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Ground Support: The Shifting Role of
Print Publications in B2B Media |
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21 November 2005 |
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Ah, print, the darling of trade publishers everywhere. It's
still a potent weapon in today's B2B marketing wars, but
with trade events and online publications soaring in their
revenue mixes today's B2B publishers are oftentimes
perplexed as to how to deal with the shifting strategic
role of print. Just as yesteryear's battleships and today's
aircraft carriers had to adapt their strengths to new types
of missions B2B print publications can find important roles
in today's business marketing mix - if they cede their
former glories to new types of strategic and tactical
roles. After all, how many things does an executive get in
the mail these days that they really want to open? |
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The run-up to World War II saw
Germany investing enormous sums in modernizing its navy. The
culmination of this effort was the launching of the battleship
Bismarck
in 1939, a huge and powerful vessel that dominated the oceans
in the early days of the war. But in May of 1941 the
Bismarck's fate was sealed by an attack by a squadron of
outdated
Swordfish biplanes launched from a British aircraft carrier
and armed with torpedoes. When the Bismarck sank to the
floor of the Atlantic so did the era of battleships as the
focus of naval supremacy. Enormous battleships played a key
role in the remainder of WWII, but the use of battleships
shifted to ground support for amphibious invasions, floating
artillery stations used to pummel coastlines with huge shells
and rockets. Aircraft carriers became the flagships of modern
military fleets in place of battleships, but even their roles
are shifting as new forms of automated munitions delivery take
hold.
So it is with some interest that I read a
curious quote in BtoB Online regarding the
ABM Financial Trend Report from The Jordan, Edmiston Group,
a great report highlighted at last week's American Business
Media's
Top Management Meeting in Chicago. In reaction to the
report presentation Robin Ashton, president of Gill Ashton
Publishing and publisher of
Foodservice
Equipment Reports, said that “The print product is
basically an aircraft carrier you fly everything off of,”
adding, “There is no question that keeping the aircraft carrier
fueled is a challenge nowadays.” The data from the
report (PDF) seems to underscore the fueling issue. While
many B2B publishers have wrestled their way to print
profitability again, the growth is all in online and events
revenues: with online boosted 29 percent 2003-2004 and events
17 percent in the same period, while print revenue slid 1.4
percent in the same period.
Trend data offered up by ABM via a Forrester study (PPT)
looks no more encouraging for print: it indicates that by 2008
most B2B advertisers will see their own Web sites by and far as
their most important marketing channel, with events, online
marketing and online advertising all more important than trade
print.
The "aircraft carrier" of print may still play an important
role in generating revenues for B2B publishers, but
unfortunately many publishers still seem to mistake its role as
focal rather than as "ground support" for other more strategic
lines of business. Print will survive as an important component
in a publisher's arsenal, but only when they accept that it's
gunning for different targets. Here are a few thoughts for all
B2B publishers to consider when adapting print publications to
strong support roles:
- Shape your print publications as executive status
toys. Just as admirals can fall in love with the
firepower available from a battleship or aircraft carrier,
it's easy for a prestigious publication to fall in love with
the ability of print to blanket mass audiences. Yet every
trend points to print becoming a far more precise tool to
reach very elite B2B audiences who still have the time and
outlook to read print publications. With online delivery
taking the place of print as the mass delivery medium of
choice, print publications have the opportunity to position
themselves with more narrow audiences much higher up the
executive food chain who can be targeted with much
higher-value messages. Making print more rare, more
personalized and more specialized as an outgrowth of events
and online publications will provide it with a more much
appropriate - and profitable - production role.
- Focus your online presences on interests both broader
and narrower than print. The long-standing tradition for
many B2B magazine publishers has been to create standalone
online sites that correlate closely with a print title. This
can be a risky strategy, especially for small publications
that lack the capital for a sophisticated Web presence.
Industry webloggers and search engines looking at corporate
Web sites will pick off more narrow topics and more real-time
coverage than your magazine's niches while the reach of
broader audiences will elude your advertisers. It is far more
effective to align your online presence with more broadly
defined audience roles, into which materials from specific
high-value publications can be drawn into a matrix of online
services that's both broader and more narrow through
personalization tools. Online users will be able to get all
of the print-branded content that they want online and click
through your broader porfolio, but the unique combination
of content that represents a print title can still stand
alone offline. Reference ALM's brilliant
Law.com
site for a case study in making this concept work.
- Change your payload mix to suit your readers.
While there is all manner of physical media that has been
blown, sewn and glued into magazines through the years by
marketers, the product as a whole is still conceived of
editorially as words on paper from a fixed set of writers
with nice graphics and fixed ads. A magazine that an
executive cares about is one of the very few physical things
from outside their organization that will make it into their
hands in the course of a week: what else can you make of your
publication physically that will make a difference to your
readers other than traditional editorial and marketing
materials? Think also of all of the electronic materials that
have little chance of making their way through corporate
firewalls and spam filters: personally selected online
materials on CD-ROMs or
flash drives can be a key draw as well. Think of your
print outlets as an opportunity to be a branded delivery
agent for a far broader array of physical materials
customized to specific readers than may have been imagined to
date.
Many strong publishers in the ABM crowd understand the
importance of the new role of print and are moving aggressively
towards a new role for print as a key support service for
building powerful online communities. If you want print
to be more unique, make it so. Otherwise, your fleet of
flagship publications may wind up in mothballs a lot sooner
than you'd like.
-
John Blossom
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