Esse blog tem como objetivo divulgar notícias sobre Mídia Impressa, principalmente, no que se refere ao mercado leitor e movimentos da indústria, que possam impactar seu desenvolvimento e desempenho futuro.
quarta-feira, 20 de novembro de 2019
Schibsted
reduces cost-per-action with programmatic subscription offer
By Siri Holstad Johannessen
Head
of Sales and Marketing
Schibsted
Norway
Oslo,
Norway
Thea
Kristin Hansen
Marketing
Coordinator
Schibsted
Oslo,
Norway
Programmatic is just one grape
in the cluster of technological media innovations — with varying life
expectancy — that marketers have witnessed. Despite this, the method as we know
it today survived for a decade. Congratulations, programmatic!
In the world of media, 10
years can be compared with a young child. Little did we know what challenges
would arise during the juvenile years when programmatic was born. One thing is
for sure: Fortunately, adolescence has been a bumpy ride as smooth rides often
put spokes in the learning wheel.
The attention paradox
Programmatic marketing is an
automated way to buy ad placements based on criteria like willingness to spend,
segments with which you want to communicate, where you want to reach people,
and specific KPIs. Direct ad placements used to be bought based on a gut
feeling, but you can now buy and optimise ads live with Artificial Intelligence
and data.
This opens the possibility of
serving personalised and relevant ad messages on an individual level. It also
likely means every receiver is bombarded with relevant messaging in the digital
sphere — in an ocean of providers trying to reach specific audiences.
In other words, reaching
relevant target groups at the right time and place has never been easier. But
generating the attention this method offers has never been more complex.
This is a paradox in today’s
attention economy, where the human attention span is increasingly short and the
battle for attracting interest is growing. Giving receivers something valuable
and making them feel something has never been so important. The need to create
emotional impact in the noise of ads is no longer a nice-to-do factor but a
need-to-do one.
What we expected
This paradox is something we
experienced in our upbringing of the programmatic child. When we first started
doing programmatic marketing at Schibsted, we saw a unique possibility to
increase volume by promoting sales of our quality newspapers in every channel
to every target group in every funnel mode. This was revolutionary; sales were
expected to come rumbling in and we would reach sensational numbers of new
buyers!
On that note, we built
campaigns with a three-way strategy that reflected the overly optimistic
expectations we had for programmatic:
You know how some stories are
too good to be true? We’re afraid our journey with programmatic is no
exception. Early on, we felt the last-click measurement tools slap their
thighs, laughing at our expectations when they revealed the harsh truth: 16
direct sales in three weeks.
Today, it’s a known truth
that last-click attribution is somewhat worthless. Programmatic measurement
tools that actually took into account the attribution model showed far more
positive numbers. We could see direct sales were low, but the model indicated
the sales from prospects that had seen or clicked on a programmatic message
were far higher than first expected.
Conversions took place in numerous
channels where we promoted campaign offers simultaneously with programmatic
campaigns — electronic direct mailings, native ads, paywalls, telemarketing
etc. – that happened in our own environment and in our own channels.
Because very few people bought
directly from programmatic ads and the plausibility they were exposed to the
campaign offers in our own channels was minimal, was it a waste to use the
programmatic budget to only show off our campaign offers? What if we used
programmatic to expose our exclusive content, to lower prospects’ threshold to
buy our product in our other channels?
With our portfolio of
subscriber-driven newspapers, we offer quality content we take pride in, and we
would be fooling ourselves thinking the price in itself would be the only
factor increasing the number of subscribers. Programmatic is not a channel in
itself, so shouldn’t we stop treating it accordingly?
Schibsted broke its
programmatic campaign into three phases: paid, owned, and earned.
Closing the gap
between expectations versus reality
Using this as backdrop, along
with this paid/owned strategy from the ad trinity, we chose to alter our three
phases in the following campaigns:
Phase
1: Broad audience targeting. Message: editorial messages with editorial
articles/content behind paywall as a landing page. Attract, expand, and
nurture.
Phase
2: Retargeting those who visited via a subscription form (i.e. considering
filling out the form from article paywall) but changed their minds (“form
abandonment”). Message: sales promotion or yet another editorial article
behind paywall. Attract and convert.
Phase
3: Broad audience targeting plus retargeting segment. Message: “last
chance” sales promotion. Expand, attract, and convert.
By altering this, only
prospects in the right mode — those who took an interest in our products’
content — would be exposed to the campaigns’ tactical part.
What we found was quite
exciting. By comparing campaigns with the old strategy (using programmatic to
show sales promotions) to those with the new strategy (exposing great content
and minimal price messages), we saw a significant decrease in cost per action
(CPA) (conversion, in our case).
Aftenposten:
38% decrease in CPA.
Bergens
Tidende: 31.3% decrease in CPA.
Stavanger
Aftenblad: 57% decrease in CPA.
Fædrelandsvennen:
28.4% decrease in CPA.
When it comes to
programmatic, you can add as many buts and ifs you want, and free yourself from
drawing any conclusions. There are obviously other factors at play such as
intuitive order forms, call-to-action (CTA) buttons, formats, complementary
channels, banner attention, price offers in the retargeting phase, time of
year, target groups, and more.
But, based on the 20
campaigns we ran over the last year, we see significant indications that our
strategy has been an influencing factor in lowering the CPA.
To illustrate the mentioned
campaigns with the new strategy, here are two case studies.
Case 1: Fædrelandsvennen — “Byen vår” (our city)
Fædrelandsvennen timed its
campaign to the release of a great editorial investigative article. The article
revealed social inequality in different parts of the geographical catchment of
its business and target group.
Phase
1: Rotating, dynamic banners disclosing some key findings from the
investigative journalism with a “read more” CTA button. Landing page:
matrix promoting all the articles related to “Byen vår” behind a paywall.
Phase
2: Retargeting. Rotating, dynamic banners disclosing more key findings
from the investigating journalism, with a new CTA promoting the name of
the investigative journalistic disclosure. Landing page: matrix promoting
all the articles related to “Byen vår” behind a paywall. Audience: Those
who visited a subscription form in phase 1 but didn’t finish.
Phase
3: Retargeting. “Last chance.” Rotating, dynamic banners promoting a sales
offer. Retargeted to those who visited an ordering form in phases 1 or 2
but didn’t finish.
We
see some weaknesses. For instance, the phase 3 banner isn’t aesthetically
coherent with phase 1 and 2. However, the campaign gave some great results.
Compared to other Fædrelandsvennen campaigns, it generated a 38% decrease in
CPA, making it the lowest CPA we’ve ever had on a FVN campaign. It also had the
biggest share of post-click conversions, which can indicate that more people
were interested in signing up for a subscription after clicking on the banners
and seeing the matrix of “Byen vår” articles behind paywall. The percentage
share of post-click conversions was twice as much as the post-click share on
the other campaigns.
It was a great success.
Case 2: Stavanger Aftenblad — Editorial retargeting
In this campaign, we chose to
promote great journalistic craft. One part of the campaign promoted a great
feature article, “The Neglected,” behind a paywall. Prospects who showed
interest in the article but were not already subscribers were retargeted with
more investigative articles about the health system and criminal journalism,
also behind a paywall.
The other part of the
campaign promoted editorial sports articles and used a segment of people
interested in sports based on Schibsted’s data. Phase 1 linked to a matrix of
articles about general sports in Stavanger. The people who visited these
articles but did not buy a subscription were targeted with sports banners and
an editorial page about Viking, the local soccer team in the area.
Visitors
in phase 1 saw an editorial page about a local soccer team.
We completely dropped the
focus on price in phase 2 and did not start the retargeting until phase 3,
where there was a “last chance” message during the campaign’s last week. In
this phase, we reached those who had taken an interest in our two editorial
phases but hadn’t yet converted into subscribers.
This campaign gave us the
lowest CPA we have ever reached at any of our four newspapers, with a 57% decreased
CPA compared to the campaigns that an emphasised price gave us.
Our take on the programmatic future
As mentioned, we mistakenly
expected programmatic to be the gold mine of direct sales. We cannot claim
we’ve found this gold mine, but we are confident we’ve at least found the
shovel that gives us the opportunity to slowly dig toward it.
But to dig a straight tunnel,
it is important to watch our step and let conclusions be temporary. We have to
keep focusing on building our brands by showing our content, but we also need
to test our strategies regularly. We must have both the acceptance and budget
to make — and learn from — mistakes.
We also want to draw
attention toward the last corner in the trinity related to nurturing. We will
do this by including existing subscribers in our brand-building phases and not
exclude them in the whole campaign as we’ve done up to this point. This way we
can feed them with reminders about the quality of our subscriber-exclusive
content.
Practical implications based on findings
This case can be
transmissible to other businesses and newspaper vendors. Some companies measure
results only by conversions and forget to build their brands. This either/or
philosophy makes a false dichotomy. In light of this, we measuring brand-building
editorial campaigns by CPA is somewhat ironic. But this case showed it is
possible to do both simultaneously.
Your company can utilise this
strategy by doing tests promoting your broad product portfolio, quality
products, written content, or whatever is relevant for your business, instead
of promoting low prices to your audience, regardless of where they are located
in the sales funnel.
We know it can be tough to
defend high budgets and low conversion rates to different stakeholders and
departments (analysts, financiers, external customers, or the company’s
objectives and key results). But, as we’ve seen, building brand decreases the
CPA both on a short-term basis and likely in the long run.
Programmatic is 10 years old
this year. We know the challenges will be tougher in the years to come. As the
method enters its digital teens, a bunch of hormonal facets will emerge such as
disregard, shorter attention span, and tracking, among other things.
About the Authors
Siri
Holstad Johannessen is head of sales and marketing at Schibsted Norway in Oslo, Norway. She can be
reached at shj@schibsted.no or @S_H_Johannessen.
Thea
Kristin Hansen is a marketing coordinator at Schibsted in Oslo, Norway.
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