Everyone in your company should use audience data
Too many B2B media founders keep audience data too close to the chest.
Their companies would benefit if more employees had access to it.
What the biggest media companies do
Two weeks ago, I was at the AMO Summit, a great conference for media operators.
I loved the panel with Amanda Landsaw, CMO at EndeavorB2B, and Tracy Ziemer, VP of Audience Development at Hearst Newspapers. The former is one of the largest B2B media companies, the latter one of the largest B2C media companies.
Amanda said (and Tracy agreed):
The value of data needs to be taught to everyone in your organization.
Everyone in your company needs to look at your audience data and how it can help them do their job better.
Why? Because it will unlock so much revenue and success for your company.
How different teams should use audience data
Here is a non-exhaustive list of things you and your teams should be doing.
Sales team
Your sales team will close more and bigger deals if it can tell sponsors exactly who your audience is and how many of your readers match the sponsor’s ICP.
Your salespeople can find sponsorship leads among your subscribers.
If you offer paid subscriptions, your sales team can go sell group subscriptions to companies.
Marketing team
Your marketers should use your audience data to learn who currently gets value from your content and then acquire more of these people.
Your marketers should also constantly be monitoring new subscribers: Is each marketing channel bringing you the right people? They should watch the demographics and the engagement levels of the people they acquire.
Ad: Check out Megahit to learn more about the demographics of your audience.
Editorial/content team
Your editorial team should make great content that attracts, engages, and retains readers. For that, it needs to understand who it is writing for. Who are your subscribers? What is the makeup of your audience? Let your editorial people look at individual subscriber profiles to really understand who they are writing for.
Beyond that, they should know how much engagement each story gets. It shows them which topics they should write more about.
If you want to go even further, show them which audience segments engage with which stories. That helps them ensure that every audience segment stays engaged.
Your content team can also use your subscriber list to find sources for its stories.
Events team
Your events people can use audience data to:
- Understand where to host events (= where your audience lives)
- Selectively invite readers as attendees or speakers
- Choose event and session topics based on engagement on your written stories
For more information, check out my article on organizing events.
Subscriptions/memberships team
If you have people focused on growing paid subscriptions or memberships, they can use audience data to:
- Understand who pays for subscriptions
- Use that knowledge to make subscriptions appealing to more people
- Send targeted messages to readers who are likely to subscribe
- Find companies to sell group subscriptions to
How to get your teams to use audience data
First, have them subscribe to Audience Doctor, of course, to give them ideas! ;-)
Second, both Amanda and Tracy agreed that everyone at a media company is busy. They won’t just start using data if you give them access. They have so much on their plate already.
Amanda suggested making people use it. At EndeavorB2B, every team regularly sets aside time to look at their audience data together to identify opportunities.
Tracy wants to make it easier for teams to spot opportunities in the data. She wants their central audience team to identify opportunities for the other teams and then suggest actions that these teams can take.
Questions for you
- What could you do?
- Who should you give access to your audience data to?
Ad: Use Megahit to grow your business
I develop Megahit, a data tool for B2B media companies.
It helps you enrich your subscribers with job information:
- What do your subscribers do for work?
- What are their job titles?
- What are their LinkedIn profiles?
- Which companies do they work at?
Then it helps you and your colleagues use your audience data to grow your business.
You get audience demographics. You get filters and segmentation functionality. You can find leads. You can slice and dice your list.
Dozens of B2B media companies use Megahit to grow their revenue.
Check out Megahit! I’d love to give you a demo.
Thanks to Christiana Sciaudone for leading the panel at the AMO Summit and sharing some thoughts with me in the past that also influenced this article.
(This content is meant for the US market. If you process EU data, comply with the GDPR.)
