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Last week, we talked about the Promise of Audience Behavior Data and how it helps you to increase renewal rates, target cross-sells and create new, targeted products.

In essence, when you have an enterprise publishing system tied to your audience data, applying that information becomes the foundation for building multiple revenue streams, by tailoring content and offers in context to targeted segments of your audience.

We’ll show you how some publishers are doing just that. But first, here are a few key considerations when you think about creating new revenue streams:

  • What type of customer is your data revealing to you or do you have a few categories in mind?
  • Are you effectively relating your existing products and services, using your taxonomy system and are there gaps in your related product offerings that you can fill?
  • How do you build your contextual framework for new revenue streams? What tools can you use to enhance that framework?
  • Have you effectively monetized your knowledge and expertise?
  • Are there other businesses that you can partner with on new revenue streams?
  • Do you have an eCommerce system integrated into your CMS to easily present products related to site content?
  • Are you posting your offers directly on site, and are you keeping your transactions on site to track buyer behavior and preferences?
  • Are you consistently evaluating your product offerings, using the latest and most robust audience data?
  • Can you expand your audience geographically?

When people think about multiple revenue streams, many come to mind:

  • Subscriptions supported by a paywall
  • Ads, including mobile ads, native ads
  • New products from repurposed assets: books, downloads, video, eLearning
  • New products from Ad base: buyers guide, webinars, downloads, events

But that’s just a place to start. Publishers are not only adding revenue streams to complement the basic offerings, they are drilling down and cross-selling to make each stream as productive as possible. 

Contextual Selling: The Tagging Trifecta

Take Housing Wire, for example. They’ve used their data to support their taxonomy strategy, which includes 100,000 semantic tags that present related products, in context, to site visitors. The tags intuitively relate products from their three primary revenue streams (and they all come in first!):

  • Paid Subscriptions
  • Directory Listings
  • Advertising

The success of this strategy is apparent: Since their website relaunch last summer, Housing Wire has produced excellent returns from their buyers guide. They’ve kept the layout simple, so that readers can easily find what they are looking for. Aside from the intuitive layout of the guide itself, when visitors open up an article on the site, related articles and logos with listings come up, visually drawing the reader in. When the logo is clicked on, HW collects the data to provide as a lead to the advertiser and to identify user preferences.

Those who want to list in the guides have the ability to post and manage their listing right on the site. They submit their content through an easy form—that also saves HW editors a lot of time. This also frees up time and resources for HW, so they can enable a sales force dedicated to selling listings.

This formula works well for Housing Wire, but with a flexible, scalable CMS that supports contextual selling, the sky is the limit. Publishers can tailor their offerings to meet the specific needs of their audience. It’s always smart to start with the offerings that add the most obvious value, but the point is, that’s only a start.

Tailored Offers, Complete Resources

Natural Gas Intel is using the latest in audience data capabilities to get the most from their basic offerings—to start.  With their newfound ability to monitor accounts and create reports that sort individuals into groups based on a variety of behaviors, they are taking action to tailor their offerings to the individuals using the site. New product offers, renewals and other communications now go to an even more targeted audience.

NGI also presents complete, engaging content with highly visual, automatically sorted data sets and maps in the context of specific news topics that are offered on their site, as well as price indices that directly relate to articles on the natural gas market and those who need the information most. Individual pages are no longer isolated articles but a complete resource that presents related, relevant background data, information and products.

When you look at how just these two publishers are leveraging the latest and deepest audience data capabilities, it’s hard not to imagine the potential. We’ve provided examples of publishers who are diversifying their revenue in the past. Think of how they can expand their success with the latest data—and how you can expand yours!