good news is that we now also have alternative products to offer subscribers who we previously rejected, which gives us the opportunity to expand our audience and eliminates the concept of "non-qualified circulation".
Auditing the Entire Audience
So it's not surprising that building a corporate database (unified database, single view database, audience master file, and so on) is on everyone's "to-do" list. The more we expand our audience through digital products, the greater the need for a system that allows us to look at our customers and not only classify them by their demographic profiles, but by the particular products they are receiving within our brand. But once the database is built, how do we present this information to our advertisers? How do we show that our printed circulation may be declining but interest in our digital products and events is stronger than ever? One answer is to audit the brand. A brand audit could present our advertisers with a detailed view of our entire audience, outlined in a single document and verified by an independent third party. A business/title breakout might look like the sample spreadsheet here, which presents the business and title counts for each product within the brand, as well as a total and unduplicated count of the audience.
Further crosstabs could be produced to show where the overlap exists across different products or analyze supplemental demographics at the publisher's option.
When Direct Request Becomes Opt-In
In the digital world, the term "direct request" might be replaced with "opt-in", but the source of the record for each product could still be verified. Some publishers are already auditing newsletter delivery and Web traffic on integrated audit statements, but the detail of who these Web users and newsletter subscribers are is absent on those statements. A brand audit would take this one step further by allowing us to present our customers not only as subscribers or customers of a specific product, but as members of an active, engaged audience of our brand.
Heidi Spangler is director of circulation and audience development at b-to-b media company Questex Media.