Why Big Traditional Institutions are Finally Embracing Digital Media

Financial services marketing can implement inbound strategies to reach out to new audiences, investors and clients. A creative, transparent and bespoke campaign can target a huge volume of high net worth leads, at a high quality that won’t waste your sales team’s time. For more information on how you can create a high performing investment campaign read our guide to financial marketing strategies.

We keep forgetting BBC Three isn’t on the telly anymore when we go looking for Family Guy after a hard day’s graft. No, it’s online only now with some of its programmes being screened across other BBC channels. It’s not the knell for the service by any means; BBC Three might perform much better online where the majority of its young audience spends its time.

It’s a wait-and-see moment. If it does succeed, it’ll be down to a focus on quality content and a good social outreach strategy; something that deeper investigative programmes such as Blood, Smack & Tears: Afghanistan’s Heroin Hell and others may benefit from while other channels look to snap up Don’t Tell the Bride repeats.

If it’s better than anything else available and targeted right, then people will flock to it. It’s a sign of the times and signals a big shift towards a future of digestible media whenever and wherever we want it. Netflix and Amazon Prime are two of the biggest success stories of this, but why on earth has it taken so long for traditional media institutions to adopt digital media and embrace the habits of the audience it claims to serve?

Because this isn’t just a BBC thing. The Independent also announced that it was closing its print publication in February after 30 years to concentrate more of its efforts on its online delivery. A lot of mourning from traditionalists, but with ESI Media saying independent.co.uk attracted 70 million global unique users with expected revenue growth of 50% this year, they’d be stupid not to kill print.

A new day dawning?

Don’t get us wrong, we still hold a special spot in our hearts for print. There’s nothing better than the smell of a brand new magazine or the feel of printing off a beautiful marketing brochure or booklet you’ve worked hard on. But the costs on such a mass daily scale are astronomical, whereas, if strategised correctly, you’re looking at much smaller costs for labour and content creation if you publish online.

So it’s intriguing then that, on the same day as the Independent’s print announcement, rival publisher Trinity Mirror would come out and say they’re producing the New Day, the first standalone national daily you’ll see on the stands in the last thirty years. “A large number of [readers] can be tempted back [to print with] the right product,” says Simon Fox, Trinity Mirror’s chief executive.

It’s brave, we’ll give them that much, but we’re struggling to see how it will not only generate revenue but provide the results that advertisers crave. Because the woes of the print industry, we believe, run parallel with the fate of the call centre, and that relying on outbound marketing to turn a profit and keep a business going just isn’t going to cut it in the digital age.

When the recession hit and we were looking into the reasons for job losses and the closure of a number of print titles we remember a source in the industry telling us to visualise print publications as a three-legged stool. The legs defined income: shelf price, subscriptions, and advertising. Get it right and you had a nice solid stool that anybody could sit on.

No future in magazines

Except two of those stools were taken to with a hatchet in regard shelf price and subscriptions. They became much harder to get and traditional media outlets were quick to seize on the internet. Why would they pay for our stories when they could just get them online for free, they asked? And rightly so, it was a big problem; one that helped introduce paywalls to the likes of The Sun and The Times.

The Sun, though, dropped its paywall at the end of last year and it’s still something of a contentious subject. Again, free content is usually to blame according to those at the top, but if that’s the case then how come MailOnline is breaking records for unique visits on a consistent basis? How come publishers like BuzzFeed and 65twenty are growing so fast that they can’t stop opening new offices?

Because they’ve cracked the secret of publishing online. Future Publishing was one of the worst hit publishing houses during the recession, with content creators on the floor being hit with redundancies and blaming poor management decisions – something that’s still happening, actually, with Alan Dexter taking a swipe at the publisher’s boardroom after they closed his PC Format magazine.

Meanwhile BuzzFeed is beavering away bringing down international corruption syndicates that blot the sheer integrity of the tennis circuit. So what are they doing right that traditional publishers are getting so wrong? One key difference for digital publishers’ growth is that the most successful ones don’t have traditional sales floors. They instead have teams of inbound marketing specialists.

Going native

Because traditional ads in print publications are outbound communications, plain and simple. Though a magazine ad can look fantastic and a local newspaper ad can get the information out there, advertisers still haven’t got a clue who will have read it, who it’s prompted to follow up on the message, if it’s appeared in front of the right target demographic, and more.

They want to know what their money’s being spent on, and the trackable and reportable nature of inbound marketing gives them something they can really justify putting the budget toward. They can market in creative ways, too; MailOnline for example partners with high-street chains to generate leads back to similar products that celebrities are photographed wearing.

BuzzFeed has a contributor system that allows brands to have their own sub contributor pages, associating their brand and content with a cool publisher that knows how to hit a millennial audience. Social outreach via the likes of Facebook’s Power Editor and Twitter cards allow publishers to target highly specific audiences and provide calls to action; all of the above providing publishers and advertisers with the information to gauge the success of their ad spend.

Native advertising is also a hugely popular option, and more culturally significant to a readership than a standard sponsored post telling them to do something. It’s not all perfect, though. Digital publishers simply have to have a strong division between ethical journalism and the advertising side of things, otherwise all will be in vain.

Get the inbound side right though and digital publishers and content producers aren’t looking at three-legged stools anymore; more like nice, soft, comfortable three-seater leather couches. There are more revenue streams than ever before for publishers to take advantage of. The sooner the traditionalists see it, the more maybe those resources can be put back into stable print ventures.

Find out more about inbound marketing and how a strong publishing strategy can support and enhance your content by contacting the Six & Flow team today.

High net worth leads are as active – possibly even more-so – than your average internet user. Especially younger, millennial success stories; they communicate through social media and use search engines to discover new opportunities, too. So, if you want to attract these leads, read our blog '3 secrets to high net worth lead generation.'