change warrior playbook overview

VERSION 1.0 ALWAYS EVOVLING | May-15

PLAYBOOK - OVERVIEW »The strategies used to create and interact with communities. The art and science of grabbing someone's attention, getting him/her to care and then to act. Incorporating everything we need to do to build and nurture relationships with supportive and loyal audiences across targeted groups and via multiple platforms. To develop trust and be

useful to the lives of our communities, however they receive us.

Swift Audience Development Strategies

The Audience Team | Swift Communications Inc. Attract leads, create relationships, generate revenue.


PREFACE Creating a Culture of Learning & Excellence How to Create a Culture of Learning & Excellence (Swift webinar)

Culture isn’t a brand. It’s not something we sell during orientation. It’s doesn’t have instructions. You don’t read a culture manual. Culture is a way of being -‐ it’s the way we act, every day. Creating a Culture of Excellence

• Starts at the top to keep the culture alive and breathing everyday • Goal to build a team of change warriors: 15% game changers on staff

Invoke ‘invisible capes’ • Empower decision making with Swift’s mission, vision & value statement. • What’s your purpose and where do you have the right to win • Setting the standard of expectation and measuring expectations

Creating a Culture of Learning • Clearly defined roadmap. • Rapid experimentation and implementation, on a duct tape budget • Using data driven decisions • Crystal clear, consistent, continuous, transparent communication, even when it’s

painful. • A commitment to know what is not important as well as what is important. • Aligning purpose with passion. • FOCUS. Prioritizing Ruthlessly. • Measuring results

Culture Curve


THE PLAN – THREE SIMPLE STEPS

1. Attract targeted audiences through industry standard and A-‐Team best practices around search, social, legacy, and referral.

2. Retain & Engage users with ease of site navigation, user experience, and email/newsletter registration. Develop email lead lists by targeted interest and newsletter opt-‐in categories across Swift.

3. Monetize & Convert leads to revenue through advertising, sponsored content, contests and promotions, legacy and virtual events, product sales and subscription/membership sales and other opportunities.

Audience Development Sales Funnel

Lead Generation | Engagement | Revenue Conversion


STEP ONE - ATTRACT Hook or Attract | Visibility

The Goal: To build a highly SEO optimized website using strategies that increase our placement on search engines, to reach a defined audience (for advertisers) and communities where we have the right to win. To create robust, discoverable, interesting and engaging content built around a data-‐driven plan to drive targeted audiences through search, social, legacy and referral means, to create a relationship that results in subscription membership or revenues from store, event, or advertising opportunities.

ATTRACT Resources:

Search • Simple SEO – NAP Success • SEO for Editors • Swift Knowledge Base -‐ How to DTI web tag • On-‐Page optimization -‐ SEO Checklist

Harvesting evergreen content • Chartbeat

Social Grow ENGAGED social media audiences. Develop a social media strategy.

• How to use Facebook to maximize your publishing efforts Swift Webinar (30min)

• How to run an effective Facebook ads campaign • Facebook Campaign Request Form • Cross channel social media approach • Viral storytelling • How hugging chickens became an Instagram success • Live event coverage • Best Practice Docs: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest

Legacy • Active registered subscribers (attract and engage current audience) • Cross-‐promotion opportunities, niche pubs, events, etc. • Contests & Giveaways – Develop contest calendar and sales plan. Incorporate

audience development in legacy contesting and promotions


• Events -‐ Virtual and Live -‐ pre, during and post event opportunities to attract, engage and convert

• Breaking News Referral

• Refer a Friend – InviteReferrals.com • Word of mouth – TOMA • Use Google Analytics to discover which websites are driving substantial referral

traffic to your site on a prolonged basis. Create strategies to build those relationships

Notes

• ALWAYS THINK MOBILE! • Video: The tools to create great video are right on our phones • Faster load times lead to higher traffic. Page Speed Insights Test • Beyond speed, site design and layout has a large effect on site traffic and on

purchase decisions. Simple aesthetics matter, but conversion architecture is especially important in building traffic. Design also has big impacts on users’ ability to navigate the site. Sites that are easier to navigate generate more return traffic and higher sales.

• NewsCycle/DTI: Embed iFrames (videos, maps, other web content) in InCopy during the story-‐creation process. Control story headlines as they appear in search results, on social media sites and on the homepage, uniquely. Multimedia content attracts more traffic than text only articles. (Interactive elements and graphics)

• Reader-‐generated content strategies – blogger networks/high volume writers • Native Advertising -‐ content marketing opportunities • The frequency of posts is a key factor in stickiness. If a user returns to your site

and finds that nothing has changed, you have just taught them to come back less frequently. Diversity in article content and format, including article length, is key. We won’t build a consistent daily audience with only lengthy features. A constant stream of short pieces is the first step to ensuring site stickiness.

KPI – Key Performance Indicators Audience Team dashboards Social Media 2015 Engagement Dashboard Visibility Index: Impressions/searches. If you’re not visible to Google, you don’t exist. Brands that dominate their space can have a VI in the 60% range. Magazine industry averages in the 20s.


STEP TWO - RETAIN Engage and Retain

All the strategies to engage the audience we attracted

The Goal: To drive continued engagement and conversion – turning web visitors into email subscribers – and those email subscribers into an advertiser audience, event registrants, product purchasers, cross-‐promoters and ideally subscribers/members. Developing on-‐site content recommendation opportunities to improve page visits and time on site (stickiness). Achieving these gains starts by thinking differently about digital traffic. Compounded audience is the most powerful force on the Internet. The success of local news in 2015 lies within this compounding process, on measuring stickiness and optimizing for it. The bottom line is that any successful strategy requires us to grow overall audience, time on site and return visits. We must engage to develop and move site visitors to email audiences, of which we can drive future engagement and find revenue conversion opportunities.

RETAIN Resources:

• Email webinar -‐ Swift Email • Greeley email launch – Warm-‐up campaign • Email Marketing Best Practice Guide • Email Marketing Best Practices 2015 • PressLaff Implementation Workflow • Presslaff Idea Sparkers • Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study 2014 • Newsletter Requirements & Timeline • Dat-‐e-‐base Launch Form -‐ Presslaff Email Newsletter • Start collecting in-‐house email addresses in this format • PressLaff -‐ Magic of Email presentation • Incorporate freemium campaigns. Free e-‐book/download products as member

benefits and to drive registration or subscription conversion (evergreen content or repurposed special section content) native or content marketing opportunities

• Develop ongoing marketing campaign to drive active subscribers to access digital content and /memberservices. ACE automated circulation emails

• Improve ‘stickiness’ – stories of interest tagging, other opportunities to improve time on site and page visits per session.


STEP THREE - MONETIZE Convert | Monetize

Subscriptions & other revenue opportunities, built on digital & REAL audiences & relationships.

The Goal: In addition to subscription/membership revenue opportunities, drive advertising revenues through the highly engaged, targeted email audience, overall driving EBITDA, with reduced expense and higher ROIs.

REVENUE Strategies: Circulation:

• Social offers BYP Facebook Ad Success • Develop and implement new acquisition, retention and win back subscription

marketing opportunities with ACE campaigns. (niche/cross-‐promo, abandoned cart, retargeting, etc.)

• Marketing review to ensure ROS/ROP/filler ads/newsletters/niche pubs/social offers/ads are updated. Review all existing collateral, online and print. Cross sell the product line – cross sell triggers, discounts and promo offers in confirmation and thank you email campaigns to drive additional sales to existing email subscriber base. Implement best practice at each customer/user touch-‐point through lifecycle and user experience.

• Reduce OSG subscriber invoicing expense/postage with e-‐billing. Develop and schedule print and digital campaigns to engage subscribers in e-‐billing and iServices subscriber payment portal through /memberservices. Consider tab-‐ons, buck slips and other opportunities.

• Other cross promotion opportunity – CSY/BYP/Other

Advertising • Create email and newsletter advertising/sponsorship packages – newsletter ads,

spotlight emails, sponsored content, etc. (Spotlights defined as single topic – advertiser-‐sponsored content emails/newsletters – content based and targeted to reader interests)

• Assess opportunities around content marketing opportunities in specific interest categories to targeted audiences

• Develop advertiser sponsored contest calendar and sales plan • Develop classified campaigns


• Build campaigns around live and web-‐based events, archives, books, products, cross-‐promotion, sponsorships, partnerships, affiliate opportunities, coupons, other…

• Develop e-‐book opportunities • Drive ancillary revenue with newsletter ads and increased traffic/page views on

site. • Potential development of niche audiences • Drive virtual and live event/webinar attendance

How to produce a low-‐cost webinar -‐ Bring your duct tape


The overarching goal isn't just to sell subscriptions, but to drive website traffic and the largest lead pool possible, to sell more subscriptions/memberships. In addition to subscriber/member revenue, monetize that substantial lead pool/audience through advertising, sponsored content, contests and promotions, live and virtual events and other opportunities. Bottom line: If we keep building visibility, focusing on email capture rate, and improving orders per thousand emails, sales and revenues will grow.

Good content produces engaged readers, delivers audience for advertisers, produces revenue for us.


Suggested Reading Audience Development Playbook Key Influencers Deseret Digital Media Sam's thoughts on Deseret's success

Top Three Takeaways Deseret Digital Boot camp 1. Culture is king. We must develop a culture of transformation. 2. Create a culture of excellence and brand matters. We must define who we are

as a company and by operation. We must identify the key areas (six according to Deseret) that our audience cares most about and then invest where we can be the leader/best.

3. Data driven decisions are critical. Grey Persons of Borrell pointed out that data should be used to drive consensus around objectives. If we don’t have the data that points to what our audience wants and needs, we’re throwing expensive spaghetti against the wall.

“Clark does an excellent job focusing on transition and captures well the questions we should be asking along with what the revenue mix should look like for successful media companies of the future. We have made progress with our approach but unfortunately we are currently performing to the average and not truly transforming our company. Please read Clark’s column, think about how we operate at Swift and offer your ideas to consider to make the progress needed to become a truly transformed media company.”

Bob Brown; referencing Clark Gilbert’s article on transformation Clark Gilbert Innovation Wire On Transformation 10 Lessons on Leadership from Clark Gilbert Rubrics and relationships -‐ The transformation recipe from Deseret Digital Media Don’t argue -‐ just do a test -‐ and other lessons from Deseret Digital Boot camp Mequoda The Mequoda Intensive Mequoda FREE e-‐books

MediaXchange MediaXchange 2015 -‐ The good, the bad and the ugly


Others NYT Innovation Report Gatehouse Newsroom Guide VP of Growth at Facebook on a digital growth model Stickier News -‐ What newspapers don't know has hurt them -‐ but there is a better way American Press Institute -‐ News U -‐ e-‐Learning Resource Center API: How to make a digital content strategy for audience growth API: Strategies for Digital Paywalls and Digital Revenue EngagingNewsProject.org http://Media.twitter.com http://Newsroom.fb.com http://blog.lyris.com/5-‐personas-‐publishers-‐create/

change warrior playbook overview

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