The creation of audience profiles is a critical step in converting website visitors into paying customers. Digital technology has forced publishers to rethink their roles in the world of media, particularly in regards to generating revenue. A mix of business models will be needed to enable publishers to
turn website visitors into paying customers in the future.
There are three main ways for you to earn revenue from your readers as a publisher:
- Marketing promotions
- Paid subscriptions
- Advertising
You need a deep understanding of what makes your visitors tick to succeed in any of these areas: their interests, passions, and motivations. It is crucial to gather data about users' online behaviour, preferences, and context of their visits in order to create profiles of them.
How would you define audiences?
When it comes to gathering information about users, a data management platform is a great tool. All of this information can be analyzed by a DMP (Data Management Profile), and the resulting groups (we call them audiences) can then be used to create your personalization strategy.
You can target a broad audience or a narrow audience. Visitors to your sports pages can be considered part of your audience if they visit those pages frequently. A very specific definition may be Chicago-based male readers of sports news with a young family.
In order to build individual relationships with your readers, you must have a firm grasp of your audiences. You can then recommend tailored content to those readers. Their targeting capabilities make them ideal for brands and advertisers. Marketing offers cannot be run properly without them.
Are Publishers Able To Make Sense Of This Vast Desert Of Data About Their Users To Reach Their Target Audiences?
DMPs define the segmentation of users using taxonomies (categories).
The data behind DMPs are used to create targetable audiences that marketers can sell to advertisers, for example.
Each visitor's behavior and activity can be used to create individual profiles based on the data gathered. Using this one-to-one approach, you offer content recommendations for each visitor to your site, such as news articles, videos and features.
The payoff? Providing articles that are relevant to your readers' interests will give them a feeling of familiarity, and constant reminder as to why they choose your site leading to a high rate of subscription.
DMPs Help Brands Identify Audiences To Target With Advertising.
Visitors who are extreme sports fans arrive on your website, and within a few microseconds of it loading, you'll identify who they are (male and female extreme sports fan) and alert your marketing that someone from this audience has arrived.
Those seeking to reach that audience (such as extreme sports brands) can bid in real-time for exclusive advertising spots on pages visited by extreme sport fans. Those who are interested in extreme sports will see relevant ads. The logic is clear.
Lessons learned:
- The publishing industry needs a variety of business models to convert website visitors into paying customers in the future.
- Data about the users' online behaviors, their purchases in the past, and preferences, along with the context of their visit, can be used to build user profiles.
- The data and insights generated by DMPs can then be used to create targetable audiences that advertisers can buy.
- A media provider today is required to answer the following questions about the visitors to his or her website: who, what, where and when?
- Reader preferences can be matched to a DMP to create a more personalized online experience and publishers who use DMPs to do so will win big.
