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Developing a Comprehensive Audience Strategy
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Developing a Comprehensive Audience Strategy
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Segment:0 .
JAKE ZARNEGAR: All right, OK. OK. Hello, everyone. We're just going to maybe allow just a minute here for as folks gather.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I see folks are joining us. So let's give folks just a few minutes or maybe a minute to congregate here before we get started. I'm still seeing the participants list tick up, so if that starts to level out then I will go ahead and get started.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: OK, for those just joining us, we'll be getting started here in about a minute. OK.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Let's go ahead and get started. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our SSP session here on developing an audience strategy. We've assembled what I like to think of as a real powerhouse panel today. Joining us are Steve Lieber, who is currently with Avisos Partners but is also a two-time association CEO with both the Emergency Nurses Association as well as HIMSS.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Michelle Mason is joining us today. Who is president and CEO of Association Forum and also, has been a managing director of strategy at the American Society for Quality. And Colleen Scollans is joining us, who currently heads up the marketing and digital transformation practice at Clarke and Esposito. And she has been chief marketing officer of more than 250 folks around the globe at Oxford University press.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And I feel very much like the junior partner in today's enterprise. My name is Jake Zarnegar. You may know me from the Silverchair Company and Silverchair Platform. But we've also just launched a new audience intelligence platform called Hum, which gives me a very particular interest in listening to this August panel today.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So as today's session is really about better understanding and serving your whole digital audience, we're going to start with a poll for our listeners today. And have we put that poll up there? Yes? A little hard for me to see here. And that poll is, how big is your organization's audience? So how big is the audience that your organization serves the digital audience?
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Do you know? Make a guess at it. So please fill up that poll, we're going to come back to that a little later. Now I'm seeing it up there. So please go in there and vote in that poll. But I'd like to start us off today-- we say the audience strategy but we think that probably requires some definition and some context framing.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And so I've asked Steve Lieber to outline the audience strategy and how it represents an evolution from current or earlier practices in the digital area for associations and societies. So, Steve can you tell us about the audience strategy and orient us?
STEVE LIEBER: Right. Thank you, Jake. Yeah, when we are talking over the next hour, we're going to be using some terms that may be somewhat interchangeable. We may be talking about audience. We may be talking about members. We may be talking about customers. And so making sure that we all have that common knowledge or definition I think is important.
STEVE LIEBER: And so for the most part, I think for the group we have here of publishers as well as association and society professionals, will be fairly good in terms of a common understanding of the audience we talk about. And before I specifically go deep into talking about audience strategy, I want to step back for a moment and present the concept that when you are heading down the path of developing a comprehensive audience strategy, it really needs to be part of a broader transformational effort.
STEVE LIEBER: Audience is one of them. Because in the association/society world we've often thought about audience being our members. The people who paid to belong. And for those of you in the publishing business, you might think it as those who pay to subscribe. I believe and you'll hear over the course of this conversation, audience is bigger than that. Than those people that you are currently reaching or who currently pay to participate.
STEVE LIEBER: And that's what we're going to be talking about more broadly in terms of developing the comprehensive audience strategy. But at the same time, there are other components of your organization, your association, your publishing business that also need to go through something of a transformational conversation in terms of who you include. And that is really a fundamental part of broadening one's audience, that especially for those of you in the association business that you look beyond members.
STEVE LIEBER: To look at sponsors and vendors not as just vendors and sponsors but also think about them as targeted audiences. Moving outside of your subscriber base or member base, critical factor to think about and starting to change your thinking about if you're ever going to broaden your audience, marketing and particularly IT. These are some transformational strategies that need to be brought to bear in your thinking as you move from a traditional approach to your business model and into a new or more digitally focused and what we in the business call a transformational type of approach.
STEVE LIEBER: So thinking about that there are multiple components here, multiple factors that are part of the transformation of an organization, let's now move into audience strategy. And so, first of all in defining audience as I mentioned before, we need to move beyond what we thought of as our traditional audience, those who are currently paying to be a part of our audience. Again, whether it's membership or subscribers or such.
STEVE LIEBER: And our objective of an audience strategy should be to create the largest, engaged audience ecosystem. And there are a couple of key words there, largest and engage, that you need to be thinking about. Because it's not just about the numbers but whether or not those numbers are actually doing things with you. They're not passive, they're active. And so when we work on the word largest, we want to think about as I referenced before, people that may be outside of our what heretofore was our traditional target.
STEVE LIEBER: And so we want to look at not only the current audience we have but the people who work for them. People who work with them. People that they work for. Who they buy from. Who they associate with. Who they want to influence. Who impacts their work. When you start to take into your definition of audience, all of those sub audiences, you really do start to look at numbers that can be a factor of 10 or more times what your current audience is.
STEVE LIEBER: It's like a word I reference that we need to pay attention to is, engaged. Audience acquisition is just a step. It's really not the objective. The objective is engagement, broadly, deeply, widely into the objective of achieving maximum impact with the audience. And the way you do that is you engage them. And the way I define engage is they are actively taking something from me.
STEVE LIEBER: They are a subscriber or a paying member. They are actively downloading, actively attending, actively participating. This is not someone who just comes to a page and looks. That's not engaged. It's when they do something. They take a physical action to extract something from you. Now you've got them at the first level of engagement. And as you go more deeply into building your audience strategy, you start to build a funnel that makes that engagement level even deeper than that.
STEVE LIEBER: And then the final point I'll make about sort of defining size and engagement-- remember that in order to achieve the growth and size and the depth of engagement is it not only involves the content that you present, but also the technology that you use in terms of making it easy for them to engage with you, the products that you put out there for them to engage with, the analysis that you do on their behavior, and then your operations to bring all that together.
STEVE LIEBER: And hopefully in the next 50 minutes or so, we'll touch on most if not all of those topics. Jake.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. I'm going to stop our share and bring our ourselves up here. Occasionally we'll be popping in some images like you saw earlier to illustrate points. But we do want to keep this in a roundtable format. So it'll be mostly us discussing concepts and the roundtable folks talking with each other. Steve, you mentioned that a lot of times your audience ends up being much bigger than you think it is. You mentioned 10x when you start really bringing together your audience for everyone.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And I'm just want to look at the poll results here. I think we're the first ones to try a poll today, so this didn't go perfectly smoothly. I can't seem to share the results visually with you. But the good news is there's only four result answers. So I can just tell you what the answers are. So I'm looking at the poll results here and I see 37% selected audiences of 50,000 or less up to 50,000, 42% selected up-to 500,000 people, 16% of you said you reach up to 5 million people, and only 5% of you said I have no idea how big the audience is that we reach.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So I'm seeing a little update here. A little more going towards the lower end. But still about 80 something percent saying audiences that you're reaching are 500,000 people or lower. And what I say is that, that may not be right. When you actually start bringing together your systems and the data that's behind them you may be reaching more people than you think you are across all of your programs.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So it is an interesting aspect of separating the core membership like Steve noted who are very heavily invested as well. But the broader audience which is engaging with your content as well. Michelle, I'd like to turn the conversation your way here. And you have a lot of experience working with associations strategically and hearing about their challenges, their opportunities.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: When you hear-- when you think about the audience strategy and addressing a broader audience, how do you see this appealing to societies and associations and what kind of problems or opportunities can it work for?
MICHELLE MASON: Sure. It's a great question, Jake. Thanks so much for asking. And I think Steve was right in that is really part of a broader transformational strategy within the organization. Typically, associations view themselves as silos, right. And you just spoke to us so eloquently when you said the systems are not talking to each other. So in many cases, we don't know what an audience strategy is.
MICHELLE MASON: We don't know how to approach it because we don't have the analytics to help inform our decisions. And in many cases, we do nothing. And so we become paralyzed, which is clearly not the answer that we want to explore here to do nothing. So we are faced with the reality that we need to understand our audience. And when we look at this from a transformational perspective, at least what I'm hearing and what we're doing at association forum, we're looking at how do we connect audience strategy with content and marketing strategy?
MICHELLE MASON: So content is key and content is context. And is really centered around everything that we do. But we also recognize sometimes that we think if we publish a blog or a white paper, we will get the audience. That's not necessarily the case. It should be relevant. And we really need to focus on what does our member or really in many like Steve said, our customer want and need.
MICHELLE MASON: So we focus on members but there is a huge audience out there that we're not tapping into that doesn't want to be a member and we should be OK with that. If they're willing to pay a premium for the content that we're providing, that's OK, let's just get comfortable with that. So it really requires us to shift our thinking around how we approach this. And I really view it as a challenge as much as an opportunity.
MICHELLE MASON: And as we look to become more relevant particularly in today's times, it'll force us to think about how to do things in a very different way. And so when we think about audience strategy, is really about fine tuning our message, to get to the right customer, the right place at the right time, using the variety of vehicles or channels that we have before us. And in some cases, not just producing content for content sake but how do you repurpose that content and how do you reshape that message for the audience that you are attracting?
MICHELLE MASON: Whether it's a member, whether it's a non-member, or to someone out there in their community. If I may, in association perspective that has an association with limited resources, that's really a good thing. That's OK because then when you're really able to focus in your targeting. We think we're, in doing our planning session, we talked a lot about small associations.
MICHELLE MASON: Well, you need the right people doing the right thing for the right reason. And I think one should really start focusing on that and looking at your strategies from an integrated perspective, not in isolation, there is an opportunity to become more successful and attract more members, build your pipeline for conversion along the way.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Right--
STEVE LIEBER: I'd like to build off of that comment, Jake.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Yeah, please do.
STEVE LIEBER: Michelle, you used the word repurposed. I'll use a different word and that's derivative products.
MICHELLE MASON: Yes.
STEVE LIEBER: We come out with one piece and for our subscribers, or it's our regular blog, or our regular piece that is part of the subscription package. The opportunity though with a bigger audience is to create derivative products off of that same content for different purposes with different audiences than your core subscribers. This is how you're able to build an audience database that is x times greater than your core audience.
STEVE LIEBER: And so you do, you can take pieces out and distribute it differently. Key to that is a reference that Michelle made, which is having the analytics, understanding audience behavior, who's interested in what and in what format. Because the way you're pointing out the original product may not be the way I want to consume it. I want it in a smaller bite and a different delivery mechanism or whatever and those sorts of things are key.
STEVE LIEBER: And having the technology in play to be able to understand those dynamics about audience interest in behaviors as well as the ability to distribute it across multiple channels are key. And just for any of you on the call today that are among smaller organizations, this is not out of your reach.
MICHELLE MASON: Absolutely.
STEVE LIEBER: Technology has changed where-- this is-- we are not talking about something that you can just tune out and say, oh, well, that's only for big publishers or big associations societies. Now this is in the reach of virtually all including that one or two persons association that Michelle [INAUDIBLE]
MICHELLE MASON: Absolutely. Your spot on, Steve is about having a relationship with your customers. And to your point, understand their behaviors. What problems are you trying to help them solve? So the way we used to think about it, that's not working anymore. Is the help me solve my problems and is understanding your audience and having an audience strategy. And quite honestly, I don't think many associations are having that conversation.
MICHELLE MASON: So this is very timely.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: You're right. And, Steve, you mentioned different formats or repurposing. We've seen that a deep piece of research can be turned into an infographic very easily, that is highly visual and highly appealing across many distribution channels and can bring new people in to the organization who are interested in the concept. And I think probably infographics are probably underutilized by associations and societies considering how popular they end up being when you look at the analytics of who's engaging with them.
STEVE LIEBER: And think of it as a marketing technique.
MICHELLE MASON: Yes.
STEVE LIEBER: I mean, when you put an infographic out, you've suddenly identified yourself as the source of knowledge about the subject. That's going to drive people to you. So it's not only delivering content but it's also marketing.
MICHELLE MASON: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point because we are also living in this kind of sound byte era, we want little snippets of information if we think about Twitter and everything else. And so that infographic is just giving you enough information to teeth out, to capture your interest. And if you want more, you're going to find the more. But have the engagement piece drawing them in.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Well, speaking of marketing and how this strategy intersects between content and marketing and growing an audience, I think we have the glue here with us today. Colleen, you've put this into practice many times. But first, what I wanted to ask you was from your work in marketing and digital transformation know other some key trends that you've been seeing that are really important for stores associations to know about as they embark on an audience strategy?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Absolutely, Jake. So the first one builds up-- in fact they all build on what Michelle and Steve have been saying. But I think the first thing is organizations are stepping back looking at their overarching strategy and the organizational design with an audience or customer lens as opposed to that internal lens. So you have your customers, the people that-- they may be authors if you're a publisher, they may be members, product purchasers but you also have we learned to have broader audiences?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Your vendors, you have partners, you have the people that you're trying to reach with outbound marketing, trying to bring people into the funnel, and then you've got your content as magnet. You're absolutely right, your content is everything. Michelle, whether it's your core content as is, or your core content repackaged, or your core content with derivative, or content marketing, all of that pulls people in.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Your audience is all of that. And if internally you're not structured to maximize that, it's challenging. And so we're seeing organizations look at their organizational design. Second thing organizations are doing is they're collecting the data. You've heard both Michelle and Steve talk about analytics and behavioral data.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: You have to be collecting that data. Right. You have to have what I like to call a single view of your audience or customer. What's in a customer, you know who it is. Sally Smith. When it's someone you don't know, you still actually can collect information about them. And you can glean significant amount of intelligence around that or grouping them together around cohorts.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: So organizations are collecting relationship and transactional data. They're collecting behavioral and engagement data. They're collecting data that customers are giving them, an attitudinal data. They're collecting visitor contact, what someone's doing at any given time. And they're pulling that all together to have the kind of behavioral analytics that Steve and Michelle referenced.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I would just add there's also a really strong focus on what we call now zero-party data. It's kind of a child of first party data. So first party data is the data we collect as companies. Zero-party data is when we ask a customer, audience member to explicitly tell us something. It's becoming more and more important to find ways to exchange value, maybe content, for data. And I often hear a particular challenge in publishing is only maybe 10% of my audience gives me either data on my journal's platform.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I would argue there are ways to make that much, much greater. If you start thinking about what you're exchanging for value, customers are becoming more and more willing to exchange data. And then that data just leads to better decision making. Data used to be descriptive, it just told us what we did. It became diagnostic, it started to tell us what we did wrong. It's now predictive, it can tell us what's going to happen. And for some organizations it's even prescriptive, it tells us what we should do differently.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And modern marketing is all based on prescriptive data, telling us which way we should go. And lastly, with all of that data, marketing organizations are really thinking about targeting, segmentation. My number one advice for any membership association is to start with segmentation strategy. And then I'm really going up the spectrum to personalization. Really thinking about how they curate those experiences.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: If you're looking for high-level engagement, personalization is really important. And you'll see in industries outside of ours, it's becoming standard. Go ahead, Steve.
STEVE LIEBER: Colleen, let me follow up with a question that just triggered and for the audience. We've been on rehearsals and all and every time I hear Michelle and Colleen talk, I have follow-up questions that are news ones from the last time we talked. You talk about marketing and what I'm sort of reacting to that is are we all becoming both publishing companies and marketing companies or associations and marketing companies?
STEVE LIEBER: I mean, is it becoming just so integral to our being that we need to kind of think of ourselves as that as well as what our traditional core business is?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, I think, definitely. One of the things that always strikes me-- I think this is more so with publishers but I've also seen it with associations is that the definition that we have of marketing in our industry often is promotion. And that's so different to how it is outside of our industry, where marketing is customer experience, audience engagement, predictive analytics, that's all marketing.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And so I think you're absolutely right, Steve. Part of what needs to happen is a redefinition of what marketing is for our industry in 2021.
MICHELLE MASON: Yeah--
STEVE LIEBER: We run the risk of having that definition of marketing that's the old definition, the promotion. And so I think we might lose some folks' attention if they don't get in their minds, know that's really not what we're talking about. It really is about engagement in other aspects of relationship management.
MICHELLE MASON: I agree that the definition of marketing is changing. And when I think about last year, 2020, how we had to shift our business models to become production companies. And now when we think it's not just an event any longer it's a hybrid and in some cases 365 year-round. So what do you do with all that content? What do you do with what you're learning? And if about your customers or your members and if your systems are not talking to each other, then how are you getting their full picture to be able to be supportive in this space?
MICHELLE MASON: So, yeah, I definitely agree that things are shifting quickly.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I would just add that marketing technology, I think, is part of what's changing this. Right. That the marketing is technology now. Now you need the strategy. The strategy has to come first. But so much of marketing is really about technology. And if you think of those decisions as technology and you don't think of them as marketing, that's where I see all the problems start happening.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: So it gets kind of disconnected.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. Michelle, I'm glad you brought up some of the rapid transformation that was necessary in the last year as more and more moved towards digital. And especially thinking of the many different products and services offered by the same organization to the same audience and needing to really connect those behind the scenes in order to get that. As Colleen said, that unified customer view as well.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So I do have a question here to move us forward here with Steve. Now, Steve, I want you to walk us through a little bit of a case study here with when you were at HIMSS. Because you did take this approach many years ago or started it or started down this journey many years ago and I've seen results of what that resulted in. And so I'd love you to walk through your experience re-orienting an association and its activities towards the audience.
STEVE LIEBER: Sure. Thanks, Jake. Yeah. It was probably or at least 10 years ago. And for those of you that are in the publishing business at least that long, I'm talking about the period where we started to see the trends on print versus digital. And a lot of us tried to ignore that trend for a long time. And we kept that print vehicle in play for a lot longer than we should have and until the financials forced us into particular decisions.
STEVE LIEBER: But it was part of a trend that caused us to start to rethink things. And so we did. We started thinking about not only moving into a more digital distributed type of publishing, but also thinking about our audience, which is related to this. And so this was early 2011-12, in terms of when the strategy conversation started to develop around this.
STEVE LIEBER: And at the time, HIMSS, which is the health care information and management systems society-- so this is the IT Association in health care. Primarily focused on clinical applications and provider organizations. And so with that time we had a membership of about 50,000 and that's who we considered our audience to be. And so as we thought about what our objective were in growing our reach impact and influence, we knew we needed to reach more than 50,000 people.
STEVE LIEBER: So that was the place where the concept of, OK, let's look at who our members work for, who they were with, who works for them, who they buy from, who they relate to, who they're trying to reach and influence, that sort of thing, and just create a segmented, picking up on Colleen's definitions here, segmented group after segmented group to build the entire ecosystem. And in the end, we were able to achieve very significant results.
STEVE LIEBER: And as this shows you over a period of about five to eight years, membership grew. But more importantly, and from a financial standpoint, even more dramatically, our engaged audience grew. And this is where we started to develop the concept of 10x is not out of the reach in terms of what's possible, especially when you drop the definition of about it being so discriminatory to just those people who are eligible to belong to your association or just those who choose to subscribe to your publication.
STEVE LIEBER: And so this is the end of the story, so to speak, in terms of what success looked like. How did we get there? At the time that we started this, and quite honestly, by the time I retired from HIMSS beginning of 2018, still wasn't a whole lot out there to help you do this. We spent a lot of money and a number of years to build the technologies ourselves.
STEVE LIEBER: And fortunately, I was in an association that was big enough and working with some extremely bright people who knew what they were doing to help us get there. And this is basically the schematic that sort of summarizes the whole thing, in that-- and it's very simplified in that there's not one circle of content and data. Multiple circles inside there.
STEVE LIEBER: But we had all of that stuff. And so we had some information about our audience. And we certainly were producing content. But we moved through a process of changing our outlook on content, for example. We stop believing that we were the only source of great content. We came to accept other people produce great content too. And I'm going to be better.
STEVE LIEBER: I'm going to reach more people if I aggregate content in addition to create content. So we changed our content strategy. Data, just as Colleen was talking about, we came to realize we needed to know more. We needed to engage in different efforts to get data on our audience. And then we needed to be able to analyze it and understand who was interested in what topic in real time.
STEVE LIEBER: So the traditional approach is you come up with-- and I mean, I've been in the business long enough, you came up with an annual editorial calendar. And you had that lined up. And this month is this and next month is that. It didn't matter whether the audience was interested on that schedule. That's the way we did it. Well, [INAUDIBLE] realize, OK-- and we know now why we were driven to all of this.
STEVE LIEBER: Because everybody else in the retail sector learned this a long time ago. Google anything on your computer right now and see how fast ads start popping up for that stuff in the boxes around your search engine. People are watching us all the time. They're learning what we're interested in. Well, in the publishing association world, we had to do the same thing.
STEVE LIEBER: So we started building the engines that collected that real time data in order to build the audience intelligence that we needed so that we could achieve those objectives. And so again, the idea here was to do take the content, take the data, analyze it, and then produce those things that really do allow us to grow the audience. Allow us to personalize. Colleen used that label as well, very important in terms of personalizing and engaging the audience.
STEVE LIEBER: New products, they're the derivatives diversifying our revenues from our core business into others. And then the things that sort of-- additional benefits that came to us as a result of what we were doing is that we were able to take the knowledge that we were learning and put it into practice, not only here to produce timely content in formats that people wanted to digest, we were also able to use it other places.
STEVE LIEBER: In the association world, we were able to use it in our government affairs and advocacy efforts. We were able to build new educational programs, not just out of our publishing area, but in other areas as well. And so it very much was a transformation that resulted in impacting the whole association. And really did move us from that traditional look that's on the left hand side.
STEVE LIEBER: And unfortunately still is a way that many organizations, if they are honest with themselves and go through a little questionnaire asking where are you on certain metrics and parameters, you will find you may be lagging a little bit in the transformational definition of things. And it really did help us move over. And was really a significant mechanism in which we were able to grow the HIMSS organization from relatively small to medium-size organization to a very large global association that had a reach impact and influence that was considerably greater than where we started.
STEVE LIEBER: But my key point on that is we had to do that ourselves. There was a lot of IT building that we had to do. And as I say today, the technology world has recognized that the publishing association business is a target for them. There are products out there that are in reach of virtually all organizations and can realize the same benefits that we did.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: That's great. And speaking of [INAUDIBLE] is very aspirational to see that HIMSS, a case maybe not the aspiring to the years effort and large sums spent, but certainly the outcomes are aspirational. Michelle, as you're kind of thinking of the entire group of associations and-- what are you seeing as far as readiness across the-- are our organizations ready to make these changes?
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Or what kind of steps should they be taking kind of first?
MICHELLE MASON: Yeah. It's a great question. In terms of readiness, I think it's all over the map, in terms of readiness for associations. But it all starts with the first step. So, I think, I'll speak from association foreign perspective and then-- About five or six years ago, we had what I learned from an agency, was content chaos. And that really was our content wasn't really document.
MICHELLE MASON: It was ad hoc. It was very siloed. So we really had to step back and say, OK, we need a systematic approach to better organizing our content to be relevant to members. And so we looked at what systems, processes-- people, processes, and systems. But before going there, we had to conduct the content audit to understand what we truly had and we have far more than what we realized.
MICHELLE MASON: And that was through hiring and education consultant, which led us down the path of a content strategy, identifying the topics that are of interest to our members and relevant to our members. But most importantly, we needed to align this strategy to our strategic plan because we know you can't manage what you can't measure. We knew we would need to make a strategic investment. And so therefore, we wanted to keep it on our board's radar screen.
MICHELLE MASON: And so we were in this strategic investment phase for a couple of years before we actually operationalize it. And it's just the way that we do business. But we looked at workflow. We looked at calendars. We looked at personas. We looked at a variety of components to get us to where we are today.
MICHELLE MASON: We still have a long road to travel. But fast forward, in terms of readiness and association form, where we are today, we are working on an integrated content strategy. We are connecting our events with our content to better engage our audience to a different touch points to Steve's point. And we're looking at these various touch points, these various channels, from social media, blogs, podcasts, webinars, to just help our members to understand as we discussed earlier.
MICHELLE MASON: You can have a core piece of content but what it [INAUDIBLE] derivative products that you can create. It did not happen overnight because we really had to change our organizational systems and design to be supportive foundationally of a strategy in this nature. But it also centered around people. It's not as though you can tap someone on the shoulder and say, I need you to lead this area.
MICHELLE MASON: You really need someone that has a level of experience looking at the bigger picture and has that foresight to lead to this. So I just give you a quick example before I conclude. So we have a magazine, for a magazine, you read an article. Now we can lead you into a free engagement with us around that topic, which we called a conversation circle. And we believe that conversation circle is leading us-- leading the customer or the member into more of a pay-in-debt experience with us.
MICHELLE MASON: We're beta-testing it and this concept and we're seeing that is starting to deliver results. So in terms of readiness, we're all over the map in terms of readiness. But certainly there are organizations out there that are just getting started in the process.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I like how you said that your goal was that, this is just the way we do business. Because it's truly it's designed to be imbued in everything rather than a giant change or a complete shift. It's more of a more effective techniques to do the mission and services that you're already-- are part of your strategy.
MICHELLE MASON: Yeah.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I'd like to quickly jump over to Colleen because I think you've actually walked organizations through this process, maybe more than once as well, so I believe you also have some notes on how to get started with this transition.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, absolutely. So I break it down into the three phases. The first phase is sort of setting your game plan. There's a lot of planning required. So I always start by saying it's really important to broaden your horizon. And what I mean by that is you really need to know what you're aiming for. You need to become familiar with the technologies and tools and customer expectations that are out there.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And it can be helpful to look to industries outside of ours. There is, of course, innovation in our industry. I think Steve told us a really innovative story at HIMSS. And it looks like association forum, is heading down the innovation path. But it's also good to look outside of our industry to broaden your horizon. It's really difficult to set strategy if you don't know what's possible.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And then the second piece is obviously setting that vision and strategy. A lot of it's what Steve and Michelle hit on, really know who your audience is today and who you want that audience to be. Make sure you do content audits to understand what kind of content and engagement mechanisms you have with them. And be really clear where you want to go over a multiyear period.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Though the other point I think is really critical during planning is start with capabilities. I often see organizations jump to technology. Really start with the capabilities you need. Start with strategic capabilities. But what do you want to achieve? And why do you want to achieve it? I.e. what benefit will it bring to your business.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Prioritize those capabilities. Then you need to take those strategic capabilities and bring them down to a functionality level. And you need to do that really early in the process because marketing technology can be confusing. And, Steve, I couldn't agree with you more, the technology is incredibly accessible now. But I still see people sometimes gravitating to some of the larger really expensive solutions.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And I think they do that because they haven't fundamentally figured out the capabilities they want to achieve. And then they don't understand all of the newer more cost effective options that are available. Which I think is really important for our industry. Then you move into the getting-started phase. So the first thing I say is break down your silos. You are trying to attract audiences. You're trying to engage audiences.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: You're trying to have a really positive customer audience experience, and you're trying to convert them. That is like one journey. Think about how your organization is designed to achieve that. Think customer and audience don't think internal. This requires you to look at your talent. You very well will need some roles that don't exist today. I've heard of scientific communicator.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Every organization needs to have at least somebody or part of someone dedicated to marketing operations, content marketers. You need to really think about who you have in your organization that needs to be trained, up-skilled, and coached. I work with a lot of CMOs where I coach them, which is a very popular thing right now for example.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And then what talent do you need to bring into your organization. Then you need to start investing in technology. There are some basics I believe every organization needs to have. The first is a customer data infrastructure and I don't mean a CRM. I mean something that can actually give you that full customer view.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Something that helps you organize your campaigns, it can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet. But every organization needs something like that. A fully functioning Google Analytics at a minimum. I would say 90% of the people I talk to in the industry, don't have Google Analytics even set up correctly. So really some of those basic fundamental analytics. And then as Michelle touched on, a really good content infrastructure.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Then you need to move into you're adding sophistication phase, which is really all about thinking about all the data that you're collecting and how do you start to collect a much more robust data profile. Making sure that you're focusing on that zero-party data we've collected. There are some people in our industry, I think Gemma Network is a particularly stellar example, that are doing an amazing job of zero-data party collection right now.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And it's fueling a lot of their platform and marketing experience. I think, organizations now just need to start thinking about that. Then you need to start thinking about the tools and technology that leverages personalization and advanced AI. And only then can your organization really start to be on data led.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: But I would say is those last three yellow phases are not for every organization. But to Michelle and Steve's point, everybody can focus on the purple and blue phases. There's a lot to do even for small organizations and the tools are within our reach right now. And so it is possible, very possible for organizations to get pretty far along without having to get to the really sophisticated phase.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And then for those organizations that are able to be like HIMSS and be more ambitious, they can start to sort of move into the yellow phase.
STEVE LIEBER: Colleen, I'd say if you-- Jake, if you'd flip that slide back up, your technology Basics bar actually can extend to the right because you can start out on this journey and basic is defined one-way. But as you do some things, your skill level is going to increase. And something that--
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Totally.
STEVE LIEBER: --you first-- when you first started this thing all that's beyond does, where they're never be capable of that but after you've done the basics, that doesn't look so intimidating after all. And it does become get into your reach and so you really start to move into adding sophistication perhaps earlier than some people might think they would.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah. I think that that's right. I think what's really important to me is not jumping to-- not running before you can walk. So I'll see some people for example, talk about, I want marketing automation, but don't have a customer data foundation. Right? So it's all about knowing what those right fundamental pieces are.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And then you're absolutely right, that's the hard part. Once you've built that you can start to add the sophistication that's right for your organization.
STEVE LIEBER: Yeah, absolutely.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: OK. Well, this has been great. I'd actually like to transition us a little bit here. Just that we wanted to leave time-- I know this panel could definitely have a conversation for much longer. I want to leave time for our audience members to ask questions, speaking of trying to understand our audience. So I saw a few notes come across as we were going but please also submit some more questions.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I saw a very interesting comment which I'd like to get your reaction to, from Eric Swenson, who noted that we mentioned that the definition of marketing was changing, but really this has been imbued in kind of B2C and B2B businesses for quite a while. And maybe associations, and societies, and school really just behind that definition to that it changed a while ago.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I've been seeing [INAUDIBLE] up here. I take it we agree with Eric on this.
STEVE LIEBER: Yeah.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah.
STEVE LIEBER: As a professional--
MICHELLE MASON: So true.
STEVE LIEBER: --who's been in the association business virtually in my entire career, I will admit we are behind the curve on this.
MICHELLE MASON: Yeah. Ditto, Steve. I would say that too. We getting there.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And we--
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I mean, I guess there are some benefits from being late adopters, right? I mean, you do get to skip the first round of early discovery. So you should have a little more kind of established systems or kind of pathways available.
MICHELLE MASON: Jake, and I think that this past year of the pandemic, has accelerated our adoption. Right. We're are forced to embrace audience strategy because there's simply more competition out there for audience and share [INAUDIBLE]
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah. I think it's completely true. And I think you're right, Jake. There's an advantage. I work with clients within our industry and outside of our industry and some of the other clients are having to re-do some of the stuff they did years ago because it's really changed. So the benefit is the point I think that Steve made before. There are new strategies and technologies in reach today that weren't in reach maybe even five years ago.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: But yeah, now it's absolutely true. I do think our industry needs a marketing renaissance.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I liken it to how my IKEA has lane assist. There is no way that was going to happen-- that wasn't going to be the first company to roll it out. I'm sure it's 5, 10 years old on the more expensive models. but it does trickle down over time. I have another question here for the group. Well, Steve, this one is a little more for you here in particular. You mentioned ways to create new revenue lines using your larger audience.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Could you talk about a bit of what shape those new revenue lines took at HIMSS, I think?
STEVE LIEBER: Sure. There are a couple of different things, both that are completely new lines as well as efforts which add to existing lines. And so the new lines are the ability, as we talked about, of repurposing or creating direct derivative products. You may have something that you provide to your subscribers or to your members. You take segments of that and sell it as one offs.
STEVE LIEBER: The ability to do custom campaigns for companies. So if you have an audience base, whether it's subscribers, members or whatever, but an audience base paying or and non-pay, so your big audience eco-system. You go to companies and say, I can reach x hundreds of thousands or millions of people. I know what they're interested in, when they're interested in it, and so I can deliver to you and engage interested audience almost on-demand.
STEVE LIEBER: And so with you, let's create content that highlights your products, your services and drive it specifically at the audience that's interested in it at that particular time. And the rate for that is a premium on top of a generic marketing campaign that a company might engage in. And you already have these relationships because they're already, for those of you in the association business, they're already sponsoring webinars for your digital conferences.
STEVE LIEBER: Back before last year, they were sponsoring, or attending, or exhibiting at your in-person events. Their interest is reaching-- getting their message to reach audiences at the right time, not again when we decide, but when the audience decides. So you're using some of the same tools that we've actually had for years but we're just smarter in how we use them. The other thing that I'd say about all of this in terms of derivative products or new products and all we've got to get at [INAUDIBLE] of one product line business.
STEVE LIEBER: We're a publisher of this journal or we are an association of this membership. And so we have to get out of our vocabulary terms like non-dues revenue or non-subscription revenue because that minimizes the importance of value of these other lines of business. They are new lines of business. Treat them not as red-headed stepchildren but as full family members and embrace them, capitalize them, drive them just like you would any other line of business.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I can tell you that I talked to a association that specializes in cleaning, like institutional cleaning. And they quickly spun up some certification and education in keep cleaning for COVID safe. And they provided a new value to just a much wider audience than they had ever reached before. I mean, they told me that every single airline, hotel chain now was engaging with their organization. And now saw that they had all this great content on good scientific techniques for cleaning things and maintaining.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And so just a way, they're opportunistically to grow your audience and see that it's much broader than just the members of that association. Now, I have one more question-- I think this one is going to be-- this one's probably going to take us to the finish line because it's pretty broad. But this is a question that I think we anticipated being asked, so I'm glad it was asked, which is what kind of level of investment are we talking about to make these changes that Michelle and Colleen and Steve were talking about in an organization?
JAKE ZARNEGAR: What does this look like investment wise? And I think, Michelle I'll start with you here. Oh.
MICHELLE MASON: I'll be vague and say that it's all-- it is depends on the organization, the level of investment from a smaller staff association. I started more-- because my investment was very limited. Right. So I started more from utilizing leveraging my volunteers to think through the concept, the strategy, then made an investment in education consulting, and then an investment in research. So it's more of proof of concept for my organization, which led ultimately to a strategic investment.
MICHELLE MASON: But then a large organization might approach it different because you have the resources to implement a more aggressive strategy. But just depends on, in my view, the organization size.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: OK--
STEVE LIEBER: So if you go back to Colleen's chart in terms of the three phases, it gives you an idea of what sort of investments you're going to need to make. So if the setting the plan-- OK, you may need to consult to help you go through that. If the concepts we've been talking about here are really new to your organization, that's a consultant coming in and helping you go through that internal assessment.
STEVE LIEBER: Helping you walk through the thought process of how do you and where do you broaden your horizon and developing vision and strategy. That's cheap. People like me and Colleen and others, we're not expensive. So--
MICHELLE MASON: I don't know about that, Steve.
STEVE LIEBER: And on top of that, there are a lot of us out there that do this sort of thing not just-- and so you can shop for that. The second part starts to do-- it requires some capital investment in terms of being able to get through, in particular, the technology basics. And so the idea of we need a common taxonomy for our subject so that we're able to tag content consistently and that sort of thing.
STEVE LIEBER: The ability-- and this is why, I think, our lines do need to overlap a little bit because data collection, there's an element of data collection and technology basics. Are you working on you're working on data collection across one platform? Or do you have a website and a social media platform? And your events registration--
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Education platform. Yeah. Right.
STEVE LIEBER: So that the ability to work-- the more platforms you have more than likely the bigger resources you have. But just to start people with some thinking, I think that over one to two year period a noble initial investment in the 100 to 150,000 range, gets you a long way. I think if you had that kind of investment over, let's call it a two fiscal year period, I'm hoping you can get well down this chart.
STEVE LIEBER: Not into the yellow so much but-- and the thing of this you may actually have some resources. The problem is you haven't tied them together. And so really the only big technology thing you need to do is provide some kind of overlay to pull all that stuff together versus having to bring in new technologies.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I think Michelle and Steve's answers are great. I would say it does depend obviously on your organizational size. I think that there are differences. I think, I always separate the people, the thinking, the planning from the actual technology. I think on the people, thinking, and planning, I do think need external help. And I think it's not just technology help, I see a lot of people go for technology firms.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: But I actually think you need to do something different. So there is some consultancy freelance help. In terms of your talent, it does require probably some different talent than you have in some structural change. For some organizations, actually they have all the talent they need, it's just about reallocating. For other organizations they have to make investments. So I think that's a hard one to detail.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: In terms of the technology, I think can get pretty far as you say, Steve with $100, $150,000, I've seen that happen. I think the problem I see is-- this is going to be controversial so I'm trying to say-- there are some really big marketing technology companies, I think we all know who they are. And there are a lot of people who push their products for various reasons.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And technology teams like their products for various reasons. And those will cost you multiples, and multiples, and multiples, of that number Steve debut. And I think if you are brave and committed to a different kind of architectural approach, you can do it more significantly cheaply. And that's what I'm always advocating. This is why it starts with capabilities for me because you need the 300 or 400 things you actually want to achieve.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And so you're not just going to the big players, you're going to a wide swath of players to see who can actually deliver that and at what cost. You want to really have a good foundation so you make a cost-efficient choice. And the last thing I would add is if you do this right it will more than pay for itself in terms of efficiency or revenue. And so it needs to have a business case, that's the other reason for capability is, right.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: You need to know that this capability is going to deliver this business benefit and can string that together.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Colleen, I'm really appreciative of you tying it all together there the end that any investment you make will certainly pay for itself. And this is a great path for associations to try. We are out of time. I'd really like to thank you all for joining us. Thank the panelists for their great content. It was the conversation I had hoped we were going to have. It was very interesting. And I thought you brought a lot of value to our audience here.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So thank you all and thank you to those who filled out our polls, that ask questions, and listened. And I hope you will be considering really ramping up your audience strategies in your associations in the future. So thank you all and we going to sign off now. Thank you.
STEVE LIEBER: Thank you.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Take care.
Segment:0 .
JAKE ZARNEGAR: All right, OK. OK. Hello, everyone. We're just going to maybe allow just a minute here for as folks gather.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I see folks are joining us. So let's give folks just a few minutes or maybe a minute to congregate here before we get started. I'm still seeing the participants list tick up, so if that starts to level out then I will go ahead and get started.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: OK, for those just joining us, we'll be getting started here in about a minute. OK.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Let's go ahead and get started. Hello, everyone, and welcome to our SSP session here on developing an audience strategy. We've assembled what I like to think of as a real powerhouse panel today. Joining us are Steve Lieber, who is currently with Avisos Partners but is also a two-time association CEO with both the Emergency Nurses Association as well as HIMSS.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Michelle Mason is joining us today. Who is president and CEO of Association Forum and also, has been a managing director of strategy at the American Society for Quality. And Colleen Scollans is joining us, who currently heads up the marketing and digital transformation practice at Clarke and Esposito. And she has been chief marketing officer of more than 250 folks around the globe at Oxford University press.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And I feel very much like the junior partner in today's enterprise. My name is Jake Zarnegar. You may know me from the Silverchair Company and Silverchair Platform. But we've also just launched a new audience intelligence platform called Hum, which gives me a very particular interest in listening to this August panel today.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So as today's session is really about better understanding and serving your whole digital audience, we're going to start with a poll for our listeners today. And have we put that poll up there? Yes? A little hard for me to see here. And that poll is, how big is your organization's audience? So how big is the audience that your organization serves the digital audience?
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Do you know? Make a guess at it. So please fill up that poll, we're going to come back to that a little later. Now I'm seeing it up there. So please go in there and vote in that poll. But I'd like to start us off today-- we say the audience strategy but we think that probably requires some definition and some context framing.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And so I've asked Steve Lieber to outline the audience strategy and how it represents an evolution from current or earlier practices in the digital area for associations and societies. So, Steve can you tell us about the audience strategy and orient us?
STEVE LIEBER: Right. Thank you, Jake. Yeah, when we are talking over the next hour, we're going to be using some terms that may be somewhat interchangeable. We may be talking about audience. We may be talking about members. We may be talking about customers. And so making sure that we all have that common knowledge or definition I think is important.
STEVE LIEBER: And so for the most part, I think for the group we have here of publishers as well as association and society professionals, will be fairly good in terms of a common understanding of the audience we talk about. And before I specifically go deep into talking about audience strategy, I want to step back for a moment and present the concept that when you are heading down the path of developing a comprehensive audience strategy, it really needs to be part of a broader transformational effort.
STEVE LIEBER: Audience is one of them. Because in the association/society world we've often thought about audience being our members. The people who paid to belong. And for those of you in the publishing business, you might think it as those who pay to subscribe. I believe and you'll hear over the course of this conversation, audience is bigger than that. Than those people that you are currently reaching or who currently pay to participate.
STEVE LIEBER: And that's what we're going to be talking about more broadly in terms of developing the comprehensive audience strategy. But at the same time, there are other components of your organization, your association, your publishing business that also need to go through something of a transformational conversation in terms of who you include. And that is really a fundamental part of broadening one's audience, that especially for those of you in the association business that you look beyond members.
STEVE LIEBER: To look at sponsors and vendors not as just vendors and sponsors but also think about them as targeted audiences. Moving outside of your subscriber base or member base, critical factor to think about and starting to change your thinking about if you're ever going to broaden your audience, marketing and particularly IT. These are some transformational strategies that need to be brought to bear in your thinking as you move from a traditional approach to your business model and into a new or more digitally focused and what we in the business call a transformational type of approach.
STEVE LIEBER: So thinking about that there are multiple components here, multiple factors that are part of the transformation of an organization, let's now move into audience strategy. And so, first of all in defining audience as I mentioned before, we need to move beyond what we thought of as our traditional audience, those who are currently paying to be a part of our audience. Again, whether it's membership or subscribers or such.
STEVE LIEBER: And our objective of an audience strategy should be to create the largest, engaged audience ecosystem. And there are a couple of key words there, largest and engage, that you need to be thinking about. Because it's not just about the numbers but whether or not those numbers are actually doing things with you. They're not passive, they're active. And so when we work on the word largest, we want to think about as I referenced before, people that may be outside of our what heretofore was our traditional target.
STEVE LIEBER: And so we want to look at not only the current audience we have but the people who work for them. People who work with them. People that they work for. Who they buy from. Who they associate with. Who they want to influence. Who impacts their work. When you start to take into your definition of audience, all of those sub audiences, you really do start to look at numbers that can be a factor of 10 or more times what your current audience is.
STEVE LIEBER: It's like a word I reference that we need to pay attention to is, engaged. Audience acquisition is just a step. It's really not the objective. The objective is engagement, broadly, deeply, widely into the objective of achieving maximum impact with the audience. And the way you do that is you engage them. And the way I define engage is they are actively taking something from me.
STEVE LIEBER: They are a subscriber or a paying member. They are actively downloading, actively attending, actively participating. This is not someone who just comes to a page and looks. That's not engaged. It's when they do something. They take a physical action to extract something from you. Now you've got them at the first level of engagement. And as you go more deeply into building your audience strategy, you start to build a funnel that makes that engagement level even deeper than that.
STEVE LIEBER: And then the final point I'll make about sort of defining size and engagement-- remember that in order to achieve the growth and size and the depth of engagement is it not only involves the content that you present, but also the technology that you use in terms of making it easy for them to engage with you, the products that you put out there for them to engage with, the analysis that you do on their behavior, and then your operations to bring all that together.
STEVE LIEBER: And hopefully in the next 50 minutes or so, we'll touch on most if not all of those topics. Jake.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. I'm going to stop our share and bring our ourselves up here. Occasionally we'll be popping in some images like you saw earlier to illustrate points. But we do want to keep this in a roundtable format. So it'll be mostly us discussing concepts and the roundtable folks talking with each other. Steve, you mentioned that a lot of times your audience ends up being much bigger than you think it is. You mentioned 10x when you start really bringing together your audience for everyone.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And I'm just want to look at the poll results here. I think we're the first ones to try a poll today, so this didn't go perfectly smoothly. I can't seem to share the results visually with you. But the good news is there's only four result answers. So I can just tell you what the answers are. So I'm looking at the poll results here and I see 37% selected audiences of 50,000 or less up to 50,000, 42% selected up-to 500,000 people, 16% of you said you reach up to 5 million people, and only 5% of you said I have no idea how big the audience is that we reach.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So I'm seeing a little update here. A little more going towards the lower end. But still about 80 something percent saying audiences that you're reaching are 500,000 people or lower. And what I say is that, that may not be right. When you actually start bringing together your systems and the data that's behind them you may be reaching more people than you think you are across all of your programs.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So it is an interesting aspect of separating the core membership like Steve noted who are very heavily invested as well. But the broader audience which is engaging with your content as well. Michelle, I'd like to turn the conversation your way here. And you have a lot of experience working with associations strategically and hearing about their challenges, their opportunities.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: When you hear-- when you think about the audience strategy and addressing a broader audience, how do you see this appealing to societies and associations and what kind of problems or opportunities can it work for?
MICHELLE MASON: Sure. It's a great question, Jake. Thanks so much for asking. And I think Steve was right in that is really part of a broader transformational strategy within the organization. Typically, associations view themselves as silos, right. And you just spoke to us so eloquently when you said the systems are not talking to each other. So in many cases, we don't know what an audience strategy is.
MICHELLE MASON: We don't know how to approach it because we don't have the analytics to help inform our decisions. And in many cases, we do nothing. And so we become paralyzed, which is clearly not the answer that we want to explore here to do nothing. So we are faced with the reality that we need to understand our audience. And when we look at this from a transformational perspective, at least what I'm hearing and what we're doing at association forum, we're looking at how do we connect audience strategy with content and marketing strategy?
MICHELLE MASON: So content is key and content is context. And is really centered around everything that we do. But we also recognize sometimes that we think if we publish a blog or a white paper, we will get the audience. That's not necessarily the case. It should be relevant. And we really need to focus on what does our member or really in many like Steve said, our customer want and need.
MICHELLE MASON: So we focus on members but there is a huge audience out there that we're not tapping into that doesn't want to be a member and we should be OK with that. If they're willing to pay a premium for the content that we're providing, that's OK, let's just get comfortable with that. So it really requires us to shift our thinking around how we approach this. And I really view it as a challenge as much as an opportunity.
MICHELLE MASON: And as we look to become more relevant particularly in today's times, it'll force us to think about how to do things in a very different way. And so when we think about audience strategy, is really about fine tuning our message, to get to the right customer, the right place at the right time, using the variety of vehicles or channels that we have before us. And in some cases, not just producing content for content sake but how do you repurpose that content and how do you reshape that message for the audience that you are attracting?
MICHELLE MASON: Whether it's a member, whether it's a non-member, or to someone out there in their community. If I may, in association perspective that has an association with limited resources, that's really a good thing. That's OK because then when you're really able to focus in your targeting. We think we're, in doing our planning session, we talked a lot about small associations.
MICHELLE MASON: Well, you need the right people doing the right thing for the right reason. And I think one should really start focusing on that and looking at your strategies from an integrated perspective, not in isolation, there is an opportunity to become more successful and attract more members, build your pipeline for conversion along the way.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Right--
STEVE LIEBER: I'd like to build off of that comment, Jake.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Yeah, please do.
STEVE LIEBER: Michelle, you used the word repurposed. I'll use a different word and that's derivative products.
MICHELLE MASON: Yes.
STEVE LIEBER: We come out with one piece and for our subscribers, or it's our regular blog, or our regular piece that is part of the subscription package. The opportunity though with a bigger audience is to create derivative products off of that same content for different purposes with different audiences than your core subscribers. This is how you're able to build an audience database that is x times greater than your core audience.
STEVE LIEBER: And so you do, you can take pieces out and distribute it differently. Key to that is a reference that Michelle made, which is having the analytics, understanding audience behavior, who's interested in what and in what format. Because the way you're pointing out the original product may not be the way I want to consume it. I want it in a smaller bite and a different delivery mechanism or whatever and those sorts of things are key.
STEVE LIEBER: And having the technology in play to be able to understand those dynamics about audience interest in behaviors as well as the ability to distribute it across multiple channels are key. And just for any of you on the call today that are among smaller organizations, this is not out of your reach.
MICHELLE MASON: Absolutely.
STEVE LIEBER: Technology has changed where-- this is-- we are not talking about something that you can just tune out and say, oh, well, that's only for big publishers or big associations societies. Now this is in the reach of virtually all including that one or two persons association that Michelle [INAUDIBLE]
MICHELLE MASON: Absolutely. Your spot on, Steve is about having a relationship with your customers. And to your point, understand their behaviors. What problems are you trying to help them solve? So the way we used to think about it, that's not working anymore. Is the help me solve my problems and is understanding your audience and having an audience strategy. And quite honestly, I don't think many associations are having that conversation.
MICHELLE MASON: So this is very timely.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: You're right. And, Steve, you mentioned different formats or repurposing. We've seen that a deep piece of research can be turned into an infographic very easily, that is highly visual and highly appealing across many distribution channels and can bring new people in to the organization who are interested in the concept. And I think probably infographics are probably underutilized by associations and societies considering how popular they end up being when you look at the analytics of who's engaging with them.
STEVE LIEBER: And think of it as a marketing technique.
MICHELLE MASON: Yes.
STEVE LIEBER: I mean, when you put an infographic out, you've suddenly identified yourself as the source of knowledge about the subject. That's going to drive people to you. So it's not only delivering content but it's also marketing.
MICHELLE MASON: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point because we are also living in this kind of sound byte era, we want little snippets of information if we think about Twitter and everything else. And so that infographic is just giving you enough information to teeth out, to capture your interest. And if you want more, you're going to find the more. But have the engagement piece drawing them in.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Well, speaking of marketing and how this strategy intersects between content and marketing and growing an audience, I think we have the glue here with us today. Colleen, you've put this into practice many times. But first, what I wanted to ask you was from your work in marketing and digital transformation know other some key trends that you've been seeing that are really important for stores associations to know about as they embark on an audience strategy?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Absolutely, Jake. So the first one builds up-- in fact they all build on what Michelle and Steve have been saying. But I think the first thing is organizations are stepping back looking at their overarching strategy and the organizational design with an audience or customer lens as opposed to that internal lens. So you have your customers, the people that-- they may be authors if you're a publisher, they may be members, product purchasers but you also have we learned to have broader audiences?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Your vendors, you have partners, you have the people that you're trying to reach with outbound marketing, trying to bring people into the funnel, and then you've got your content as magnet. You're absolutely right, your content is everything. Michelle, whether it's your core content as is, or your core content repackaged, or your core content with derivative, or content marketing, all of that pulls people in.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Your audience is all of that. And if internally you're not structured to maximize that, it's challenging. And so we're seeing organizations look at their organizational design. Second thing organizations are doing is they're collecting the data. You've heard both Michelle and Steve talk about analytics and behavioral data.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: You have to be collecting that data. Right. You have to have what I like to call a single view of your audience or customer. What's in a customer, you know who it is. Sally Smith. When it's someone you don't know, you still actually can collect information about them. And you can glean significant amount of intelligence around that or grouping them together around cohorts.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: So organizations are collecting relationship and transactional data. They're collecting behavioral and engagement data. They're collecting data that customers are giving them, an attitudinal data. They're collecting visitor contact, what someone's doing at any given time. And they're pulling that all together to have the kind of behavioral analytics that Steve and Michelle referenced.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I would just add there's also a really strong focus on what we call now zero-party data. It's kind of a child of first party data. So first party data is the data we collect as companies. Zero-party data is when we ask a customer, audience member to explicitly tell us something. It's becoming more and more important to find ways to exchange value, maybe content, for data. And I often hear a particular challenge in publishing is only maybe 10% of my audience gives me either data on my journal's platform.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I would argue there are ways to make that much, much greater. If you start thinking about what you're exchanging for value, customers are becoming more and more willing to exchange data. And then that data just leads to better decision making. Data used to be descriptive, it just told us what we did. It became diagnostic, it started to tell us what we did wrong. It's now predictive, it can tell us what's going to happen. And for some organizations it's even prescriptive, it tells us what we should do differently.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And modern marketing is all based on prescriptive data, telling us which way we should go. And lastly, with all of that data, marketing organizations are really thinking about targeting, segmentation. My number one advice for any membership association is to start with segmentation strategy. And then I'm really going up the spectrum to personalization. Really thinking about how they curate those experiences.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: If you're looking for high-level engagement, personalization is really important. And you'll see in industries outside of ours, it's becoming standard. Go ahead, Steve.
STEVE LIEBER: Colleen, let me follow up with a question that just triggered and for the audience. We've been on rehearsals and all and every time I hear Michelle and Colleen talk, I have follow-up questions that are news ones from the last time we talked. You talk about marketing and what I'm sort of reacting to that is are we all becoming both publishing companies and marketing companies or associations and marketing companies?
STEVE LIEBER: I mean, is it becoming just so integral to our being that we need to kind of think of ourselves as that as well as what our traditional core business is?
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, I think, definitely. One of the things that always strikes me-- I think this is more so with publishers but I've also seen it with associations is that the definition that we have of marketing in our industry often is promotion. And that's so different to how it is outside of our industry, where marketing is customer experience, audience engagement, predictive analytics, that's all marketing.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And so I think you're absolutely right, Steve. Part of what needs to happen is a redefinition of what marketing is for our industry in 2021.
MICHELLE MASON: Yeah--
STEVE LIEBER: We run the risk of having that definition of marketing that's the old definition, the promotion. And so I think we might lose some folks' attention if they don't get in their minds, know that's really not what we're talking about. It really is about engagement in other aspects of relationship management.
MICHELLE MASON: I agree that the definition of marketing is changing. And when I think about last year, 2020, how we had to shift our business models to become production companies. And now when we think it's not just an event any longer it's a hybrid and in some cases 365 year-round. So what do you do with all that content? What do you do with what you're learning? And if about your customers or your members and if your systems are not talking to each other, then how are you getting their full picture to be able to be supportive in this space?
MICHELLE MASON: So, yeah, I definitely agree that things are shifting quickly.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I would just add that marketing technology, I think, is part of what's changing this. Right. That the marketing is technology now. Now you need the strategy. The strategy has to come first. But so much of marketing is really about technology. And if you think of those decisions as technology and you don't think of them as marketing, that's where I see all the problems start happening.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: So it gets kind of disconnected.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. Michelle, I'm glad you brought up some of the rapid transformation that was necessary in the last year as more and more moved towards digital. And especially thinking of the many different products and services offered by the same organization to the same audience and needing to really connect those behind the scenes in order to get that. As Colleen said, that unified customer view as well.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So I do have a question here to move us forward here with Steve. Now, Steve, I want you to walk us through a little bit of a case study here with when you were at HIMSS. Because you did take this approach many years ago or started it or started down this journey many years ago and I've seen results of what that resulted in. And so I'd love you to walk through your experience re-orienting an association and its activities towards the audience.
STEVE LIEBER: Sure. Thanks, Jake. Yeah. It was probably or at least 10 years ago. And for those of you that are in the publishing business at least that long, I'm talking about the period where we started to see the trends on print versus digital. And a lot of us tried to ignore that trend for a long time. And we kept that print vehicle in play for a lot longer than we should have and until the financials forced us into particular decisions.
STEVE LIEBER: But it was part of a trend that caused us to start to rethink things. And so we did. We started thinking about not only moving into a more digital distributed type of publishing, but also thinking about our audience, which is related to this. And so this was early 2011-12, in terms of when the strategy conversation started to develop around this.
STEVE LIEBER: And at the time, HIMSS, which is the health care information and management systems society-- so this is the IT Association in health care. Primarily focused on clinical applications and provider organizations. And so with that time we had a membership of about 50,000 and that's who we considered our audience to be. And so as we thought about what our objective were in growing our reach impact and influence, we knew we needed to reach more than 50,000 people.
STEVE LIEBER: So that was the place where the concept of, OK, let's look at who our members work for, who they were with, who works for them, who they buy from, who they relate to, who they're trying to reach and influence, that sort of thing, and just create a segmented, picking up on Colleen's definitions here, segmented group after segmented group to build the entire ecosystem. And in the end, we were able to achieve very significant results.
STEVE LIEBER: And as this shows you over a period of about five to eight years, membership grew. But more importantly, and from a financial standpoint, even more dramatically, our engaged audience grew. And this is where we started to develop the concept of 10x is not out of the reach in terms of what's possible, especially when you drop the definition of about it being so discriminatory to just those people who are eligible to belong to your association or just those who choose to subscribe to your publication.
STEVE LIEBER: And so this is the end of the story, so to speak, in terms of what success looked like. How did we get there? At the time that we started this, and quite honestly, by the time I retired from HIMSS beginning of 2018, still wasn't a whole lot out there to help you do this. We spent a lot of money and a number of years to build the technologies ourselves.
STEVE LIEBER: And fortunately, I was in an association that was big enough and working with some extremely bright people who knew what they were doing to help us get there. And this is basically the schematic that sort of summarizes the whole thing, in that-- and it's very simplified in that there's not one circle of content and data. Multiple circles inside there.
STEVE LIEBER: But we had all of that stuff. And so we had some information about our audience. And we certainly were producing content. But we moved through a process of changing our outlook on content, for example. We stop believing that we were the only source of great content. We came to accept other people produce great content too. And I'm going to be better.
STEVE LIEBER: I'm going to reach more people if I aggregate content in addition to create content. So we changed our content strategy. Data, just as Colleen was talking about, we came to realize we needed to know more. We needed to engage in different efforts to get data on our audience. And then we needed to be able to analyze it and understand who was interested in what topic in real time.
STEVE LIEBER: So the traditional approach is you come up with-- and I mean, I've been in the business long enough, you came up with an annual editorial calendar. And you had that lined up. And this month is this and next month is that. It didn't matter whether the audience was interested on that schedule. That's the way we did it. Well, [INAUDIBLE] realize, OK-- and we know now why we were driven to all of this.
STEVE LIEBER: Because everybody else in the retail sector learned this a long time ago. Google anything on your computer right now and see how fast ads start popping up for that stuff in the boxes around your search engine. People are watching us all the time. They're learning what we're interested in. Well, in the publishing association world, we had to do the same thing.
STEVE LIEBER: So we started building the engines that collected that real time data in order to build the audience intelligence that we needed so that we could achieve those objectives. And so again, the idea here was to do take the content, take the data, analyze it, and then produce those things that really do allow us to grow the audience. Allow us to personalize. Colleen used that label as well, very important in terms of personalizing and engaging the audience.
STEVE LIEBER: New products, they're the derivatives diversifying our revenues from our core business into others. And then the things that sort of-- additional benefits that came to us as a result of what we were doing is that we were able to take the knowledge that we were learning and put it into practice, not only here to produce timely content in formats that people wanted to digest, we were also able to use it other places.
STEVE LIEBER: In the association world, we were able to use it in our government affairs and advocacy efforts. We were able to build new educational programs, not just out of our publishing area, but in other areas as well. And so it very much was a transformation that resulted in impacting the whole association. And really did move us from that traditional look that's on the left hand side.
STEVE LIEBER: And unfortunately still is a way that many organizations, if they are honest with themselves and go through a little questionnaire asking where are you on certain metrics and parameters, you will find you may be lagging a little bit in the transformational definition of things. And it really did help us move over. And was really a significant mechanism in which we were able to grow the HIMSS organization from relatively small to medium-size organization to a very large global association that had a reach impact and influence that was considerably greater than where we started.
STEVE LIEBER: But my key point on that is we had to do that ourselves. There was a lot of IT building that we had to do. And as I say today, the technology world has recognized that the publishing association business is a target for them. There are products out there that are in reach of virtually all organizations and can realize the same benefits that we did.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: That's great. And speaking of [INAUDIBLE] is very aspirational to see that HIMSS, a case maybe not the aspiring to the years effort and large sums spent, but certainly the outcomes are aspirational. Michelle, as you're kind of thinking of the entire group of associations and-- what are you seeing as far as readiness across the-- are our organizations ready to make these changes?
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Or what kind of steps should they be taking kind of first?
MICHELLE MASON: Yeah. It's a great question. In terms of readiness, I think it's all over the map, in terms of readiness for associations. But it all starts with the first step. So, I think, I'll speak from association foreign perspective and then-- About five or six years ago, we had what I learned from an agency, was content chaos. And that really was our content wasn't really document.
MICHELLE MASON: It was ad hoc. It was very siloed. So we really had to step back and say, OK, we need a systematic approach to better organizing our content to be relevant to members. And so we looked at what systems, processes-- people, processes, and systems. But before going there, we had to conduct the content audit to understand what we truly had and we have far more than what we realized.
MICHELLE MASON: And that was through hiring and education consultant, which led us down the path of a content strategy, identifying the topics that are of interest to our members and relevant to our members. But most importantly, we needed to align this strategy to our strategic plan because we know you can't manage what you can't measure. We knew we would need to make a strategic investment. And so therefore, we wanted to keep it on our board's radar screen.
MICHELLE MASON: And so we were in this strategic investment phase for a couple of years before we actually operationalize it. And it's just the way that we do business. But we looked at workflow. We looked at calendars. We looked at personas. We looked at a variety of components to get us to where we are today.
MICHELLE MASON: We still have a long road to travel. But fast forward, in terms of readiness and association form, where we are today, we are working on an integrated content strategy. We are connecting our events with our content to better engage our audience to a different touch points to Steve's point. And we're looking at these various touch points, these various channels, from social media, blogs, podcasts, webinars, to just help our members to understand as we discussed earlier.
MICHELLE MASON: You can have a core piece of content but what it [INAUDIBLE] derivative products that you can create. It did not happen overnight because we really had to change our organizational systems and design to be supportive foundationally of a strategy in this nature. But it also centered around people. It's not as though you can tap someone on the shoulder and say, I need you to lead this area.
MICHELLE MASON: You really need someone that has a level of experience looking at the bigger picture and has that foresight to lead to this. So I just give you a quick example before I conclude. So we have a magazine, for a magazine, you read an article. Now we can lead you into a free engagement with us around that topic, which we called a conversation circle. And we believe that conversation circle is leading us-- leading the customer or the member into more of a pay-in-debt experience with us.
MICHELLE MASON: We're beta-testing it and this concept and we're seeing that is starting to deliver results. So in terms of readiness, we're all over the map in terms of readiness. But certainly there are organizations out there that are just getting started in the process.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I like how you said that your goal was that, this is just the way we do business. Because it's truly it's designed to be imbued in everything rather than a giant change or a complete shift. It's more of a more effective techniques to do the mission and services that you're already-- are part of your strategy.
MICHELLE MASON: Yeah.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I'd like to quickly jump over to Colleen because I think you've actually walked organizations through this process, maybe more than once as well, so I believe you also have some notes on how to get started with this transition.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah, absolutely. So I break it down into the three phases. The first phase is sort of setting your game plan. There's a lot of planning required. So I always start by saying it's really important to broaden your horizon. And what I mean by that is you really need to know what you're aiming for. You need to become familiar with the technologies and tools and customer expectations that are out there.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And it can be helpful to look to industries outside of ours. There is, of course, innovation in our industry. I think Steve told us a really innovative story at HIMSS. And it looks like association forum, is heading down the innovation path. But it's also good to look outside of our industry to broaden your horizon. It's really difficult to set strategy if you don't know what's possible.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And then the second piece is obviously setting that vision and strategy. A lot of it's what Steve and Michelle hit on, really know who your audience is today and who you want that audience to be. Make sure you do content audits to understand what kind of content and engagement mechanisms you have with them. And be really clear where you want to go over a multiyear period.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Though the other point I think is really critical during planning is start with capabilities. I often see organizations jump to technology. Really start with the capabilities you need. Start with strategic capabilities. But what do you want to achieve? And why do you want to achieve it? I.e. what benefit will it bring to your business.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Prioritize those capabilities. Then you need to take those strategic capabilities and bring them down to a functionality level. And you need to do that really early in the process because marketing technology can be confusing. And, Steve, I couldn't agree with you more, the technology is incredibly accessible now. But I still see people sometimes gravitating to some of the larger really expensive solutions.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And I think they do that because they haven't fundamentally figured out the capabilities they want to achieve. And then they don't understand all of the newer more cost effective options that are available. Which I think is really important for our industry. Then you move into the getting-started phase. So the first thing I say is break down your silos. You are trying to attract audiences. You're trying to engage audiences.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: You're trying to have a really positive customer audience experience, and you're trying to convert them. That is like one journey. Think about how your organization is designed to achieve that. Think customer and audience don't think internal. This requires you to look at your talent. You very well will need some roles that don't exist today. I've heard of scientific communicator.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Every organization needs to have at least somebody or part of someone dedicated to marketing operations, content marketers. You need to really think about who you have in your organization that needs to be trained, up-skilled, and coached. I work with a lot of CMOs where I coach them, which is a very popular thing right now for example.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And then what talent do you need to bring into your organization. Then you need to start investing in technology. There are some basics I believe every organization needs to have. The first is a customer data infrastructure and I don't mean a CRM. I mean something that can actually give you that full customer view.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Something that helps you organize your campaigns, it can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet. But every organization needs something like that. A fully functioning Google Analytics at a minimum. I would say 90% of the people I talk to in the industry, don't have Google Analytics even set up correctly. So really some of those basic fundamental analytics. And then as Michelle touched on, a really good content infrastructure.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Then you need to move into you're adding sophistication phase, which is really all about thinking about all the data that you're collecting and how do you start to collect a much more robust data profile. Making sure that you're focusing on that zero-party data we've collected. There are some people in our industry, I think Gemma Network is a particularly stellar example, that are doing an amazing job of zero-data party collection right now.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And it's fueling a lot of their platform and marketing experience. I think, organizations now just need to start thinking about that. Then you need to start thinking about the tools and technology that leverages personalization and advanced AI. And only then can your organization really start to be on data led.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: But I would say is those last three yellow phases are not for every organization. But to Michelle and Steve's point, everybody can focus on the purple and blue phases. There's a lot to do even for small organizations and the tools are within our reach right now. And so it is possible, very possible for organizations to get pretty far along without having to get to the really sophisticated phase.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And then for those organizations that are able to be like HIMSS and be more ambitious, they can start to sort of move into the yellow phase.
STEVE LIEBER: Colleen, I'd say if you-- Jake, if you'd flip that slide back up, your technology Basics bar actually can extend to the right because you can start out on this journey and basic is defined one-way. But as you do some things, your skill level is going to increase. And something that--
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Totally.
STEVE LIEBER: --you first-- when you first started this thing all that's beyond does, where they're never be capable of that but after you've done the basics, that doesn't look so intimidating after all. And it does become get into your reach and so you really start to move into adding sophistication perhaps earlier than some people might think they would.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah. I think that that's right. I think what's really important to me is not jumping to-- not running before you can walk. So I'll see some people for example, talk about, I want marketing automation, but don't have a customer data foundation. Right? So it's all about knowing what those right fundamental pieces are.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And then you're absolutely right, that's the hard part. Once you've built that you can start to add the sophistication that's right for your organization.
STEVE LIEBER: Yeah, absolutely.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: OK. Well, this has been great. I'd actually like to transition us a little bit here. Just that we wanted to leave time-- I know this panel could definitely have a conversation for much longer. I want to leave time for our audience members to ask questions, speaking of trying to understand our audience. So I saw a few notes come across as we were going but please also submit some more questions.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I saw a very interesting comment which I'd like to get your reaction to, from Eric Swenson, who noted that we mentioned that the definition of marketing was changing, but really this has been imbued in kind of B2C and B2B businesses for quite a while. And maybe associations, and societies, and school really just behind that definition to that it changed a while ago.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I've been seeing [INAUDIBLE] up here. I take it we agree with Eric on this.
STEVE LIEBER: Yeah.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah.
STEVE LIEBER: As a professional--
MICHELLE MASON: So true.
STEVE LIEBER: --who's been in the association business virtually in my entire career, I will admit we are behind the curve on this.
MICHELLE MASON: Yeah. Ditto, Steve. I would say that too. We getting there.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And we--
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I mean, I guess there are some benefits from being late adopters, right? I mean, you do get to skip the first round of early discovery. So you should have a little more kind of established systems or kind of pathways available.
MICHELLE MASON: Jake, and I think that this past year of the pandemic, has accelerated our adoption. Right. We're are forced to embrace audience strategy because there's simply more competition out there for audience and share [INAUDIBLE]
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: Yeah. I think it's completely true. And I think you're right, Jake. There's an advantage. I work with clients within our industry and outside of our industry and some of the other clients are having to re-do some of the stuff they did years ago because it's really changed. So the benefit is the point I think that Steve made before. There are new strategies and technologies in reach today that weren't in reach maybe even five years ago.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: But yeah, now it's absolutely true. I do think our industry needs a marketing renaissance.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I liken it to how my IKEA has lane assist. There is no way that was going to happen-- that wasn't going to be the first company to roll it out. I'm sure it's 5, 10 years old on the more expensive models. but it does trickle down over time. I have another question here for the group. Well, Steve, this one is a little more for you here in particular. You mentioned ways to create new revenue lines using your larger audience.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Could you talk about a bit of what shape those new revenue lines took at HIMSS, I think?
STEVE LIEBER: Sure. There are a couple of different things, both that are completely new lines as well as efforts which add to existing lines. And so the new lines are the ability, as we talked about, of repurposing or creating direct derivative products. You may have something that you provide to your subscribers or to your members. You take segments of that and sell it as one offs.
STEVE LIEBER: The ability to do custom campaigns for companies. So if you have an audience base, whether it's subscribers, members or whatever, but an audience base paying or and non-pay, so your big audience eco-system. You go to companies and say, I can reach x hundreds of thousands or millions of people. I know what they're interested in, when they're interested in it, and so I can deliver to you and engage interested audience almost on-demand.
STEVE LIEBER: And so with you, let's create content that highlights your products, your services and drive it specifically at the audience that's interested in it at that particular time. And the rate for that is a premium on top of a generic marketing campaign that a company might engage in. And you already have these relationships because they're already, for those of you in the association business, they're already sponsoring webinars for your digital conferences.
STEVE LIEBER: Back before last year, they were sponsoring, or attending, or exhibiting at your in-person events. Their interest is reaching-- getting their message to reach audiences at the right time, not again when we decide, but when the audience decides. So you're using some of the same tools that we've actually had for years but we're just smarter in how we use them. The other thing that I'd say about all of this in terms of derivative products or new products and all we've got to get at [INAUDIBLE] of one product line business.
STEVE LIEBER: We're a publisher of this journal or we are an association of this membership. And so we have to get out of our vocabulary terms like non-dues revenue or non-subscription revenue because that minimizes the importance of value of these other lines of business. They are new lines of business. Treat them not as red-headed stepchildren but as full family members and embrace them, capitalize them, drive them just like you would any other line of business.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I can tell you that I talked to a association that specializes in cleaning, like institutional cleaning. And they quickly spun up some certification and education in keep cleaning for COVID safe. And they provided a new value to just a much wider audience than they had ever reached before. I mean, they told me that every single airline, hotel chain now was engaging with their organization. And now saw that they had all this great content on good scientific techniques for cleaning things and maintaining.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And so just a way, they're opportunistically to grow your audience and see that it's much broader than just the members of that association. Now, I have one more question-- I think this one is going to be-- this one's probably going to take us to the finish line because it's pretty broad. But this is a question that I think we anticipated being asked, so I'm glad it was asked, which is what kind of level of investment are we talking about to make these changes that Michelle and Colleen and Steve were talking about in an organization?
JAKE ZARNEGAR: What does this look like investment wise? And I think, Michelle I'll start with you here. Oh.
MICHELLE MASON: I'll be vague and say that it's all-- it is depends on the organization, the level of investment from a smaller staff association. I started more-- because my investment was very limited. Right. So I started more from utilizing leveraging my volunteers to think through the concept, the strategy, then made an investment in education consulting, and then an investment in research. So it's more of proof of concept for my organization, which led ultimately to a strategic investment.
MICHELLE MASON: But then a large organization might approach it different because you have the resources to implement a more aggressive strategy. But just depends on, in my view, the organization size.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: OK--
STEVE LIEBER: So if you go back to Colleen's chart in terms of the three phases, it gives you an idea of what sort of investments you're going to need to make. So if the setting the plan-- OK, you may need to consult to help you go through that. If the concepts we've been talking about here are really new to your organization, that's a consultant coming in and helping you go through that internal assessment.
STEVE LIEBER: Helping you walk through the thought process of how do you and where do you broaden your horizon and developing vision and strategy. That's cheap. People like me and Colleen and others, we're not expensive. So--
MICHELLE MASON: I don't know about that, Steve.
STEVE LIEBER: And on top of that, there are a lot of us out there that do this sort of thing not just-- and so you can shop for that. The second part starts to do-- it requires some capital investment in terms of being able to get through, in particular, the technology basics. And so the idea of we need a common taxonomy for our subject so that we're able to tag content consistently and that sort of thing.
STEVE LIEBER: The ability-- and this is why, I think, our lines do need to overlap a little bit because data collection, there's an element of data collection and technology basics. Are you working on you're working on data collection across one platform? Or do you have a website and a social media platform? And your events registration--
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Education platform. Yeah. Right.
STEVE LIEBER: So that the ability to work-- the more platforms you have more than likely the bigger resources you have. But just to start people with some thinking, I think that over one to two year period a noble initial investment in the 100 to 150,000 range, gets you a long way. I think if you had that kind of investment over, let's call it a two fiscal year period, I'm hoping you can get well down this chart.
STEVE LIEBER: Not into the yellow so much but-- and the thing of this you may actually have some resources. The problem is you haven't tied them together. And so really the only big technology thing you need to do is provide some kind of overlay to pull all that stuff together versus having to bring in new technologies.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: I think Michelle and Steve's answers are great. I would say it does depend obviously on your organizational size. I think that there are differences. I think, I always separate the people, the thinking, the planning from the actual technology. I think on the people, thinking, and planning, I do think need external help. And I think it's not just technology help, I see a lot of people go for technology firms.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: But I actually think you need to do something different. So there is some consultancy freelance help. In terms of your talent, it does require probably some different talent than you have in some structural change. For some organizations, actually they have all the talent they need, it's just about reallocating. For other organizations they have to make investments. So I think that's a hard one to detail.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: In terms of the technology, I think can get pretty far as you say, Steve with $100, $150,000, I've seen that happen. I think the problem I see is-- this is going to be controversial so I'm trying to say-- there are some really big marketing technology companies, I think we all know who they are. And there are a lot of people who push their products for various reasons.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And technology teams like their products for various reasons. And those will cost you multiples, and multiples, and multiples, of that number Steve debut. And I think if you are brave and committed to a different kind of architectural approach, you can do it more significantly cheaply. And that's what I'm always advocating. This is why it starts with capabilities for me because you need the 300 or 400 things you actually want to achieve.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: And so you're not just going to the big players, you're going to a wide swath of players to see who can actually deliver that and at what cost. You want to really have a good foundation so you make a cost-efficient choice. And the last thing I would add is if you do this right it will more than pay for itself in terms of efficiency or revenue. And so it needs to have a business case, that's the other reason for capability is, right.
COLLEEN SCOLLANS: You need to know that this capability is going to deliver this business benefit and can string that together.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Colleen, I'm really appreciative of you tying it all together there the end that any investment you make will certainly pay for itself. And this is a great path for associations to try. We are out of time. I'd really like to thank you all for joining us. Thank the panelists for their great content. It was the conversation I had hoped we were going to have. It was very interesting. And I thought you brought a lot of value to our audience here.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So thank you all and thank you to those who filled out our polls, that ask questions, and listened. And I hope you will be considering really ramping up your audience strategies in your associations in the future. So thank you all and we going to sign off now. Thank you.
STEVE LIEBER: Thank you.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Take care.
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