• What Is Content Marketing and Why Is It Important?

According to modern business strategists and marketing experts, content marketing is the key to success in this increasingly digital age of Internet, e-commerce, and social media. But what exactly is content marketing and why is it such a valuable tool for your brand? This article will explore the definition of content marketing, its benefits, and show some examples of the various ways that brands are utilizing content marketing throughout different industries.

• 50 Ways to Make Media Pay: Paywalls

Many news outlets have historically dropped paywalls (or elements of them) for emergencies, breaking news stories or major events. In keeping with this, multiple publishers did the same thing with COVID-related content, including outlets with historically firm paywalls, like the Financial Times. It wasn’t a move that everyone agreed with, and as the crisis continued, some publishers – like McClatchy in the U.S. – decided to reinstate their full paywalls.

• Metrics Show How Poor Digital Experience Impacts Revenue

Common sense says your customers’ digital experiences are closely tied to overall customer satisfaction. But new metrics can now show the effect of a substandard digital experience on the bottom line.

• 8 Survival Skills Every Publisher Needs to Offer Marketing Services

Publishers, even if your business starts morphing into the “annoying agency,” there are still some strategies that may be worth considering. Regardless of your talent, salesmanship, and entrepreneurial skill set, you may find some of these survival skills are worth further cultivating.

• Are Your Marketing Emails Illegal? How to Comply (And Thrive) With the CAN-SPAM Act

When considering email marketing as an outreach tactic, it’s important to understand the rules and regulations that can turn your company’s innocent approach into a legal nightmare. Let’s start by exploring the different components of an average user’s email inbox.

• Growing Reader Revenue in 2022

As subscription revenue becomes increasingly vital to news publishers, how best to inspire readers to sign on to the value proposition is at top-of-mind. There’s no singular answer, no magic bullet, and no one-size-fits-all approach, but publishers are getting creative with their subscription appeals, and readers are responding.

• ‘There needs to be a mindset shift’: The Publishers’ Guide to Building Effective Data Strategies

More publishers than ever before are using data to grow traffic and revenue. However, more data does not equal better results. A new report by paywall solutions company Piano explores the challenges faced by businesses banking on data for growth. It also presents insights on how companies can collect and use data more effectively.

• The Advertising Sales Reps’ Guide to Programmatic Advertising Sales: Part II

In publishing, the addition of digital advertising has opened a new world of revenue opportunities as well as many challenges. And the technological transition has brought with it opportunities for publishers that did not exist as publishers gain the ability to sell advertising inventory across the entire internet. It’s a challenge for many sales reps to understand how digital advertising works so they can take advantage of these opportunities.

• Happy Landings! How to Get Started With Landing Pages

The goal of a landing page is to increase lead generation and optimize conversion rates. While other web pages on your site prompt visitors to click around, a landing page guides visitors to a specific content offer. Let’s dive deeper into the benefits of landing pages.

• Dysfunctional Dynamics Continue to Blight Ad Tech’s Prospects

Any time a buyer has to sacrifice quality to meet a big-budget spending constraint, that buyer is in a lemon market and should exit until that hard reality trade-off can be overcome. It’s a critique often levied at the state of online advertising. And for good reason: the further out media buyers go into the online ad market to buy publisher inventory the more low-quality inventory they end up buying. But as long as ad tech vendors can deal with that inventory, media buyers don’t have to (i.e incorporate that trade-off cost into ROI) and the money keeps flowing.

• Do Publishers Need an Exit Strategy From Social Media?

What was once supposed to be a golden opportunity to reach and connect millions of people all over the world has soured, with the biggest platforms now being accused of threatening the very fabric of society and democracy. As more and more issues have surfaced, brands are getting twitchy. From ad boycotts to deleting brand accounts, some feel it is better not to be associated with social media at all. So, is this something publishers should also be seriously thinking about?

• The Advertising Sales Reps’ Guide to Programmatic Advertising Sales: Part I

Programmatic advertising, at its most basic, provides a variety of ways to automate the proactive efforts mentioned above. With that automation, opportunities abound to provide advertisers, publishers, and audiences only those quality ads that make sense. And with that quality comes ample opportunity for all to profit.

• CRM 101: A Crash Course on Customer Relationship and Marketing Automation

Many companies have difficulty organizing, analyzing, and acting on the data these users provide. The data could be their clickstream across your website or social media, email communications with salespeople, or basic demographics and contact information. It seems like a daunting task to organize and nurture every user according to where they are in the buying process. Fortunately, a specific marketing automation software exists to make it possible.

• ‘It’s not a peanut butter spread approach’: How Advertisers Are Adapting to a More Nuanced Social Landscape

The days of the one-size-fits all social media approach are seemingly over. Advertisers say the way people use social media is changing, pressuring brands to abandon broad campaigns and instead create content for each individual platform.

• Affiliate Revenue: Still a Publisher’s Best eCommerce Bet?

Globally, the affiliate market – which encompasses cashback and reward sites, as well as publishers and other content creators, social networks and other delivery mechanisms – is worth over $12 billion a year. In the U.S. alone, affiliate marketing spend is projected to reach $8.2 billion in 2022, up from $5.4 billion in 2017. Put simply, with values like these, this is too big a market for publishers to ignore.

• The Highs and Lows of Publishing CRM, and How to Embrace the Complications

Keeping an exact score is difficult, as the CRM failure rate has been measured to be anywhere between 18% and 69% over the years. Even if you look past the bewildering gulf between those numbers, you still have a technology that carries endless promise for all, yet still somehow fails one out of every five attempts.  So when there is a failure, should blame be put on the system? The answer to those questions may not be simple, but the solutions to overcome the larger contributing issues are entirely too easy.

• Perfect Timing: How Automation Can Help Your Email Marketing Strategy

The exponential rise of digital marketing required companies to embrace new methods of reaching current customers and potential leads. Email marketing quickly proved itself as one of the most effective digital marketing strategies. Today, the marketing strategy goes beyond sending monthly digital newsletters and product or service updates. Automating these emails is a valuable upgrade to your marketing strategy.

• With the Future of Third-Party Addressability on the Open Web Hanging in the Balance, the Ad Industry Divides in Two

A decision on guardrails to help the ad industry gain consent to track people across the European Union was meant to leave everyone with no doubts about one thing: whether the tracking and profiling of people across the web by a swarm of vendors is legal. Instead, it’s done anything but unify opinion.

• Advertising’s Next Top Model: Exploring the Cookie Alternatives

Google’s decision to phase out cookies has left advertisers searching for a suitable replacement identifier solution. Additionally, the European Publishers Council (EPC) filed an antitrust complaint against Google with the European Commission (EC), claiming the company favors its own online display advertising technology services. Where does this leave publishers? Is the industry too hung up on identity solutions? Or is there another way?

• Your Guide to the Best Magazine Software for Publishers

When it comes to magazine media and digital publications, reliable software tools are a necessity. From publishing CRM and magazine design, to circulation and subscription management, this ultimate guide to magazine software is an overview of the most popular software tools in the publishing industry.

• In With The New: How to Build an Engaged Audience With Inbound Marketing

Your business’s growth relies heavily on the lasting relationships you develop with your prospects and customers. Enter inbound marketing: the foundation for your audience-building and audience-engagement efforts. Inbound marketing involves forming a strategy to create brand awareness and foster long-lasting relationships with your customers. In contrast to outbound marketing, which involves marketers’ attempts to find customers, inbound marketing values the attention of customers and makes the company easily recognizable and accessible.

• With Google’s Latest Privacy Sandbox Update, European Publishers See Silver Lining

Pity the publisher commercial exec. Every time they get a handle on how Google sees advertising without third-party cookies, it changes. Sometimes a lot, other times a little — always enough to prevent them forming a persistent opinion on what’s happening. The tech company’s latest proposal for targeting without third-party cookies — Topics — is no different.

• What Might Web3 Mean for Publishing and Advertising?

Last year saw the first real web3 experiments from publishers and advertisers. From NFT drops to purchasing metaverse real estate, companies started to at least think about what web3 might mean for them. For some it’s a simple branding exercise, but for others it will be about building new customer experiences.

• Conquering All Media: The Best Ad Sales Software in Every Industry

At its most basic, an ad sales management program can track all stages of a sale through a customer relationship management (CRM) system. At its best, it’s a proactive tool that ensures work is done efficiently, effectively, and in step with every move that both your team members and your valued clients make.

• Work Smarter: Measure These 16 Lead Generation and Sales Pipeline Metrics

When it comes to making smart business decisions, using data and metrics to guide your sales strategy is key. But, there are countless sales-related metrics and KPIs to look at when evaluating the success of your lead generation and sales pipeline efforts, so which numbers should you be really focusing on? This blog will help you determine the best sales-related metrics for tackling your company’s lead generation and sales pipeline goals and practices.

• 50 Ways to Make Media Pay: Other Established and Emerging Ideas

In this section, we explore examples of well worn wider business practices that can support revenue growth and new income streams, as well as look at areas that are growing in popularity.  Some of these emerging ideas are newer than others, but as publishers look to reduce advertising dependency, so a number of older ideas are being looked at again, or benefitting from more effort and resources being allocated to them.

• Key Challenges Google Must Face in What Is Arguably the Most Pivotal Year in Its History

“One-size-fits-all products don’t spark much desire any longer” in the new world of journalism, suggests WAN-IFRA’s new report, Understanding your audiences in a deeper way. The report, based on the Table Stakes Europe program, shares case studies of several regional publishers who are using newsletters to reach and grow specific audience segments.

• Why Integrated Marketing Tools Are a Sales Rep’s Best Friend

If you work in ad sales and depend on your CRM, some tools are absolutely essential. At the bare minimum, you will want your CRM to integrate with your email account. After all, if you spend all day in Outlook or Gmail, why not take advantage of it? However, there are plenty of other marketing tools out there that a publishing CRM can offer. And just because you aren’t using them now doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be.

• Buzz Off! The 10 Most Annoying Buzzwords in Marketing Today

For those in the marketing industry, there’s no need for an introduction on this topic. It’s as if every year, marketers establish a list of words that will entice customers, words that perfectly encompass everything they want and need … Then they overuse them. Or, worse, misuse them. Read on to see the contenders for 2022’s marketing buzzword blacklist.

• Understanding Google’s FLoC Replacement Topics, and Its Unanswered Questions

There’s a new addition to Google’s plan for life after the third-party cookie: it’s called Topics, and it replaces one of the more controversial aspects of its original plan — Federated Learning of Cohorts. It works by identifying five topics that represent a person’s interests for that week based on their browsing history. To start, there are currently 350 available topics, although that will grow over time.

• How Publishers Are Growing Subscriptions With Newsletters: Insights from WAN-INFRA

“One-size-fits-all products don’t spark much desire any longer” in the new world of journalism, suggests WAN-IFRA’s new report, Understanding your audiences in a deeper way. The report, based on the Table Stakes Europe program, shares case studies of several regional publishers who are using newsletters to reach and grow specific audience segments.

• Here Are 8 Key Qualities to Seek in a Publishing CRM

One of the easiest ways to streamline these everyday tasks is by implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) software. If you’re in the publishing industry and looking to optimize your processes and boost profitability, read on. Here are the key qualities to seek when looking for the best publishing CRM.

• Are Your Marketing Emails Illegal? How to Comply (and Thrive)With the CAN-SPAM Act

As of 2021, 89% of marketers use email as their primary channel to generate leads. It’s a great way to reach audiences directly with multimedia and catered calls to action. And, it allows a business to remain at a customer’s top-of-mind while gaining traction in a calculated way that can be measured and analyzed … The only catch? Compliance. Many marketers and content creators remain in the dark when it comes to the legalities of email marketing content. In fact, most are unaware that some pretty strict email laws exist, limiting what can and can’t be done.

• Google Readies New Interest-Based Advertising in Next Phase of Privacy Sandbox Experiments

After years of speculation, setbacks, and criticism Google is trialing a new proposal in its Privacy Sandbox initiative called “Topics” which it claims will facilitate interest-based advertising long after it sunsets third-party cookies in its Chrome browser in 2023. The online giant confirmed the planned rollout of Topics Tuesday after it claimed to consider feedback from its earlier Privacy Sandbox proposals which raised concerns from third parties around the potential for Google to self-preference its own ad stack.

• Metaverse: Opportunities for Publishers

Over the last year, performance marketers have been feeling the squeeze on all sides with mounting data privacy changes, an increasingly crowded digital marketplace and a new era of pandemic-induced shopping habits.  The changes have pushed many of them, from small to midsize brands, to reconsider full-funnel marketing strategies, striking a more concerted balance between brand building and direct response marketing. That means rolling out more marketing touchpoints, like out-of-home and streaming video, in addition to performance marketing tactics like social media and paid search.

• The Great Recruitment: How to Hire Great Ad Sales Reps

The good news, as many are forecasting, is that 2022 is shaping up to be a promising year for advertising growth. GroupM is calculating the growth rate to continue to rise by 9.7% — up almost an entire percentage point from its own previous forecast … Coming out of the last few years and following what many were calling The Great Resignation, perhaps there’s no better time to embark on what I’d like to call The Great Recruitment — an opportunity to bring great, available talent together with 2022’s promising opportunity for the good of your publication.