TheMarketingblog recently came across a B2B website that looked a bit different to most in the way it presented its advertiser’s, so we contacted them to see what it was all about.
Editor Rowan Crowley, ex EMAP Circulation, Marketing and Publishing Director was candid and gave us clear insight of how H&C News look at their marketplace, we like it and suspect their advertiser’s do too even if they are treated as 2nd Class Citizens!
Why the big change in style? We had to as Harper and Google Analytics told us to…
We brought a new content and social media executive into the business last year to help us manage the ever growing amount of content that we publish and that extra resource enabled us to measure everything we publish more effectively.
The measurement was done by adopting Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird viewpoint, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
The person we needed to understand is a visitor to our website and a subscriber to our newsletter, we call her Harper.
In Harper’s busy life running a restaurant at a top London hotel she is time poor and extremely disciplined about managing her demanding work life. So we have to work very hard to earn some of that time by providing her with information that delivers a return on her time investment with us.
By walking around as Harper it allows us to focus on a real person doing a real job and add this dimension to the stats. Google Analytics is priceless in understanding what content engages with our audience, and our email marketing software adds depth to that understanding – but Harper keeps us on our toes!
And – we saw longer page viewing times on content that included images that were visually engaging. The pages were not any more or less information rich, but did earn more of the visitor’s time, which is our constant challenge.
So – we decided to create a much more image led website, and the early analytics are already demonstrating higher numbers of page views per visitor and more time spent per visit.
Your advertising concept is certainly very different. Can you explain how it works?
As B2B publishers all our revenue comes from advertisers, but our responsibility to maintain a long term mutually beneficial relationship with them rests on treating them very much as second class citizens!
Why? Because our primary objective is to provide business information that ‘engages’ our subscribers and visitors. Our advertisers also place their marketing messages within this content in order to engage with our subscribers and visitors. So by putting our subscribers and visitors first, we best serve the interests of our advertisers.
The site is structured with five main sections and currently sixteen sub sections: a section or sub section can be sponsored by an advertiser. We then build a section page dynamically to place a selection of the sponsor’s web marketing assets on every page within that section. By web assets what we are talking about is video, Facebook, twitter, email newsletter sign up forms, event registration pages… pretty much anything that the advertiser wants to use to try and engage with our subscribers and visitors.
By offering a rich variety of channels, the sponsor is providing choices and options with which our subscribers and visitors can engage – much more attractive to them than simple banners, though we do include banners within the sponsor mix as the branding it delivers is vital.
The proposition from the sponsor is set out clearly in content that is relevant to their business and, as such, can work to gain attention with our subscribers and visitors.
Most importantly, it does not interrupt their editorial engagement by dropping into content and disrupting what they are reading. Instead, it provides choice and we feel this is a better proposition for all.
Please can you let me have some of the early reactions to your new site?
Here again we will focus our answer from Harper’s perspective: early indications from Google Analytics indicate we are seeing higher numbers of page views per visitor, and more time spent per visit. No complacency though – we need to build on this, and further refine engagement.
Oh, yes – and in the past week quite a few advertisers seem to be taking faster decisions. Thanks, Harper!
Rowan Crowley is the Editor and Publisher of Hospitality & Catering News.
Across eleven years Rowan held a number of senior management positions within Emap PLC including Publishing Director, Marketing Director and Circulation Director.
The scope of Rowan’s media experience covers magazines, newsletters, websites, ‘alert’ services, conferences, awards events and exhibitions.