Online Optimization: What’s Next for the Media Industry?

The explosion of online media sites – and how that expansion affects advertising dollars, subscriptions and traditional channels – is forcing media companies to take a long hard look at their business strategies. Online optimization will be essential as media companies reach out to subscribers with new content and new ways of delivering that content.

Your audience = the world
Media companies are presenting a new face to reach more and more of the public that’s interested in their content, and technologies such as RSS feeds and streaming media have given them opportunities to provide content bundles and delivery options that were never before possible.

Let’s take one individual reader as an example: She’s a chef, she likes to shop for shoes and she’s an amateur carpenter. First, how do you find her? And once you’ve found her, how do you get her – and others like her – to interact with your content the way you want?

Start with a customer data warehouse and data integration capabilities that enable you to combine offline and online customer data. Sounds pretty basic, right? But executives overlooking the importance of these early stages run into trouble before they get their campaigns up and running.

Using analytics on this data will provide you with the intelligence you need to identify profitable customer segments. Then, based on the knowledge you have about customer segments, you can create better targeted, more focused content for specific segments. Getting the new content out before your competitors do can also capture greater customer loyalty and competitive advantage.

The next step is to identify advertisers willing to pay for premium ad space for these more targeted segments. For example, with the reader mentioned above, the hardware company Lowes or the shoe company DSW would likely pay more to advertise to this segment than to a more general population.

As you’re creating new segments and offerings, your strategies must take into account all of the channels you own and manage. For example, if you own both an online presence and a television station, you don’t want your new online streaming media to cannibalize your 7 p.m. local news. Instead, you want to find ways to get a lift for both your online and television presence.

An easy way to manage this is for your TV channel to reference your Web site and for your Web site to offer unique content targeted back to programming that appears on your TV station.  Furthermore, you can create unique ad packages to sell for both your Web channel and TV channel. So now a company like Lowes can buy targeted ad space on the Web as well as general content for the TV. And because Lowes knows there is cross-pollination between the different channels, it is more likely to sign an ad deal.

Why the right AdWords make all the difference
Buying high value words so you show up at the top of browsers’ search lists is another way to establish brand recognition. And it’s critical to be able to turn on a dime as news happens so you can quickly position yourself to stay at the top.

It’s also essential to make sure that the multiple divisions within your organization don’t end up bidding against each other for specific search terms and thereby needlessly raising the rate per click. In a recent example, several divisions within the same company started bidding against each other for a key word for their business. The result? Unwittingly, the company ended up paying $10,000 per click for the word and had to spend tens of millions of dollars because it had bid against itself.

To avoid similar business fiascos, companies have made room for a new top executive – the search engine management officer. The emergence of this new role demonstrates the importance of optimizing the budget paid out for click dollars. Search engine bid optimization will become the new must-have for doing business online.

Bloggers’ influence over your brand
Along with building brand recognition through search engine marketing, you can also make or break your brand with the layout and design of your Web site. Your Web site is a representation of who you are. You can’t beat having happy customers blog about your site, but on the flip side, all it takes is one negative blog entry about your site to do widespread damage to your reputation. Consider these actions to track your “organic” reach among blogging communities:

• On a global scale, find out who’s blogging about your site or referencing your content.
• Reach out to these bloggers with proactive campaigns. Give them something great to blog about and they most likely will. One recent example of a marketing campaign to bloggers is Microsoft’s surprise gift of Acer Ferrari laptops to people who had blogged about them. What happened? The recipients gave Microsoft even more publicity – some positive and some negative – in their blogs by conjecturing about the gifts.
• Track the traffic that comes to your site based on blogs.
• The days of just simply ignoring disgruntled customers without any follow-up efforts are over. The damage they can do to your reputation in blog postings is worth preventing, so pursue ways to repair the relationship.
• In a similar vein, find out which RSS syndications have left your site and why, and then determine how you can bring them back.

Based on what you learn, you can use multivariant analysis and visual BI techniques to experiment with page designs. By conducting these design experiments, you can lower the cost of your Web site by determining the best way to move people to the content you want them to see and then persuading them to take the actions you’re directing them to.

Looking forward
Social networking is rapidly becoming ubiquitous, both online and through mobile channels – places like MySpace and cellular networks such as Verizon Wireless’ “IN Calling” and Alltel’s “My Circle.” Savvy media companies will start targeting these social groups with the right messages by using optimization technologies to make the most of their marketing spend.