What if you could leverage content you already have (and, yes, books count as “content”) to build conversion architectures that turn casual audiences into committed readers? In this talk, Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media Consulting outlines what opportunities are currently available to publishers, and how they can start thinking differently about how they market and sell content to readers.
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Transcript
Brian: I think it's useful this morning to work with a wider definition of what the book might be. Not because that's the only way that conversion architectures or content marketing works, but because a wider definition challenges us to reconsider the way we reach and serve readers, opening the door to potentially sustainable competitive advantages.
Zalina Alvi: This week's episode is all about leveraging the power of the internet to attract and convert audiences. The speaker, Brian O'Leary of Magellan Media Consulting, discusses the recent growth of subscription services like Scribd and Oyster, and sites like Pottermore to explore how publishers are starting to think differently about how they sell content to readers. If you're unfamiliar with terms like content marketing, conversion architectures, and marketing funnels, don't worry, Brian explains it all. By the end of this talk, you should have a better understanding of how these concepts can support book publishing even if you're not in marketing. Now, without further ado, here's Brian.
Brian: Now, this talk started out as a component of a totally different presentation. It was called, An Architecture of Collaboration that I gave last spring. In it, I claimed that the market for reading may be expanding significantly and the gains that are seen are almost entirely outside the prevailing industry supply chain. Now, my earlier talk included 12 things, conveniently located around this clock, that I recommended publishers do to develop what I called that architecture of collaboration. Most of us see new platforms and new business models as competition. Architecture made the argument and encouraged publishers to engage with communities and companies to offer new sources and uses of what is currently thought of as book content. I ranked these 12 ideas from easiest, which was during W3C, a theme that was part of the conversation yesterday, to hardest, which was change our approach to copyright.
Now, the potentially bad news in this, the recommendation that underpins today's talk, experiment with conversion architectures that help attract and retain audiences, was ninth, and that was counting from the end that was easiest. Conversion architectures represent a really significant shift away from the way the publishers think about our business. Our current focus really results primarily in the sale of an object, physical or digital. But as we move to the web and we start to work to organize communities, at least some of our content can be used to attract audiences to a given digital destination. And that's where conversion architectures and content marketing come in. We have to offer potential readers a reason to come visit and still more reasons to stay.
So in talking with the BookNet Canada team, that's how conversion architecture is a theme expanded to become content marketing for book publishers. And my talk today has five primary parts. I know you're gonna be shocked if you've heard me speak before then and I'm telling you what I'm gonna tell you. The first is how conversion architectures work, how they apply to book publishing. The second is how does content marketing itself apply to book publishing, why publishers are well-positioned to compete using content marketing, how publishers can be good content partners for other companies, and then, with the hope that I've shown you, why content marketing matters. I'll talk about what you can do to make it work for you. Before I dive in though, and I know it's a big room, but I'd like to start off by asking you to do something with me.
Each year, the Content Marketing Institute conducts a survey of small businesses which they define as having between 10 and 99 employees. It's an interesting market because the companies generally are of a size that reflects the majority of book publishers in North America and certainly, in Canada. The annual survey asks a range of questions. CMI then reports the results to the wider range of folks who wanna know about content marketing. This morning, I picked up on three sets of answers that I think helped frame why content marketing matters to publishing. So let's start with what they described as the top 10 challenges small business marketers said they face. Now, they're listed here alphabetically, but there are some clear leaders that are hidden in this list.
Sure. It's the use of content to sell a product or service. Anyone wanna guess what should be top of this list for challenges that content marketers face? Survey says, the top challenges were actually producing engaging content, producing content consistently, and producing a variety of content. And I take at least two lessons from these findings, something I'll come back to in a minute. So the second question that caught my eye. CMI asked these marketers, "How many different content marketing vehicles do you use?" The average company used a dozen different approaches to content marketing to reach its target audiences. In fact, here's a ranked list of the most frequently used approaches. Perhaps some of them are more important than others to various types of businesses. But if you compare the overall range to what we include in most book marketing campaigns, you can quickly imagine how much broader and how much more engaging we might need to become to compete for share of mind going forward.
Before you get discouraged though, I want you to look at what that same group of respondents said to the question, "What is the most effective content marketing topic?" So this list represents the 12 most effective topics or, I'm sorry, tactics. Once again, I've listed them alphabetically. If I can solicit one more set of brave souls who wanna volunteer what they think the top, the most effective content marketing tactic is. It's ebooks. Ebooks are said to be the tactic that is thought the most effective for small business marketers. Ebooks. I mean, these are those plateau-bound orphan formats that we've spent the last two days trying to figure out how to do more efficiently. What's going on here? Now, on one level, I think reports like this one from Content Marketing Institute confirm that publishing skills, the things like producing engaging content, doing so consistently, doing a cross or variety of forms are critical parts of effective content marketing efforts. But they also showed that something we already know how to do, which is make books available, to publish books, is seen as an effective tactic in this space. I think the data points out that there's an immediate, perhaps growing need for publishing skills, and also the ability to create and disseminate book, or at least book-like content in this space, and publishers with lists that align with an audience, or an industry might find themselves supplying not just products, but expertise. That's an opportunity though, not just to sell incremental units, but also to be mindful of what this content marketing space might mean for us. And I think that ultimately brings us up against limitations inherent in our conception of the book.
I was teasing Noah when we were doing a run-through this morning that no book, no Tech Forum talk would be complete without a mention of Hugh McGuire. And there's a definition that Hugh had that he gave in a talk in 2011 that, "A book is a discrete collection of text and other media designed by authors to be an internally complete representation of an idea or a set of ideas, emotion or a set of emotions, and transmit it to readers in different formats." Now, there's interplay here among ideas and emotions that provides for rich content for readers. The definition doesn't include a cover, endpapers, or binding method, or even the notion of pages, although it doesn't preclude them. And for our purposes here, I think it opens the possibility that the book and its components can serve as the basis for a conversation.
Now, you may or may not feel entirely comfortable with Hugh's definition, but I think it's useful this morning to work with a wider definition of what the book might be. Not because that's the only way that conversion architectures or content marketing works, but because a wider definition challenges us to reconsider the way we reach and serve readers, opening the door to potentially sustainable competitive advantages. Now, to strengthen that claim, let me talk a little bit about how conversion architectures work as a component of content marketing. If you're an experienced marketer, whether in the book space or elsewhere, you're familiar with the idea that this work required to attract, retain, and monetise an audience. And these activities are often shown stacked on a funnel, with the widest part at the top reserved for prospecting or attracting potential customers. The narrowest part at the bottom represents a subset that becomes paying customers.
Now, on the web, attracting an audience or potential buyers is done through things like search, search optimization, social media, referral traffic, promotion, and promotion can include offline formats that include print and ebooks. The cost of acquiring a potential customer in this environment can be quite low. But once a potential buyer is aware, many retailers, particularly on the web, have successfully used vehicles like email newsletters, content updates, promotional offers to retain some portion, hopefully a larger portion, of the initial audience. And the key here is often obtaining a valid email address. And although many retailers focus on selling products, an audience can also provide value through sponsorships, subscriptions, and live events. Our relationship with an audience also provides cost-effective opportunities to sell related products.
Now, as I said in my introduction, our current focus results primarily in the sale of physical or digital objects. We don't really think about using content to attract readers as a component of establishing direct ongoing relationships, nor do we think as much about understanding the experience our readers have with our books beyond the moment at which the books are bought. There are exceptions, though, and I think those exceptions may come to be the rule.
It was nearly two years ago that HarperCollins in the U.S. appointed a director of audience development, and this is a role that's classically reserved for periodical publishers. More recently, Kobo has announced the launch of an ebook data service, an opportunity to measure things like drop-off, persistence, and completion rates for books. Now, proponents of such features point out that they can highlight early success, for example, of midlist titles informing how PR and social media efforts are deployed. And as the number of titles assessed by these data services grow, so too does their ability to actually help grade benchmarks for publishers and surface a book that might otherwise be missed in a crowded field.
There are growth of subscription services. I think of 24symbols, which has been in business now for the better part of five years, Scribd, and Oyster, as well as serious specific sites like Pottermore. And they all illustrate ways in which this conversion architecture approach is starting to affect how publishers can approach their businesses. I've actually encouraged publishers in working with them to think about using subscription models as a direct response opportunity, a way to test demand for various types of content. We could also consider subscription models, any reading platforms as options to measure things like persistence, how long a reader stays with the book. Having built an audience and particularly one that's managed directly, a publisher might even offer benefits to loyal or highly engaged readers, and the value-added efforts can take many forms.
Consider Scrivener's decision announced last fall to revive its iconic early 20th century magazine as a digital publication made available on a weekly basis. The magazine offers behind-the-scenes stories about author's reading lists, approaches to writing, stories of published works. The goal isn't to sell the magazine, but to build relationships with the people who buy the books that the magazine was launched to cover. A similar case can be made for the Oyster review, which is a collection of, in their words, criticism, culture, essays, and other content about books. Oyster, the subscription service, is planning to include personalized content and targeted calls to action in the review. In fact, when Oyster announced its decision to hire Kevin Nguyen as its editor, it added, "We believe the best product lies in the pairing of high-quality editorial with our work in personalization, data science, and design." At a high level, they recognized the direct response marketing won't work for every type of book, nor will it work for every type of reader. But it does give publishers who try it, the opportunity to interact directly with readers in ways that can both refine the content that we create and the forms that we use to deliver it.
Now, I wanna take a moment to explain why I think publishers can really compete in this space. I feel pretty strongly that publishers already have the skills required to compete effectively as content marketers. In fact, I think you can deliver on the promise of conversion architectures and content marketing for four distinct reasons. The first is that you're already in the business of linking content to markets, which is really the purpose of content marketing. You're all established as content curators and that's a core component of effective content marketing. You have access to and can offer the kind of longer form content that's most likely to have an impact, whether measured in shares, inbound links, actual consumption, or sales. And the final piece is that you're among the best able to recognize and know how to tell great stories.
So let me take you to these in turn, starting with linking content to markets. This is really what publishing is created to do. We evaluate titles on their merits and in doing so, we think carefully about the readers who might buy a particular book. The links we make are often intuitive with successes backed by years of trial and sometimes error. At its core, understanding how audiences look for, read, share, and recommend content is in our DNA even if we haven't always measured it. We're also accustomed to the idea that we can give away content to sell it. Whoever decided to put chairs in bookstores was a content marketing genius. Galleys, ARCs, and blads are examples of the way that we traditionally have tried to build word-of-mouth by giving away early looks at a book. Typically, these samples are distributed through the trade. But as with the decisions we've made about what books to publish, the measurement may not be precise, but we recognize the value in building awareness of a book by using the content of the book itself.
More recently, we've offered sample content directly to readers, in most cases, through features like Amazon's Search Inside the Book. For the most part, only the platforms know the extent to which these samples turn prospects into readers, but that's a situation that partners like Kobo are working to change. The traditional and the emerging marketing efforts share one common characteristic, they rely on content to help sell our product, which is books. In that sense, I think publishers have been acting as content marketers for decades. Now we need to use the data available to us to refine our understanding of how prospects find, consume, and respond to our content.
Now, one of the things we can do to better understand those interactions is employ journey maps, which are defined as the visual, a graphic interpretation of an individual's relationship with an organization, service, product, or brand over time and across channels. The journey map is typically created from the reader's perspective and it can help publishers in a number of ways providing data that allows us to connect, collaborate, and align around reader's interest. If we think about it, in mapping a reader's step-by-step journey, it's useful to look upstream what their prior experiences were, how they became aware of a book, and downstream after purchase, to see what the customer does as a result to their interactions with the book that we create. These journey maps can be decidedly low-tech. The wall maps, post-it notes, and visual aids are the preferred tools.
I think the need for effective journey maps for truly understanding the customer engagement is probably growing. A couple years back, I said that it's much easier to deal with an overarching platform like Amazon than it is to figure out how to market at a small scale. But the web isn't a community of millions. It's truly millions of communities. But more to the point, and I think a more actionable example, Jim Bankoff, who founded Vox Media, kind of a competitor to Time Inc. in the digital realm, described the challenge this way. The audience isn't, in his word, "sports fans" or "people interested in health," but rather New York Rangers fans or those suffering from gout, or perhaps New York Rangers fans suffering from gout. That would probably be a bigger overlap, though.
Now, across social media platforms, marketers can use content to reach audiences. Whether the content is owned or aggregated, it's effectively curated. It's chosen with a specific target community in mind. And again, this is an area in which publishers excel. The industry already understands how to develop content that provides value to readers, that creates opportunities to interact more frequently with those readers, that showcases content depth on a given area, and earns attention from target influentials, which in our case, our reviewers and book bloggers. Bless you. Consumers value content providers who can gather information and share recommended links or resources. Bundling the work of others, perhaps, can be an effective way to provide that value. It also allows us to interact with prospects, showcase expertise, and gain visibility, so too could be mindful sharing of our own published content.
Now, you heard this with Kevin a moment ago, but the web value is longer form content. It's a common refrain, I think and particularly among publishers of all types, "No one appreciates long-form content anymore. People want snippets, factoids, blog posts, and news they can use." Publishers lament that the web is overwhelmed by short-form content. I mean, I think that the platforms like Medium, Atavist, you'll hear from Atavist later today, and Longreads challenge some of these notions. But the mere presence of platform alone isn't the confirmation that long-form content has value in the marketplace. But what is interesting though comes from the world of search.
Writing for ProBlogger, Garrett Moon, who's the co-founder of CoSchedule, explained that Google's algorithms favour long-form content. And data developed by social media guru, Neil Patel, show that long-form content is actually more likely, and this is the chart on the right, more likely to be linked to from another site. And just when you look on the left... This might be a little bit hard to read. The post at the top end of the curve, which is the far left on that left-hand side, are about 35,000 words. But Patel also found that longer form content was more likely to take the top spot in search rankings. This chart, which was developed by SurfIQ, shows that the average length of posts returned on the first page of a search result consistently exceeded 2,000 words with the longest posts outperforming somewhat shorter ones. Okay. You're thinking, you know, 2,000 words is not a book, but you're unlikely to post a full book online, right? But something with 2,000 words is a pretty healthy excerpt. It's certainly more than enough room for a thoughtful interview with an author, and particularly an up-and-coming one. It could be even the right length for an editorial preview of a coherent and carefully curated spring list.
I think publishers understand long-form writing. The question we have to ask and answer is, what content can we offer that helps us attract and retain readers? And that's an interesting and I think ultimately inspiring question to ask and answer. Now, to illustrate how far ahead of the curve publishers are, I decided to draw on something that a writer, Scott Aughtmon wrote for the Content Marketing Institute. Aughtmon wrote a post explaining how "Businessweek" began as an in-house publication for a furniture maker, A.W. Shaw. And it was an in-house publication, but the people outside the company were demanding it. So he started selling it individually to them. After he proved the concept, Shaw sold the rights to McGraw Hill, which owned "Businessweek" until 2009. And this success story actually inspired Aughtmon to remind content marketers of five things that work when it comes to using content to sell products and services. These were top quality content.
Shaw's content benchmark was make it so good that people wanna pay for it. Even though he's specifically a furniture maker, Shaw thought like a publisher. Specifically, he understood his target audience and its immediate, and longer-term needs, and he created content that helped his audience address those needs. Shaw focused on niches. He didn't try to serve everyone. He picked the markets where he thought he was able to deliver a better solution. He found value in developing unique style and he understood that audiences expected and deserved a clear point of view. But perhaps, one more a show of hands, who here could have predicted the points on Aughtmon's list? No one? I would say everybody. This is what you do. And the reason is effectively simple. You know, good storytelling is at the heart of what publishers are about.
This isn't to say we have it all figured out. New platforms and new formats emerge about as often as new books seem to. Some of them seem impossibly intriguing. Snapchat, which is the home of the disappearing text, I had no direct experience with this, has started to offer Snapchat stories. At "Business Insider," Nicholas Carlson wrote that the interface has guaranteed the recipient is always 100% engaged because you have to leave your finger on the phone or whatever device you're using to consume the story. It's inherently an opt-in programme, meaning you get qualified leads. The demos are young. Who wouldn't want a younger demo these days? And the scale can quickly rival broadcast or cable. And of course, it came out last fall, and would probably peak in less than a year. Welcome to the web.
One thing I think is worth pointing out is that publishers can be good partners for content marketers and other industries. Now, this is different from just simply marketing for our own purposes, but it works in industries, and niches that would benefit from distinctive high-quality content. We've thought about this classically as special sales, but it can go beyond that. The easiest sales though might come from imprints that specialise in content of value to specific audiences and the result would be win-win. You get publishers who gain more sales of existing or adapted content, and content marketers see greater effectiveness and increased loyalty and sales growth for whatever they're about. But the alignment need not be so perfect. It might seem counterintuitive, but sometimes the most powerful type of content a marketer can offer might be the content that doesn't directly focus on its core business or industry. Think back to that perceived effectiveness of ebooks as a marketing tool. They offer value and persistence. For a content marketing partner, a prospect might even return to a well-chosen ebook, time and again, each time directly or indirectly remembering the marketer who offered him the book.
I think publishers represent an important resource for content marketers who face challenges doing things like producing engaging content, producing content consistently, and producing a variety of content. I'm just saying, "Content marketers are on solid ground," and looking at you and saying, "You could be a core part of our content strategy as well." Now, I wanted to try and find things, and some of these actually were included in the blog post that I did for BookNet Canada about a month ago. But I've come up with eight things that I think you could be doing now. Even if you don't think you wanna do content marketing any time soon, it won't hurt to do some of these things, at least try them to become better informed about the practice. And I think along the way, you'll pick up some other useful skills. And working on it now, even in a small way, offers you a nice hedge.
So these eight straightforward steps. The first is grow your understanding of how things like search, social, and referral marketing works. Ideally, I'd suggest, don't make this an IT or a web assignment, but somebody who's senior in your team on the project to report back to everyone on best practices and experiences. The second, and this is probably something that you would do naturally anyway, inventory your content to see what might work in a format that's valued by your target audience. It's possible that the marketing materials, for example, that you have in-house are written largely or entirely for a trade or a supplier relationship. If so, that's important to know early, especially if you decide to cultivate more direct relationships because those materials probably won't work. The third is to create or capitalize on long-form content. And as you do, improve your meta tags and also your Rich snippets, you know, the components of search that are behind the scenes on most web pages, to accurately describe your content in ways that are relevant that your audiences will recognize and respond to. And last on this page, measure what you do. I think it's okay to start with simple measures. Sometimes people can create really exhaustive list, but grow from there. Try tracking things like the number of followers and subscribers. Look for higher level of engagement. You can use a service like Bitly to better understand where users are clicking and what they're doing with curated content. You can track brand recognition, you know, whether how familiar a person is with your imprint, for example. And then think about it from their perspective of goal setting. It's an area where a lot of content marketers fall short, but set some short-term and long-term goals, and then track actual results and learn from them.
The second header for this, blog about something that your readers care about. Cultivating an audience starts with voice and takes practice. The authors that we publish know this and it gives many of them a head start, I think, on this kind of effort. And to attract and retain an audience, I think you need to think about ways to connect what you do with the people who would value from it. You have to think carefully about calls to action. Not every content passage results in a sale. We're not putting the content online so that we can have a one-to-one relationship in sales. You have to be mindful of the value of keeping a prospect close, close enough at least to obtain an email. But after that, you have to learn about their interest, and you have to follow their behaviours before you start contacting with subsequent offers and additional content. You wanna mine the data that you could have and the data that you can make available for yourself for insight, not for monetization, particularly at the outset.
The third on this list, seventh overall, nurture your infrastructure. And by this, I mean, don't neglect your basics. You have to do things like making your content. If you're gonna make content available freely, make sure that you have some sort of click-to-tweet plugin that you can make it easier for people to share. If you're planning to bring people back to your site and ultimately, if you're doing content marketing, I hope you are, make sure it loads quickly, particularly on mobile platforms. And a site written for the trade is not necessarily gonna be able to do that in a consumer environment.
And then the last is to host a live event, something that's relevant to the list that you have. This may be not as straightforward as the other ideas, but it can be instructive. The success of things like book expos, BookCon in attracting an audience, also attracting some industry notoriety, illustrates the opportunity though that readers have in their heads for interacting with published content. There are, I think, sometimes people..."Are there risks in kinda moving into this direct-response world that I'm describing?" And I think the answer is sure. There's a school of thought that all this data will be the death of us. The thing that makes us unique is a gut sense of what works coupled with the unique vision of a writer and editor in a discerning marketplace. And I'm not blind to that argument.
For several years, I actually worked as a member of a school board in the United States at a time when national curriculum standards have been developed as part of an effort to hopefully improve educational outcomes. There's no denying that standards and outcomes influenced curriculum and pedagogy. Much like the effect of a magnet on iron filings, local practices started to change to reflect standards and measurement. Lately, in the United States at least, there's been a backlash or resistance to things like overtesting, but over time the use of data has reshaped how we think about education in the United States, particularly at the local level. But good instruction still occurs. We're not all cookie-cutter products of a single model. And in practice, the models and the ecosystem have recalibrated in tandem.
I think ultimately something similar will be seen in book publishing. In one sense, the fear of data was ever thus, the widespread availability of sales data goes back to generation, and rare is the editor who hasn't looked at an author's most recent sales before signing a new work. The success of Harry Potter or 50 Shades of something spurs a rush, even a glut of titles and authors, and publishers eager to capitalize on what is a "proven" market. The thing that's true is that we've never had to deal with as much data as I'm describing in this presentation, but it's also true that authors have never been able to publish more quickly and reliably without the intervention of a publisher. If the data truly does change publishing for the worse and I hope it does not, readers will still have access to those works of surpassing beauty. And when they succeed, the data will probably get them signed pretty quickly.
So that wraps up what I wanna talk to you about today. I mean, there's a touch of how conversion architectures work, how content marketing applies to book publishing, why I think publishers are truly well-positioned to compete using content marketing, how publishers can be good content partners for other companies, and that's a good opportunity, and then these eight steps that you can consider taking to help make content marketing work for you. Given how steep we are in trade and other institutional relationships, I think some of what I propose may feel uncomfortable, even foreign. And if it does, try taking some of those eight steps along the way, asking yourself how you might parlay what you're learning into new or different ways to attract, retain, and serve your readers. But the one thing I'd ask you to avoid doing, doubling down on prevailing models without at least trying some of what I've outlined today. I know there are risks and the risks that challenge how we've organized publishing for the better part of the last century. But as John Paul Jones, a Scottish immigrant who founded what is now the American Navy, observed, "It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, that those who will not risk cannot win." I think now is a good time to take some studied and potentially eye-opening risks.
Zalina: Next week, we've got Anshuman Iddamsetty continuing the discussion on content marketing with a focus on podcasting for book publishers. If you want to learn more about what we do, you can find us at booknetcanada.ca. Thanks to Brian for speaking at Tech Forum and to everyone who attended, or helped put it together. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. And of course, thanks to you for listening.
