Is social media the no-man’s-land of communication?

The golden age of social media platforms as amplifiers of visibility and pedestals for companies to develop seems to be behind us. 

At a time when accusations of greenwashing are pouring in (Air France here, BNP Paribas there…), most brands feel they’re walking on eggshells when it comes to speaking to their audiences and consumers.

What’s more, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out on social platforms. 

• Content saturation. On Instagram, 95 million photos and videos are posted every day
• The decline in organic engagement, influenced in part by algorithms that favour certain, very specific types of content
• The monetization challenges faced by social media platforms mean that they deliberately limit the organic visibility of corporate accounts in order to prioritize their own paid-for offers

As a result, engagement rates are down across all sectors, and online brands are faced with very passive audiences. 

But it takes a lot more than that to discourage some pioneering companies. Those who have responded by completely rethinking their marketing strategy, integrating a community component into it.

From passive audience to engaged community

In response to the transformation of social networks, a new marketing strategy has been emerging over the last few years. One that involves moving from audience to community, something that not only supports the brand as it grows, but directly impacts its growth. 

This is what the cosmetics brand Nidé.co has done, for example, by asking members of its community to suggest ideas for new products. If the idea receives more than 2,000 votes in the community, it goes into production and is marketed. Profits from sales are then shared with the co-creator.

The company specialises in clean cosmetics, a growing trend in makeup and skincare. But instead of creating products that it feels fit the most people the best (or looking at it another way, with the least compromises), Nide looks for niches by asking its consumer base what they really want from their products.

‘Have you ever said, when speaking to your friends, “If only this thing existed”?’ Nide’s website asks. Nide wants you, the consumer, to share those wild wishes with it so that you can “Co-create Tomorrow”.

You’re probably wondering how, in practical terms, it’s possible to achieve such a feat. That’s what the role of the Community Builder is all about. As the true representative of the brand, lending its voice and face to humanize it, the Community Builder is a guarantor of the community’s commitment.

The community approach seeks to go further than Social Media Management. As well as relaying the brand’s messages, Community Building consists of creating a space dedicated to exchanges between members of the community, opening up a dialogue between the brand and them. And of course, to encourage this dialogue, the Community Builder is essential.

From Social Media Manager to Community Builder: focus on a new profession

Working at the crossroads between strategy, human resources, management and communication, the Community Builder is a highly versatile profile. Whereas Social Media Managers (or Community Managers) are generally responsible “solely” for feeding content into the brand’s social networks, the Community Builder’s role covers a wider range of responsibilities:

• Defining community strategy and the related business KPIs (conversion, retention, loyalty, brand visibility, etc)
• Creating and animating a community space that brings members together, achieved through speaking out, creating content, organizing events, etc
• Implementing growth strategies for the community. For example by creating an ambassador program or deploying a strategy for acquiring new members on social 
• Liaise with internal teams who can benefit from the community’s feedback or actions: marketing, product, customer support, sales, etc.

Although still in its infancy, the job is already highly sought-after. In May 2023, on LinkedIn, there were almost 28,500 job offers containing the keyword “community”.

A trend that’s not going to slow any time soon, as companies realize that the age of Social Media Marketing is coming to an end and that internal changes are needed to adapt and survive.

This article, wrapped up:
- Increasingly more brands are either acquiring, investing in or launching their own media
- Lead generation, increased revenue, providing a service and positioning themselves as experts are just some of the benefits of a brand publishing strategy
- To succeed in brand publishing, we'd recommend clearly defining your goals and the value you're going to provide, ensuring you're brand agnostic and putting ARPU (over audience) as your north star KPI

How are brands becoming publishers?

There are 3 potential pathways from brand to publisher…

• A brand purchasing an existing media (such as Hubspot acquiring The Hustle)
• Equity investment (like Penn National Gaming initially did with Barstool Sports)
• Developing content independently (the approach taken by Red Bull)

In all cases, the move to becoming a publisher often starts with traditional content marketing that gets noticed for having more potential than simple marketing, combined with a desire to better understand and engage with customers.

This transition from content marketing to brand publishing means moving away from campaign mentality, talking about the product, to instead focussing on developing customer relationships, providing information that appeals to customer’s interests and needs, whether it be through a digital or print publication.

Why are increasingly more brands turning to publishing?

The benefits of brand publishing are endless, and cover many aspects of your business model:

• The desire for brands to position themselves as experts in the industry – to reassure users, build trust, develop close relationships and increase brand loyalty (for a high CLV –  customer lifetime value).

• Audience acquisition – increase the audience size at the top of the funnel to then work on engaging these users and eventually converting them into a client.

• Provide a service to clients and prospects

• Develop a better understanding of audiences – collect first-party data through user’s interactions with content, progressively profile them to learn about who your audience are, the type of profile that’s likely to buy in the future and what you need to do to help them convert. You can even make the most of your media to get in direct contact with your audience through events, communities, discussion panels, even interviews.

• First-party data collection is also incredibly valuable for overcoming the challenges of the cookieless future.

• Be able to put this data to use in improving marketing and sales efforts – send personalized marketing campaigns to the right person, at the best time and in the format that’s most likely to convert this individual user into a client.

• Decrease acquisition costs and increase revenues – by gaining notoriety and credibility within your industry, you’ll naturally need less money to be placed in acquisition

• Diversify acquisition formats to create a richer user experience and increase customer LTV – engage users in a variety of content formats, including written content (both digital and print), newsletters, apps, podcasts, video, etc.

“Historically, the gambling industry has focused on client acquisition via a combination of third-party lead generation and traditional advertising (where permitted). In more recent years, the model has in part shifted to more involved partnerships with linear broadcast networks… The thought here is simple — eyeballs build brand awareness and eventually lead to new customers. In the game of customer acquisition, lower costs are king. That’s where Barstool fits in.”

Will Hershey, Roundhill Investments

What makes a brand successful when becoming a publisher?

The benefits are clear, but the challenge is how to create, manage, measure and monetize content in this increasingly competitive, constantly changing publishing industry.

The goal of your marketing efforts remains the same – turning audiences into paying customers – but the means to achieve them is different, moving from selling a product or service to creating quality content, telling stories that engage consumers.

Firstly, it’s essential to clearly define and share the process from brand to publisher

1. Define your goals: Why are you publishing content? How will you measure success? What are you going to publish?
2. Persona – identify your target audience, particularly those who generate the most amount of business directly (purchases) or indirectly (recommendations)
3. The user journey – and when the brand will come into the journey
4. Business plan – are you launching, acquiring or investing?
5. Identifying your format, editorial line, type of content, etc
6. Set-up an and acceleration – coordinate internally
7. Measuring (and if the chosen format isn’t right, you can always go back a few steps to redefine the goals and journey to get there)

Your north star KPI should be ARPU, not audience

Not all visitors to your site are equal in terms of the value they bring to your business. And whilst it might make sense to track and work on increasing the volume of visitors to your content, efforts should instead be placed on developing the value of these users, i.e. the ARPU.

Going back to basics, your traffic doesn’t look like the graph on the left (unfortunately). Instead, the majority of users are volatile (only visiting once a month), anonymous and sometimes don’t even consent to cookies, which means very limited tracking and analytics potential.

However, despite these users making up the majority of your audience, it’s the minority of users – those who are de-anonymized, consenting and highly engaged – who will bring the most value to your business.

This table below (made up of fake data) demonstrates the point nicely. Volatile users, although making up the highest percentage of your audience, are significantly less likely to convert in any form and provide you with very little revenue. Conversely, members, who are highly engaged but only represent a minority of your audience, are much more likely to convert into a customer and bring a high ARPU.

We’d therefore highly recommend segmenting audiences based on level of engagement and tracking ARPU as your north star metric rather than traffic.

Create value for your target audience

As with news publishers, you’ll gain more value from your audience if you provide them with value in exchange. This is exactly how any conversion works, whether that be turning an anonymous user into a registered member, subscriber or client.

For instance, with free registration (via a registration wall), you can offer users access to additional content, provide an ad-free experience or integrate UX features such as saving content for later or following topics/authors (find more ideas here).

In exchange, these users create an account to provide you with first-party data, a better understanding of your audience, additional ad revenue through targeting and users that are gradually getting more engaged in your content, making them highly more likely to subscribe or purchase from you in the future.

You could even offer paid subscriptions, either via a paywall for digital offers or print subscription for paper copies.

It’s also hugely important to prove this value internally to your teams, ensuring they’re onboard with and understand the reasons for you moving to brand publishing.

Work out how to create a community of users

Brand publishing is a long-term investment in building your audience. By creating value, you can develop a community of like-minded users who feel they can connect over your content, learn from each other and trust the information shared.

Some ideas for building a community:

• Facebook, Linkedin or Slack groups (based on your target audience) – BBC Food even use their Facebook group to learn about their user’s interests, get ideas for content and be in direct contact with their audience
• UX features such as commenting on articles (this could even be an added-value feature of creating a free account or subscribing) or debates (La Drench is a brilliant example of the value of interactional content)
• In-person events, such as round tables or talks, which could either be for all users or as an exclusive benefit for members
  

Be brand agnostic – not too much self-promotion

A brand publisher doesn’t explicitly encourage purchasing but rather engages and attracts audiences around information, gaining their trust in order to ensure they think of you when they’re ready to purchase. I.e. Content marketing for a publisher (over a brand) moves from product-centric to user-centric.

Provide value in a variety of media formats

Think outside the box to engage your users in a variety of formats (written content, audio, videos, etc.) and through a range of mediums, including onsite, newsletters, social media and possibly print.

When it comes to brand publishing, there’s probably no better example to look at than a digital marketing agency, those who actually advise brands themselves on how to launch a media. 

Let me introduce you to Intuiti, a French digital marketing and UX agency who launched in 2004 with the goal of helping clients better understand audiences, optimize user journeys and engage their target market.

Today, Intuiti is a lot more than this. They’re now not only a marketing agency, but also a media in and of themselves, under the name Decriiipt. Publishing content in a variety of formats, holding events, sending out a weekly newsletter… The success of this media is clear. The best bit? It directly benefits the overarching Intuiti business in a whole host of ways. 

Which is why I recently spoke to Quentin Franque, Head of Marketing and Communications at Intuiti, to discover how the experts in digital marketing turned to publishing to bring more business to their brand.

Before Decriiipt

Like most online businesses, Intuiti ran a content marketing strategy through their on-site blog, sharing articles, white papers and webinars with the goal of moving users through the funnel towards purchasing. 

It was actually after the success of one of these formats, a short, very focussed newsletter, that led them to brand publishing. 

We’d just launched our first newsletter – a very short, succinct content. It was our first attempt, a proof of concept. On the one hand, we knew that the idea of sharing very concrete advice and solutions in a newsletter was a good one. But, on the other hand, we realized that this wasn’t enough. To go even further, we needed to develop a variety of formats that would suit a wider audience – unfolding a problem in longer content, analyzing a strategy, sharing insider insights into a specific job, a specific company… it needed (and had the potential) to be so much more than just a newsletter.”

Quentin Franque

A deep-dive into Decriipt’s brand publishing strategy 

A light, airy user experience that brings the focus straight to the content itself – no distractions, you’re here to read. 

Lead generation is carefully integrated into the homepage without interrupting the user experience, encouraging readers to “stay connected” by signing up for the newsletter. 

Sent every other Thursday at 9am, Decriiipt aims to form a habit, increasing frequency of visits and quantity of content consumption. 

A short form to reduce friction, a clear value proposition to encourage conversion and the whole sign up process without leaving the page. 

Today, Decriiipt has an average newsletter open rate of 40%:

• They understand what audiences want and need thanks to continuous data collection, tests and analysis
• The team is always keeping an eye on the industry, being signed up to a wide variety of newsletters (free and paid), continuously crawling Medium, Linkedin, TikTok, Google…
• Deep analysis that goes into great detail without making the content long or hard to digest
• Each week, we contact 30 newsletter registrants to hear about what they think of our content
• Each week, we contact those who no longer open our newsletter (this allows us to understand who receives the email in their spam folder or find users who simply changed jobs/email address)

UX formats designed to increase engagement, including the “Top 6 most read”, appealing to our natural human desire to fit-in and be part of a wider shared conversation. 

Article collections (“dossiers” or folders), facilitate high volumes of content consumption, especially for those looking to deep dive into a specific topic. 

A variety of content formats engage audiences in different ways, including written articles, webinars, in-person events and podcasts. 

Podcasts, for instance, not only invite guests to share their expertise, but also include podcast series that bring listeners back the following week for the next episode. We’re encouraged to sign up to the Decriiipt newsletter in order to receive each episode in our inbox. 

The value of brand publishing

Of course, as a digital marketing specialist, the team knew this move to brand publishing would prove beneficial for business. But, as Quentin started listing this value, he didn’t seem to stop… “pft, what value didn’t we gain!” 

• Giving credibility to Intuitii’s expertise: showcasing intuitiii’s understanding of the market not only through content but also through the entire transition of content marketing on Intuiti to brand publishing on Decriiipt

• Showcase Intuiti’s methodology and digital marketing skills: content provides a teaser of the potential work that Intuiti can do with a client, and in a way that isn’t sales-focussed

• Differentiate the brand from competitors: there’s a huge number of digital marketing agencies for brands to pick from, but what better company to work with than one who’s successfully applying their own strategies to increase business value? 

• Develop a culture of analytics internally at Intuiti: set Decriiipt content as a standard for employees to follow, both in their ongoing understanding/monitoring of the industry and in their work with clients

• Support recruitment efforts: positioning the group as a leading expert in the digital marketing field makes job offers more highly sought after and encourages people with more industry experience to apply

• Collect leads for potential customers to intuiti: Quentin shared that roughly half of Intuiti leads come from Decriiipt, which has led to the overall number of leads tripling and the customer acquisition cost (CAC) dividing by 5

• Visibility for their service of supporting brands to move into publishing: Decriiipt in and of itself proves Intuiti’s consultancy expertise, showcasing the potential outcome for prospective clients. Quentin mentioned how some brands even got in touch to ask who they worked with to build the media, not knowing Intuiti was behind it…

• Additional content and expertise to share with clients, supporting retention efforts 

• Improve SEO performance: thanks to Decriiipt’s content, the group is now positioned on double the number of keywords than the brand website, Intuiti, proving invaluable for audience acquisition 

Given all these benefits of brand publishing for Intuiti, I was curious as to what Quentin considered as the north star metric to measure success. 

Interestingly, reader feedback.

Both quantitative, in that they aim for 5 positive comments per month, and qualitative in the sense that someone in the team gets in contact with people in the reader community to ask their opinion. The latter takes time, but can prove hugely valuable to every section of the business. 

One clear proof of this positive reader feedback is the success of Decriiipt’s events, particularly Audio Days, a podcast event focussing on user experience and marketing strategies with 1651 participants and over 12,000 podcast listeners in February 2022. Producing content is one thing for brand publishers, but organizing an event with this kind of attendance is truly a great measure of success. 

What shouldn’t you do when moving to brand publishing? 

• Don’t get stuck in a single content format: once you find something that works, it’s easy to stick in what you think is a safe zone. However, it’s through innovating and developing your strategy that you’ll increase and continue to engage audiences

• Don’t abandon ideas too quickly: give them a chance! If you lose motivation or think it’s not going to work, get others from the team involved, brainstorm and run tests to better understand your audience’s reaction to this idea

• Don’t lose the sense of being a media: topics, strategy and content may well change and develop over time, but don’t lose the sense of being a media. It should be a core focus from day one

A final piece of advice from Quentin on turning to publishing as a brand: 

“If you’re launching your own media, you’ll know all too well that the quality of content and attention given to diffusion are essential for success. But the key is to not keep what you’re doing to yourself – share results, successful strategies, user feedback… and not just with your colleague but with the whole team, company shareholders and even to readers themselves. Share everything, all the time, to everyone.”

Quentin Franque

Quentin Franque leads lectures on digital transformation for publishers at Sciences Po, a world-class university in Paris. He also takes the role of Head of Marketing and Communications at the digital marketing agency, Intuiti. 

Reputation, visibility, business: 3 goals for most brands turning to publishing

The order doesn’t matter, but reputation, visibility and business (lead gen, account creation, sales…) are the 3 goals cited by every professional I’ve met on why they launched a brand publication. One head of comms of a large French industrial group explained “you should, before anything, start with the Business Unit that’s suffering the most from a lack of strong reputation and sales results”, building a media around this BU*.

The business goal for your publication won’t necessarily be this concrete. In some sectors, particularly those with multiple intermediaries, ‘to influence’ remains the number 1 goal. “Launch a brand publication with a voice” was the advice shared by Marie Hardy, Head of Le Comptoir de Malakoff Humanis – “We launched our media with one clear goal: incarnate a collective expertise with content that informs our clients. It’s a service to them, helping to develop their daily choices and actions”.

The media you’re reading from right now, for instance, seeks to meet the above goals as well as provide a variety of benefits for Poool: 

1. Position themselves as the main point of expertise within the industry
2. Facilitate prospect’s buying decision
3. Centralize demands around a challenge (just like you’d do for a SEO tree) for a known target audience. At The Audiencers, this is professionals working in digital publishing
4. Whilst also centralizing potential future demands that are still being defined in the industry, where Poool aims to become a reference

Reduce acquisition costs, a less obvious but important goal

“Historically, the gambling industry has focused on client acquisition via a combination of third-party lead generation and traditional advertising (where permitted). In more recent years, the model has in part shifted to more involved partnerships with linear broadcast networks…The thought here is simple — eyeballs build brand awareness and eventually lead to new customers. In the game of customer acquisition, lower costs are king. That’s where Barstool fits in.” In this (long) article, the American analyst Will Hershey dives deeper into the reasons why Penn National Gaming decided to acquire Barstool.

In the last few years, the marketing mix has taken a turn to focus more on the short term, over-investing in the end of the tunnel rather than in brand awareness. The problem is that this has led to costs exploding…

1. …there’s strong competition at the end of the funnel – the number of potential customers at the end of the tunnel hasn’t increased nearly as much as those investing. On Google, for instance, where just 3 sites advertised on the word ‘trowel’ (yes, trowel) 5 years ago, there’s now a dozen or more
2. …platforms employed for the end of the funnel often have the monopoly, or near-monopoly

To reduce acquisition costs, many now turn back to the start of the funnel: branding.

If brand publishing leads to reduced acquisition costs, why aren’t all brands getting on board with this strategy?

A few reasons… 

Firstly, in very large organizations, it takes time and deep data analysis to be able to change the status quo. After all, we can’t all be early adopters! 

Secondly, launching a publication means a major drawback: attribution. Where it’s easy to see the ROI of an investment in Facebook, it’s a lot trickier to understand the investment made into a brand publication. 

Nevertheless, with a more global view, it’s true that being a smaller organization makes things easier. At Intuiti, for example, just 3 years after launching our media, Decriiipt, acquisition costs had been divided by 3 (taking only the marketing budget into account) and by 2 if we add in the HR costs since launching the media.

And that’s not all! 

There’s still plenty more reasons to get into brand publishing. With the industry having not yet reached maturity, I continue to find new reasons why certain brands should move to publishing. In no particular order, they include:

First-party data collection

Tightening privacy regulations, accompanied by changing user behaviors online, mean we’re moving from an ‘ad-based’ model to becoming more ‘content-based’. Then consider GDPR and cookie-related legislations, which have led brands to work on developing zero- and first-party data collection strategies, trying to make up for the ‘fog’ surrounding third-party data. 

Brand publishing solves both challenges.

Concentrate on a simpler acquisition model

A great number of companies spend extortionate amounts of money to simplify the user journey, to become user-centric, to have a single acquisition channel. But, in reality, budgets often hide the ridiculous internal complexity. Some structures have developed an acquisition strategy that looks more like a bowl of spaghetti than a beautifully neat, tiered wedding cake… What’s more, with the current difficulties to find talent, I’ve been hearing more and more stories of organizations who no longer have the employees to run a whole section of their strategy, or even those who realize that campaigns can run by themselves, without that employee who just left the company. Brand publishing makes acquisition simpler and doesn’t require a complex system or large team.

Support recruitment efforts 

“The thing that surprised me the most in our brand publishing adventure was its impact on recruitment. By younger talents, who may not have previously thought about sending a spontaneous application to our company, but also by many professionals with managerial experience. For instance, amongst some of the latest big recruitments, one decided to send in an application after reading our media. Long story short, she became my boss’s boss.” The ex-head of brand publishing at a large French group shared her surprise at the recruitment benefits that came from a brand publishing strategy. And she’s not alone, Welcome to the Jungle and BPI are other examples of brands that have significantly increased their attractiveness to candidates thanks to publishing.

Be in direct contact with your target audience through interviews

By running interviews as part of your publication, you’re doing them a service: visibility to their personal brand for future job opportunities, visibility of their work (or work done in their team), simple personal validation…by giving these individuals the floor space within your media, it’s highly likely that they’ll return the favor.

The difference between a regular publisher and a brand publisher

Reminder: a brand publisher is not a publisher. 

Whilst preparing for a conference, Maximime Hanssen, the editor-in-chief of Challenges, explained the difference between these two types of publishers: “for a traditional publisher, the primary interest is that of the public. For a brand publisher however, content is published as part of a business strategy, where the end-goal is to sell a product or service.”

All the same, brand publishers take many characteristics from traditional publishers, otherwise it would still resemble a regular blog. 

Just like any publisher, brand publishers look to:

• In its totality: provide a service, sharing researched work and bringing information into one place 
• In its format: publish content on a regular basis and offer an engaging user experience including quality visuals
• In its mission: to share information for a target audience, rather than speaking about itself

But despite these shared characteristics, let’s not forget that a brand publisher has the goal of selling a product or service. Even if the publication never mentions the brand, it’s still behind the scenes in the publication’s ecosystem. Conversely, a classic publisher, even one who’s under a confined ad mindset, produces information for what it is – information is at the heart of their business model. For brands, their product or service is at their heart, and always will be, even if they launch their own media. 

*Starting with a ‘need for notoriety’ as your BU is certainly one way to build a media. But I’d recommend working from your target audience and their expectations and problems. If you start with notoriety, you risk closing yourself in with very precise topics that focus too much on your product. If, however, you put audiences first, yes you may end up covering topics that don’t focus on your area of work, but you will at least be read! The HR topic in our newsletter at Decriiipt is the one that generates the most clicks and, since starting this section, newsletter open rates have increased by 3%. Intuiti, the marketing agency behind this brand publisher, doesn’t run any HR activities, but discussing HR increases the reading rate of other sections within the newsletter that do cover our area of work – jackpot! 

Produce content to support your brand? Of course, it’s a no brainer. Who wouldn’t want leads falling into their hands through blog content?

But whilst blogs have long been considered as the optimal content strategy for brands, there’s a new kid on the block and it’s arguably even more valuable to your business… 

Brand publishing, and no it’s not simply another name for content marketing. There are actually a huge number of differences between the two. 

In terms of the overarching differences, brand publishing…

• Seeks to provide a service (whether that’s information or something more concrete) 
• Takes a neutral stance (rather than biased towards the brand, both in terms of content and house style) 
• Doesn’t speak about the brand or products (too much) 
• Brings in external experts to contribute
• Shares deeper research than a blog
• Creates value for their audience, not simply trying to fit into an algorithm (such as keyword stuffing for SEO) 

In its format, brand publishing…

• Produces and publishes content on a more frequent basis and in a variety of formats (for instance written articles, podcasts, newsletters, etc)
• Places a certain amount of importance on the quality of its content, illustrations, page layout, UX, ect 

There are, of course, some brand publishing characteristics that are still under debate…

Does a brand publisher ALWAYS have to take a neutral stance? 
Does a brand publisher ALWAYS have to avoid using the 1st person? 
Should a brand publisher ALWAYS be built from user data? 

Content to publish on a company blog: 

It’s [insert company name] blog, naturally associated to the product or services, fitting in with the company house style and providing the perfect platform for self-promotional content:

• Case studies and success stories
• Comparing your product to a competitor
• Sharing company updates or insights into life as part of your team
• Client-focussed content on how to use your product
• Reportive content that doesn’t necessarily provide specific advice
• How to solve X problem that, coincidently, your product solves 
• White papers

Content to publish on your brand publishing site: 

Just like any media, a brand publisher understands, listens to and develops the industry that they’re involved in. This makes it perfect for publishing: 

• Content providing advice and expertise to support reader’s daily lives
• Interviews with personalities in the industry
• A community or hub for bringing readers/industry professionals together and potentially inviting them to participate 

Brand publishing content likely includes: 

• A certain level of content quality, which often means employing dedicated editors that aren’t associated with the brand (even better if they’ve got experience in the publishing industry)
• More illustrations than a blog, providing a better user experience and adding meaning to content
• A neutral position, providing a variety of points of view and having its own house style (separately to the brand)
• And, although there are a variety of types of brand publishers, there’s one thing that’s true of all sites… access to content is free

Free… completely free? 

Differently to traditional digital media, a paywall doesn’t really have a place on brand publisher sites (where selling the product or service is the main end-goal). A Registration Wall, however, creates a different kind of value exchange, one where readers provide you with first-party data and register for free on your site in order to access content. Already used by The New York Times, The Independent and plenty of other digital publishers, de-anonymization strategies through registration help turn your content into business through collecting data, increasing ad revenue and, importantly, better understanding your audience to increase engagement and sales.

The question then comes down to which strategy is the best for you? 

Blog or media? 

Well it’s ultimately about deciding the purpose that you’d like your content to have… 

Are you ready to invest in producing exclusive, quality content to influence your industry, naturally collecting leads for your brand through a developed inbound strategy? In other words, are you looking for a clear ROI from your content? If yes, brand publishing with a registration wall on content is the best solution for you. 

If, however, you only think of your content as

• A first step in your sales funnel, helping to qualify leads (through case studies, for instance)
• A retention tool to help your clients better use your product (such as “How to” content)

…then a blog is the best strategy for you.

This article wrapped up:
- Brand publishing is all about being user-focussed rather than product-focussed
- Guillermo highlights the importance of setting long-term goals, establishing a dedicated team and considering the value that your publication can offer readers
- Overall, although brand publishing isn't for everyone, it can bring huge benefits to your business

“Even if the benefits of brand publishing may seem irresistible, defining this value, and being certain that your core brand is stable and profitable, is a first step that shouldn’t be overlooked.”

For brands, content marketing has been well established as an effective way to acquire traffic, increase brand awareness and help audiences in their buying decision-making.  

However, over the past years, a trend has emerged of brands going a step further to actually launch or acquire their own publication, moving from simple content marketing to becoming a brand publisher.

One such company is Welcome to the Jungle, an international brand who ‘builds products that transform the experience at work’. Despite being a brand in the sense that they sell an ecosystem of HR tech products to help companies find the best candidate and employee experience, WTTJ developed a media alongside the brand, publishing a wide variety of high-quality content to help young professionals in the world of work.

‌

I spoke to Guillermo Carreras-Candi, Head of Strategy, Video and Social Media at Welcome to the Jungle, about their journey from brand to publisher, why they made this move and the best practices he’d recommend to anyone else thinking about moving to brand publishing.

Brand publishing – why do it?

‌From the very beginning of WTTJ, the founders knew they wanted to be more than your average brand. Instead of solely providing an employment service, the team envisioned producing content that would have an impact on society and the world of work, making their mark on the industry.

Although there are a wide variety of advantages in brand publishing, WTTJ have focussed on the long-term impact of producing content.

• Establishing a clear voice for the company
• Building a community, creating lasting relationships with readers
• Educating and influencing their audience: positioning themselves as experts for a stronger market position
• Educating themselves: first-party data collection to understand their audience and inform their strategy

But what makes this content any different from content marketing, or regular publishing?

‌‌The lines are certainly blurred, but the general consensus is that the move from content marketing to brand publishing is about becoming user-focussed over product-focussed, having a dedicated team, allocating a budget and working towards long-term goals rather than quick wins.

To be successful in brand publishing, you have to think and operate like a publisher, with an editorial team, defined tone and voice, identity, etc. It’s this that allows you to build real trust and engagement with users in a way that content marketing can’t.

Each brand publisher does it differently, but some brands can go a step further than WTTJ and become independent (or start this way), having a separate branding, business and monetization model. Just look at the situation of Hubspot acquiring The Hustle for instance.

In terms of brand publishing vs regular publishing, it’s about the long-term goals and overarching aim of the content.

As Guillermo highlights, there’s publishers and there’s brands, but brand publishing lies somewhere in between. Whilst you need a marketing team who connects the brand to your content, bringing in the sales and business side, it’s essential to have a dedicated editorial and marketing team for your media alone in order to keep the ‘publisher’ goals in mind when producing content, moving from selling-focussed to engagement.

Brand publisher’s set-up, in short:

• Publishing team (who have experience with media) = goals associated with regular publishing, including building audience, increasing engagement, producing quality content and developing relationships with readers
• Marketing team = the bridge between the publisher and the brand, maximizing the impact of the media for the brand
• Brand sales team = focus only on the brand, not directly associated with the publication so as to not impact the user-focussed goal of the media, but benefits from the media’s data collection and leads from the marketing team

A deeper look into Welcome to the Jungle’s content

‌Differently to many brand publishers, WTTJ keep their content under a single brand and publish content on their central site, with the sub-name Work for more/Life at work

WTTJ work for more is the ‘Media’ section of their main brand site, offering written content that covers every area of the working world, including more in-depth pieces from experts in the industry accessible on The Lab.

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Whilst content is free to consume, readers are encouraged to create a free account by signing up via the registration button in the corner or when they try to save content via the heart icon. A pop-up registration wall appears and we’re offered the option of creating an account with Linkedin (a social media associated with WTTJ’s content), Google or email.

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This de-anonymization strategy is beneficial for WTTJ to learn about their audience and collect valuable data points to inform their publishing and brand decision-making as well as increase engagement through UX features such as saving and sharing content.  

Advice from WTTJ: how to do brand publishing right

1. Consider the value a publication can offer your audience

You need to have a strong conviction about moving to brand publishing, and not just one that benefits your brand – one that provides value to your audience (can you be sure that your content will help users achieve their jobs-to-be-done and solve their pain-points?). This value should take center place as your business strategy and mission as a content producer, which is what separates content marketing from brand publishing.

Importantly, brand publishing is a big commitment, requiring an entirely separate way of thinking, organization, team, tech stack, etc…it’s not right for every company. Even if the benefits of brand publishing may seem irresistible, defining this value, and being certain that your core brand is stable and profitable, is a first step that shouldn’t be overlooked.

2. Think in the long-term

Go beyond the short-term goals of content marketing. Consider how your publication can provide you with more than revenue, such as positioning you as experts, increasing user engagements and establishing more trusting, lasting relationships to develop a community of readers.

3. Find the right team

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as moving people around within your organization. Instead, Guillermo highly recommends employing experts in creating media content for publishers (rather than marketing content). They’ll bring knowledge and understanding from the publishing industry to help develop your editorial line, build the newsroom, define your DNA as a media to stand out from competitors and become user-focussed over product-focussed.

4. Make sure you have the right budget

It goes without saying but is important to be sure of before getting started. Brand publishing is similar to having a whole other business, and thinking like this is infact how you’re going to succeed. But this requires a new team, tech stack, investment, etc.

The takeaways: 
- Brand publishers may well understand the benefits of this strategy, but many are unaware of the potential value that content can give them, especially when they learn lessons from traditional medias 
- Engagement, data collection, personalization and sales activation are 4 key essentials for brand publishing success, as recommended by expert Quentin Paquot
- Above all, a combination of de-anonymization (registration) and interactive formats can prove hugely valuable for brands to turn their content into business 

Although the benefits of brand publishing are clear, what’s perhaps less obvious is how these companies can gain value from their publication, turning content into business. 

Given that publishing isn’t their main industry (in fact, it’s a completely new area for them), this isn’t hugely surprising. It’s a media-world where revenue streams for traditional publishers are well-established and clearly defined by the industry. 

But how can brands learn from publishers to gain value from their content, effectively turning brand publishing into business? 

To help answer this question, I spoke to Quentin Paquot, CEO of Qualifio, a specialist in interactive marketing, data collection and loyalty. Having worked with a wide variety of brand publishers in various industries, he shared 4 essentials for these companies to get business from the readers of their content. 

The 4 essentials for brand publishing: 

• Engagement
• Data collection
• Personalization 
• Sales activation

1. Engagement

What specifically is engagement? 

It’s one of those words we all understand but perhaps couldn’t clearly define and, in fact, you can find a variety of different definitions online. 

At The Audiencers, engagement can be defined and tracked by combining the recency, frequency and volume of visits made by a user (known as a RFV score).

Recency = the number of days since a user was last active on your website

Frequency = the number of days that a user has accessed your site in a given time period

Volume = the quantity of content accessed and interacted with

Given that engagement directly correlates with revenue, it’s an essential metric to track and work hard to increase amongst readers. 

One of the best ways for brand publishers to successful engage their readers is by forming habits, encouraging them to return to your content on a frequent and regular basis to consume a high quantity of articles. You can do this through a combination of on-site content formats, UX features and off-site techniques. 

Newsletters: bringing content to your users on a regular basis to either fit into an existing habit (e.g. the morning commute) or create a new one. 

Content series: just like a TV series, you leave your user wanting to come back for the next episode

Gamification: Quentin brought up the interactive content format of gamification, for instance publishing a new crossword each week, or simply integrating a game into your site to entertain and encourage better quality of visits (including more time spent on page) 

The mineral water brand Vittel, for instance, ran an interactive online quiz for readers during Le Tour de France, increasing engagement and building a closer relationship with users. 

UX features: parts of your site that allow users to personalize their experience and encourage high frequency of visits through bringing value directly in front of them. For instance, the ability to save content for later, follow topics or authors, easily share content on social media, etc. 

The French Football Federation’s publishing site includes social sharing buttons, adds a tag to link to other related content and recommends further reading through article links at the side of the screen, based on the article we’re currently consuming. 

Cross-channel experience – use a mix of channels to reach customers in various, complementary and cohesive ways, including push (email or push notifications on mobile) and pull notifications (in-app messages, content cards, etc that occur within your site or app). 

2. Data collection

With Google’s cookie changes, GDPR compliance and other restrictions coming into play, the need for collecting owned data is becoming increasingly more vital for success. 

Owned data? 

Instead of relying on partners and third-party data suppliers, brand publishers need to collect first- and zero-party data that’s willingly shared by the consumer – i.e. they’re giving their permission for their data to be used with the expectation of something in return (such as a better brand experience, personalized messaging, promotions etc).

Combining de-anonymization (registration) with interactive content is the simplest way for brands to establish a successful owned data strategy and put this data to use in providing additional value to their audience. 

Registration: Converting unknown users into registered members is a simple but highly effective way to collect data and create a single view of your users. 

The most successful publishers and brands employ a registration wall to block content and ask or require users to create a free account to continue reading. 

Whilst you collect key data points, your user gets access to more content and additional benefits defined by you, such as discounts, early-access to products or UX features (e.g. ability to save content for later or resume content where they left off). 

For traditional publishers, registration has proven time and again to increase user-to-subscriber conversion rates by 10-15%. And, given that engagement plays a central role in a user’s decision to subscribe in this context, we can assume that registration can have an equally valuable impact on user-to-buyer conversion rates amongst brands. 

Tbsp, by the brand General Mills, requires users to sign up when they try to make use of any member-only features, including the ability to save content for later.

Interactive content: quizzes or tests, either before or after registering your user, can help to collect key data points and increase engagement simultaneously

Quentin mentions Makeup.com by L’Oreal who built a quiz for readers to discover their undertones by answering 4 questions. In order to receive the results, the user had to create an account, with 60-70% of participants converting into a registered user through this format across all L’Oreal brands. 

This also benefits sales at L’Oreal – users can be sent products that are adapted to their complexion, a data point that would be difficult to discover without this form of content. 

3. Personalization

Personalized messaging has a significantly greater impact on potential customers than standard copy, and the large majority of online users now expect it, especially after creating an account. 

Adding the user’s name, recommending content, personalizing messaging based on previous purchases… it’s all about putting your data to use to boost engagement, build close relationships and ultimately increase revenues. 

Segment audiences: segment your audience based on level of engagement, location, interests, or anything that could prove valuable to your strategy. This is a simple way to personalize messaging, design and user journeys without having to over complicate matters

Triggers: set up triggers through a UTM_source that personalize the user experience based on their source. For instance, users coming from your newsletter could be given open access to premium content to help boost engagement. 

Journal Du Dimanche, a French publisher, even set up a trigger for users coming from the news aggregator site upday, offering these readers access to premium content for free and encouraging registration to increase engagement. Given that upday is responsible for the acquisition of 8% of JDD’s traffic, it was important for the publisher to not turn these readers away with a paywall but instead nurture them, gradually making them aware of their premium offer. 

Account space: for registered users, you can not only make the most of the data already collected (including email and preferred content/products) but also provide features that they can personalize themselves – such as a preference center for configuring notifications/emails, building a shopping list or ‘collections’ to save content in different areas. 

BBC food allows users to save content in their ‘favorites’ as well as add ingredients to a shopping list. 

4. Sales activation

Of course, engagement, data collection and personalization are great, but they’re only valuable to your business if converted into revenue. And, even better, these engaged users may well come back and purchase on a regular basis, recommending you to others and advocating your brand.

Web-to-store strategies: bring online users from your content to your store through promotions, rewards or even with the ‘shopping list builder’ used in the BBC Food example above. 

Nespresso decided to employ a newsletter registration strategy for Black Friday, offering those who signed up the chance to receive exclusive offers and discounts. This strategy led users to both the online store and physical shop front. 

Kiehl integrated a wheel of fortune into their site where users had to enter their email address to play and be in with a chance of winning a discount or prize. 

Digital-to-physical strategies: bring the online to life 

LOSC Lille football club went a step further in engaging their online users by bringing them to physical events. Specifically, they asked digital supporters to choose a song for the club’s warm-up session, with the winner having their name displayed on the giant screens. This created a sense of community, helping consumers to feel associated with the team as well as encouraging them to pay to watch the game in real life. 

This article was written in collaboration with Qualifio, the Belgian MarTech SaaS company specializing in interactive marketing, data collection and loyalty. Quentin, who was interviewed for this content, is Qualifio’s CEO, having worked with them since 2014.