Did you catch our podcast this week with John Barnes, chief digital officer at William Reed?
If not, I can thoroughly recommend it. Over the years, John has won more AOP awards that you can shake a stick at and he has a great ability to talk insightfully about digital publishing using plain English.
Inspired by John’s conversation with Ciar Byrne, here are my ten tips for digital success:
- Be inquisitive and try things out; the secret of successful internet publishing is change.
- Understand your market: not every publishing strategy is suitable for every market. You need a deep knowledge of the market you serve before you can decide which strategy to deploy.
- Know who your visitors are: in the days of controlled circulation publishing, this was one of B2B publishing’s great strengths.
- Build this knowledge incrementally; start small by getting an email address, then append more information as you go along. Don’t scare them off with a 15 page registration form.
- Produce quality content and journalism. Without that, everything else is doomed to fail.
- Know your value. Only by knowing how useful your content is and its criticality to users can you hope to price it right.
- Be a leading part of the market you serve: work within your market as an active and trusted player.
- Keep in contact with your digital subscribers. One advantage print has over digital is the regular physical reminder to a subscriber of their subscription. With digital, you have to work harder.
- Give advertisers the metrics they want. Yes, totals matter, but who saw their ad and how long they saw it for matters too.
- Innovate, always. This lockdown period might well come to be seen as a golden period of digital innovation.
