Once your newspaper has recognized the importance of market intelligence, what can you do to harness the information and put it to work for you? The key to having easily accessible information, both to present to advertisers and to use internally, is to have the proper plan and methods for data gathering. Darrell Kunken of The Sacramento Bee shared his company's success story.
The Goal:Not all data will become useful information. First recognize the purpose of your database. The Bee wanted to use theirs to:
Understand the consumer audience before selling them products
Create a feedback loop with the customer
Target the products to certain audience segments
Establish measurable metrics
The Plan:
Next, establish a cohesive plan that includes a collection process, personnel alignments, and evaluations. Kunken stresses the importance of making the process cyclical. Getting up to date marketing data should not be a once-time investment, but a continuous process. Here are the key elements of The Bee's plan:
Dedicate staff to collect and mine data
Audit existing infrastructure
Examine your current data to see what you already have available.
Develop a data extraction plan
Kunken's plan included specific steps for data integration, analysis, execution, and most importantly, tracking the results.
Step 1: Integration
Existing data from databases such as print subscriptions, advertising customers, and direct mail lists are standardized. Next, these data are integrated through an external vendor, such as AsTECH. Step 2: Analysis
Once data is set, it's possible to analyze in a variety of ways. The Bee employed Claritas' PRIZM segmentation tool to create lifecycle groupings in order to examine consumer behavior by age and income. Step 3: Execution
The newspaper can match its consumer data against an advertiser's customer file. To increase the possibility of an advertiser agreeing to share data, Kunken suggests giving the advertiser an estimated ROI if they do. Offer to give the advertiser quarterly updates. After making a sale, make sure to follow up on results and make changes to the plan if necessary. Step 4: Tracking
Whether or not an advertising sales is made from the data, go back and evaluate the process. Also keep databases updated.
The Collection Process:
After making a plan, data collection is the next step. The Sacramento Bee looked at the following sources:
Market-wide list of USPS deliverable addresses
Bee product customers
The paper looked at data from print subscribers, online registered users, and recipients of its Spanish-language product, Vida. It also standardized data on classifieds advertisers and letters-to-the-editor writers.
Demographic data The Bee purchased household-level data on characteristics like the age of the head of the household, number of children, income, and recreational interests such as golf, travel, sailing, etc.
Advertiser customer file The Bee identified advertisers who were driving the newspaper's business and tried to identify similar types of businesses.
Kunken offered three case studies of successful deployment of market data:
Successful Partnerships
Advertiser
Situation
Approach
Result
Auto Dealership
The company wasn't seeing any ROI in print advertising and was moving all its advertising to TV.
Shared their customer files. The Bee identified products that customers of both the newspaper and the dealership used, and recommended shifting ad dollars to those products.
Recaptured business and tripled annual commitment. Gained confidence to become dealer's consultant on all advertising buys.
Furniture Store
Starting to experiment with other products. Store's competitor coming into town.
Shared customer files. Saw that 54% of print subscribers were also furniture store clients, 26% of sacbee.com users were store clients, and 24% used all three . To find growth potential, the newspaper also identified key ZIP codes the paper reached with the same income level as store customers.
Solidified account relationship; built confidence in The Bee as a multi-channel media company; secured future business.
Circulation Acquisition and Retention
How to use marketing data to allocate resources to acquisition and retention?
Created segments of customers with recent stops based on time and credit status to determine value/risk. Saw that best use of money was on retention of voluntary starts and on winning back recent stops.
Allocated limited acquisition and retention efforts most efficiently by understanding customer value better.
