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How Unifying Your Data Expands Reach, Revenue, & Impact
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How Unifying Your Data Expands Reach, Revenue, & Impact
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: Hello, and welcome,
HANSEN: my name is Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen. I am the director of marketing at Silverchair, and I want to thank you for joining us for today's event. This is the second in the 2021 platform strategies webinar series, and we're really looking forward to the day's discussion between Jake Zarnegar and Steve Lieber. But before I hand it over to them, I will cover just a few housekeeping items. As I mentioned this event is the second in the platform strategies webinar series, and we're hoping that when you registered you also registered for the next two events.
HANSEN: But if not you can still do so via the same registration link. The series is a set of free virtual events and just as with the in-person iteration, we're excited to field your questions and engage in discussions that carry beyond this hour. So please do engage with us via the Q&A as we go along and we will have some time for discussion at the end of the event. This event is being recorded.
HANSEN: A copy of the recording will be available on our website and sent out to you via email. And finally at the end, we will have a single one question survey, just requesting your rating of the event which helps us with future planning. So we'd appreciate your feedback. And with that, I'm happy to introduce our speakers today. With over 35 years experience and association management, Steve Lieber consults on governance, technology, and business strategy.
HANSEN: For more than 18 years, he served as the president and CEO of HIMSS, the world's largest association focused on health care information technology. During his time, HIMSS grew by a factor of 10 in terms of audience reach and annual revenues, and you'll get to hear more about that later today. As a nationally recognized commentator on health policy, health care IT trends and association management, he's a regular speaker and contributor to corporate strategic planning efforts.
HANSEN: And we are very excited to have you with us today. Jake Zarnegar wears two hats these days as the chief business development officer at Silverchair as well as the Chief Growth Officer of Hum. Jake has served professional association and scientific publishing community for more than 20 years by leading the development and adoption of SaaS platforms such as Silverchair's platform as well as online training and certification with Silverchair learning systems.
HANSEN: Now at home, Jake is working with technologists and association leaders to unify content and usage across their digital properties and to develop rich insights about individuals and groups. We are excited to have them with us today. And with that, I'll hand it over to you.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: All right, great, wow. After Steve's intro I thought you pretty much should have said and also Jake is here today. Steve and I have done a few presentations together in the past. We hope that we put something together today that will be thought provoking and help you think about how to implement some new strategies at your association or in your publishing operation around how to use customer data to advance new and existing business lines.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Now the title of our talk here today is how unifying your data expands reach, revenue, and impact. And if only it was that easy, it's the beginning step of an intentional strategy to do that at your organization. So you must use that data as well. And Steve is going to talk in particular about the real practicalities of using that data in his experience.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I am going to introduce us during the day and also take some time to describe the class of software that is new in the space, the customer data platforms and their ilk that are enabling this unification of data and what you can do with it. So we decided on a whim, mostly because I'm an English major to organize this webinar as in a Drama format.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So I have instructed Steve and I to only speak in strict iambic pentameter throughout the presentation. I hope no one's checking that because I've already blown it. And we're going to follow a very static or steady drama scope here. There'll be an introduction, some exposition, definitely some conflict and a climax like in the HIMSS example here.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And then I guess we'll have to move to the denouemont, and mostly I just wanted the opportunity to say denouemont as an English major later in life. So that is now checked off. So I'm going to start out and really frame what we're seeing as the opportunity for associations and for publishers around user data. And also kind of highlight a problem that is a little bit of a stumbling block for publishers and associations of using that data today.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Steve is going to introduce the audience strategy. We'll talk about the technology then we'll go into the HIMSS case study. So just to get us started here with the opportunity. I think it's really important to recognize the strong and positive position that many publishers and associations sit-in inside of their relationship with their audience. I think one of the most important things to start out with is that you're not simply a single-- you're not creating a single value for the audiences that you reach.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: You obviously have readers, you have authors, you have those that are learning, you have those that are getting credentialed in their discipline and looking to advance their careers, those looking to connect to a community or advocate, a position. So you're really providing a wide variety of value to your audiences. And a lot of times that's through many, many different platforms and many different digital touch points.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So it's the accumulation or the culmination of all of these values that establishes your overall value as a publisher or as an association with that audience member. The second thing I'd like to set up is that almost every publisher we work with, in fact, every publisher we work with, an association has a larger audience than it's paying subscribers or members. Well, of course, the member or subscriber who is very committed to paying money and accessing your product or service is extremely important and should be at the core of everything you do.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: There are a large amount of folks who orbit around your association or your publishing operation who get value from you. Sometimes not consistently or in lesser ways, and I pulled an organization here who volunteered to give me this data that an 8,400 member organization that has 100,000 people in their pro-active email lists that they can reach directly.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: But they also have a global audience of a million people that are coming to access their content. And the concept that they were working with is that, hey, we need to understand every one of these pieces of our audience. We need to understand every member not just the members, but we need to understand the audience that is coming to us occasionally or for certain purposes just as well as we understand our members.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And so that we can offer them value and also bring them closer into the organization and turn them into identified member or members. The other trend that we're really seeing right now, which I believe is that the potential of being a positive for publishers and associations, is the trend towards personalization personalized experiences and connected experiences. So this is really coming over from the commercial side.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: We think about the digital services that we interact with be the streaming services or news platforms or other types of services. They're really looking to connect your experience not just across devices but across products by the same organization. Understand who you are and what you want when you arrive. And this is becoming an expectation of digital information consumers across the board and this chart was put together by a sales force report and you'll see that the generational change is only getting more urgent as far as demanding these connected processes be seamless handoffs.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: The understanding who I am and how I use services before I start using them. So this is a trend that may only grow. Yes, Steve.
STEVE LIEBER: Yeah, so before you go off the slide I want to add a little additional context to this and actually throw in another word. Personalized also equals relevant. We have been in the process over generations of establishing-- I used to do it a year or two out we would have an editorial calendar and that's what we were going to publish on that calendar regardless of what else was going on. Well, that obviously has changed to some degree.
STEVE LIEBER: But I think really what Jake's pushing here is the concept of personalization meaning get me things that are relevant to me. Things that I want to see when I want to see it and we've got to connect these dots again later when we start talking about audience behaviors and such. But this is more than just simply when I open up my browser, and from my subscription that it says, hi, Steve, that's not enough.
STEVE LIEBER: It has to be more personalized that in the content that's being delivered is based upon what you know about me and obviously the more you know about me and the more you know about what I'm looking at, the more relevant or more personalized the engagement is going to be.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: That's right, Steve and thanks for that clarification. You also broke up my soliloquy. Sorry I had to get that word in there, also.
STEVE LIEBER: You've got a checklist of words to get in here today.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: How did you know that? OK, so the other thing that I think is a real advantage position for publishers and associations that most of your digital interactions are actually direct. You have your own websites and platforms where you're hosting your publications, your members are coming or subscribers are coming directly to you to get that data, and so you're able to gather what we call 0 party data.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: That which is people filling out forms to subscribe or to receive newsletters. But also you have direct access to observe data. So this generally is not happening on some other platform like Facebook or Twitter, where you don't have as much access to. If this activity is happening, the reading and value activities happening on your CMS, your LMS you actually have all of the observed first party data available to you, which is a real advantage for understanding those users better than others.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And if we really put it together here, there is really a strong strength position for associations and publishers. I've kind of outlined the strengths here that I see as key. The reputation and brand being extremely strong. You do have a large amount of subscribers and members and even larger audiences you're reaching worldwide with your content.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: There's great technology inside of publishers and inside of associations that is really purpose built to do things like deliver, content or education. And then of course the products and content is generally of high quality and very valuable in total. And finally, there's a lot of data being captured by all of your digital systems. All of that interaction data is generally captured.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: It's rarely thrown away. So it's somewhat available to you at this point. Now you'll note that there seems to be another half to this chart which has been excised here. We'll show that one in just a second. Because I wanted to bring up the kind of main thesis of today, which is that associations and publishers really currently lack the infrastructure to bring these coordinated digital experiences across.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Though you have the raw materials, as we noted, there are very few publishers and associations that are truly fully coordinating and understanding how to bring relevant and only relevant content to each of their audience members as individuals, and Steve is going to be talking about that going forward. So if I added a gap analysis to the strengths here and associations.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I don't think there's any gap in the reputation and brand, frankly. Where membership and audience is concerned, though you have a large group. Most publishers don't actually know very much about their audience as far as very finite segments as well as individual information about their audience members. Where there is great technology, there's not a kind of unifying data platform in many places behind the scenes bringing it all together.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: The content and products, well, they're very great in high quality are generally one-sized fit so you'll need to hunt through a large corpus in order to find the relevant content yourself. And then on the data side, the fact that the data is not unified means there's no kind of complete picture of your audience and individuals in there. So those are some gaps that we're going to talk about today.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And if this was a checkoff play, this would be the loaded gun introduced in act 1. You look at this chart right here and you see that as the younger generation, even though they're 75% of the workforce coming up, they're not joining these traditional institutions at the same rate. And this is the loaded gun which is due to go off sooner or later. You can't continue with an aging membership or aging subscriber and author group, you really need to reach the next generation of producers, of authors, of readers, and get them to find and see the value that your organization is providing.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So this is really the challenge here, is how do we get these numbers at your organization and other organizations to really even out, so that you're reaching all kind of digital folks together. So, Steve, with that setup in which I introduced some hope and also some conflict I'm going to pass it over to you for a bit of exposition here of the audience strategy.
STEVE LIEBER: Absolutely, well, as to English and drama majors, number two is usually called the confrontation. And it involves the obstacles as well as the complications. And so I'm going to introduce the obstacles that we have in getting to the ultimate outcomes of our play today. And so in particular, we're going to be talking about audience strategy. And we're also going to be talking about the complication that is occurring today and this is not just pandemic COVID complication, but as Jake just introduced the complication of changing demographics and other things.
STEVE LIEBER: So to get to the heart of the matter here what we're going to talk about is the audience strategy. And before I go into that, I'm going to talk about some broader sort of business strategies as well. But what we're foreshadowed the ultimate objective, the outcome of our performance today it is to improve revenue and impact. And it doesn't matter whether you're an association or society publisher, you have membership, you have subscribers, all of these objectives are consistent with what is in your business plan.
STEVE LIEBER: And so I think you'll find this to be extremely relevant. I've been down this path a couple of times. As I have served as the CEO of two different associations and the first one at the Emergency Nurses Association was pre-internet day. And so the challenge we had then in growing audience and an improving engagement was undertaken with a completely different set of strategies than I used at HIMSS.
STEVE LIEBER: HIMSS is a technology oriented association in health care. When I joined there in 2000, it was a relatively small $10 million a year operation. When I left there three years ago $100 million a year annual budget and really at the heart of that was a set of activities that we're going to introduce in act IV. Well, let's talk a little bit about what's going on.
STEVE LIEBER: What are the obstacles and what's going on in both the association and society world as well as in subscriber based operations. And so from a business standpoint, we have traditionally looked at things from a subscriber or member perspective. We called ourselves in the association of world, membership organization. And it really reinforced the thought that there was a primary line of business and everything else was secondary.
STEVE LIEBER: Hence the rise of the term non-dues income. It was as if it's something else. Well, in many associations, and I would suggest in the publisher world, you are starting to see if you have headed down this path. The opportunity to equal or exceed your revenue from your membership or your subscriber through other activities as you grow audience and engage in other business strategies.
STEVE LIEBER: And that really is where on the right hand side, we're getting to. We're becoming much more entrepreneurial. We're diversifying our business lines so that we're not held hostage in a sense to just that one primary line of business. Audience and we're going to dig into this in more detail later. Becoming much more expansive that we are moving from member or subscriber centric to audience, and we'll talk about what that means.
STEVE LIEBER: But the shorthand here is subscribers, or members, and others. Content again, the belief traditionally was nobody can produce content like I can't. We produce the best content and the readers really only need to read our content, well, that's not real. Never was and in the rise of the digital world and environment the access to other content is so easy that we need to move our thinking around just the content I produce to being an aggregator.
STEVE LIEBER: So it is our own content but also third party. Technology this is-- we're going to talk a little bit about that as well. This is what underpins all of it. It is rapidly changing and in fact, the ability to do what I did at HIMSS over the past 10, 12 years is significantly easier and cheaper to do today than when I started down this path 12, 15 years ago.
STEVE LIEBER: A product, the product strategy that you should be thinking about, again, is much like what I was describing before. We need to get away from the concept that we have one primary product, the subscription to our magazine or subscription to our website or our membership in the organization to be thinking about multiple products that we're focused on not only a high number of products but the ability to scale them and deliver them in large quantities.
STEVE LIEBER: And then media and marketing, again, a change from the way we've operated thinking that media and marketing was there to promote our business. And now the idea-- and to find out using that on who we're trying to reach. Well, there are many more things that media can deliver to us here and media here can be various kinds of digital and social media.
STEVE LIEBER: But it's not only using those for different purposes but also using analytics associated with them. And again, those of you in the publishing world much more so than I think in the association world, very familiar with the various analytics tools that are available to you to help you understand audience behavior and really get beyond just the who and getting into the why and how. What am I interested in, why am I interested in it, and how do I want to receive that content, all of those are things that are very much in the thinking today as associations and subscriber-based organizations move into a different environment.
STEVE LIEBER: As I mentioned technology underpins your ability to move from that traditional to transformational environment. The absence of the technology and the absence of your adopting it in each of those broad strategy categories, whether it's your audience strategy or your product strategy or media strategy all of those will involve technology to some extent.
STEVE LIEBER: And so questions you want to ask yourself, as you're sort of doing a self-assessment this is, I have a bigger model that I use in my consulting series of questions that results in a score sort of digital capability and technology intelligence. But these are three key questions to ask yourself and being really honest. Are you driven by your digital technology capabilities.
STEVE LIEBER: Now again, in the publishing world you had to. Print was dying 10 years ago. We put it in the ground maybe five years ago, and you folks are deep into this. On the association society side much slower to adapt to the digital environment and what I find quite often is, well, behind in terms of digital adoption. Making data driven decision.
STEVE LIEBER: We want to say that, oh, yes I'm fact based. I think if we test that a lot of times we'll find that fact is often the intuition disguised as a fact but having the technology to truly look at a situation, analyze it, and then come up with an informed decision that really is key. And then using audience behaviors preferences personalization, that relevancy that Jake introduced previously here.
STEVE LIEBER: Very key in making sure that you have that information, the behavior of your audience, their preferences, and personalization or relevancy for you to develop and grow the product services that you're wanting to. For the objective of growing the audience, size is important. We all know that. Increasing engagement, that's where your advertisers, your sponsors, your financial underwriters will pay more to the extent that you can show engagement versus just simply presenting it to an audience and hoping they'll click onto it.
STEVE LIEBER: And then obviously as a result of those first two things driving revenue. So digging more deeply into the one broad business strategy around audience. These are some key points for us to sort of explore in a little more detail. Again, I introduced the broad concept on audience strategy that we need to define it differently. We need to recognize that there are different people that you can reach and who are interested in what you have to produce your content, even if they're not subscribers.
STEVE LIEBER: So creating the opportunity for some form of your content to go to audiences other than subscribers. Do you differentiate what content you deliver to which audience? Of course, you do. But recognizing that you have a broader opportunity and therefore a greater ability to drive your reach, your revenue, and your impact is really key.
STEVE LIEBER: Understanding that vendors, companies, sponsors, underwriters, whatever you call those group of people who pay you things, they are also part of your audience. It's not just you are taking their money and helping to deliver them to an audience, but they are also an audience for you and so there are other products and services that you can create. Leveraging the very rich data resource that you have, which is your engaged audience.
STEVE LIEBER: Note I just changed the terminology there from subscriber to engaged audience. You have the ability to deliver to these folks, new products and services beyond your traditional subscriber product and they become a much more important audience to you because they again increase your reach, your impact, and the people that want to connect with them. You just keep adding concentric circles into your target.
STEVE LIEBER: Recognizing that those nonsubscribers are key and really do become a core audience, yet may not be the absolute middle bullseye but recognizing that nonsubscriber, nonmembers are people that you want to create access for them to receive some level of your content absolutely critical. Marketing and media, I talked about this before, that we're really focused here on engagement versus promotion.
STEVE LIEBER: And this is really a key concept. It's also important to recognize here that audience acquisition is only a step not the objective. Audience engagement is really the objective. You may have an audience but unless you engage them, you're not able to really maximize the opportunity not only in the reach but also the revenue that can be associated with this. And then from your technology standpoint really need to move beyond who, and again, Jake introduced this in your 0, first, and second party data.
STEVE LIEBER: We really need to move beyond just that who, is that-- we pretty well mastered that one especially if you're subscriber-based that you've seen that subscription fill out to them every year. So you know who but understanding why, and the analytics and the technology necessary to do that. That's really at the heart of what we're talking about here.
STEVE LIEBER: As society thinks. So again, I've introduced the concept here about moving from just simply subscriber or member to audience. And then have also introduced the concept here of engagement. And it really is an important aspect here is to repeat what I've just said before summarize the points here, it is about focusing your value proposition on audience preferences and behaviours.
STEVE LIEBER: Give them what they're looking for not what you're wanting to produce. And recognize the differences in your audience. And so being able to create multiple versions for different segments of your audience key. Next, summary point here very much about audience engagement. Really want to make sure that that's the objective. And then very much just, the final point here largest possible audience.
STEVE LIEBER: We all know that we want to grow our membership base, grow our subscriber base, but that is a limiting thought. Get out of the mindset of, I'm trying to grow my membership or my subscriber base, really trying to grow my audience, and then recognize that without the analytics of understanding more about them. The ability to drive engagement is going to be extremely hard to achieve.
STEVE LIEBER: Jake, back to you.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. Well, especially your last point here about reaching your audience through analytics. I'll take the baton here and move it forward. Although that was totally not a play related pun there. I will say that I introduced the fact to Steve that we were going to be using drama terminology all of five minutes before this presentation. So he picked it up valiantly, in fact, he really kind of started in media res, and carried the narrative forward for us.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So I'm going to move us to Act III here. And I want to introduce a piece of-- we've introduced all the things that you could and should be doing to unify and understand your audience but then we really need to get into the how. We don't want to only present you with a opportunity or a problem to be solved but not some tools to do so. And so I wanted to introduce a new class of software to you and in particular the customer data platform.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: But first, I wanted to show you a little bit of research here from Forrester that came out just a few months ago around what organizations are doing to try to create these relevant or personalized experiences. And one of the interesting things that was even called out in this report was that people are trying to skip the line and go right to relevance and personalization without actually building a foundation of understanding their audience or their customers.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: The idea that something could quickly adjust itself on the fly without actually understanding the fundamental interests or needs of the customers. So they called out the fact that you're twice as many people investing directly in personalization but not actually in customer analytics to understand their audiences. A little bit backwards. McKinsey coming from the same position really took the fundamental thing, approach here.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: He said, "Hey, listen you really need to set up a centralized customer data platform and start aggregating all of these digital interactions from your audience to understand." And that would serve as the foundation for all of these customer journey and relevance and personalization that you want to provide, coordination of experience for your customers. And they really see this as a foundational element here.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So this slide is scary because it pretty much represents the technology stack of a full organization. The way that you organize and reach your audience and provide your products from back to front. And the areas that are highlighted here in gray are the foundational services that underpin all of your websites, your applications, your products, your services, and right here in the middle around customer data management ingest process and unify customer data, customer data activation, managing data, and creating segments to understand your audience with granular levels, and then of course data intelligence.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So reporting and visualization prediction around what would appeal to a certain audience segments. These are all parts that the CDP, the Customer Data Platform is designed to cover. Now, you'll see there is a ton of other types of technologies and functions on this page. And in fact, the burgeoning customer data platform market which has really only been around now for about five to seven years has been really confounded by a lot of organizations inside of these other areas.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Trying to kind of claim that stale. Oh, we're running your advertising, so we understand your customers and contract them across. So we understand their behaviors and interests or our marketing system is understanding what is appealing to folks. And it's true that they can understand what's appealing in their interactions. But the whole point of a customer data platform is to bring together all of that intelligence together in one place and unify it.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So just to give you some examples if you are unfamiliar with the CDP market. There are large integrated CDPs, so both Salesforce and the Adobe experience platform came out with a CDP as part of their large integrated suite of products that include things like CRM and website builders and digital experience pieces. And both of them, actually-- last year-- introduced a separate CDP offering that can be purchased separately as part of their suite.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: There are also large standalone customer data platforms that again aren't attached to a large suite like Segment or Lytics. These are generally used in the what I would call the B2B2C markets. So those that are working with e-commerce vendors and others to sell products directly to consumers. And then finally, there's a large specialized CDPs, I brought Hum in here because that's my prerogative.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And I also brought in Wicket. These are two that are designed for associations and media rich organizations, in particular. Not trying to focus as much on the e-commerce conversion of the large standalone CDPs. So there are more out there. It's a very healthy and growing area of technology. It's really evolution of a lot of the marketing, the CRM, and the early and AMSs and early marketing platforms and trying to build in more capture of the digital interaction.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And in fact what they're really designed to do is to bring together all of the demographic and purchase and subscription and any sort of information that you have around purchase or event attendance together with the actual behavior, the customer behavior and interests as expressed on your products. So what content are they reading, what topics are they interested in. So you're bringing together all of your CRM and transactional information with your usage information.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And then also it's extremely important, you also need to unify your marketing data. So what actually works to entice or inspire someone to engage with you? What type of marketing is working? Is this someone who responds to your social versus email response to certain emails at certain times or in certain ways? So understanding how your audience members want to be marketed to and reached is also part of it.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So right now these three are all kind of kept separately. And the point of the customer data platform is to bring this audience data together. So the three main value propositions from a CDP that are separate and different from each of these three classes are, first of all it combines all of that demographic and purchase registration data together with behavioral data into one single record.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Those records are unified, they're also normalized so that you have you can have a bunch of different systems sending in data and it creates one unified record with many different fields and facets on it, of course. The second thing that's very important on the CDP market is that it thinks in real time. You need your digital customer information to be up to date. It cannot be old, it cannot wait weeks or months to be updated with information from activities say at a meeting or in an LMS about course, where you need that information to immediately update the next experience.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: If you want to have a coordinated and relevant experience each of your applications needs to know everything that's happening on the other applications and how it affects that user's interests immediately. It's also kind of a replacement for many associations, and publishers might use the editorial survey or the customer survey, a couple of times a year. That's extremely delayed data.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And it's definitely not happening very often. So interests change at the drop of a hat, and you can capture that in real time. And finally, the concept that if you're going to as you should work to provide make predictions about what's going to be relevant and what I should surface to audience members and segments you want to have the complete picture of that audience member.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: You don't want to be missing core aspects of their behavior or their interests. You need it all to be together. When it's not together you get things like-- I recently actually met-- many years ago, I visited New York City with my family and I went up to the Empire State Building and the observation deck which was great. And then I got a ton of advertising across Google for the next week about buying tickets to go to the observation deck.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Well, I just did that. So they saw that I had searched but they hadn't been updating and combining in real time to see that I actually bought tickets and went there. By the way I'm sure Google's figured that out by now. They seem to be able to combine data quite well. So the point of implementing something like a CDP or a similar technology to unify your audience is really to unlock this advantage you have.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: You have unique data that no one else has. If you're publishing content and you have an audience interacting with it, that interests expression, the behavior that is yours and yours only. So being able to take that, combine it with what you know about your audiences, your authors, your readers, your funders, subscribers, et cetera, and tailor experiences gives you an advantage to provide relevant content towards those users that other folks won't have.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So I wanted to give you a quickie look at what you can expect to see in CDPs. The first thing is that you'll actually see maybe for the first time your total audience. We have a lot of folks who are unclear about how many different folks are interacting with their digital properties across. So you'll start seeing a whole lot of anonymous folks and many identified sometimes members, subscribers.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: All CDP will contain audience segmentation tools so you can actually build segments that are relevant to you using any facet of demographic or behavior. So if you're looking for folks who have been heavy readers of a certain content in the last certain time period in order to promote a webinar on that same topic to them you can segment your audience that way and build profile lists like that to feed more effective marketing.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: You will have comprehensive individual profiles. CDPs are there to create a unified record around each customer. So it will contain everything from purchases to reading a history to other interactions all together in one place and builds a profile for each individual. Some CDPs, especially ones focused on media rich organizations like publishers and associations will actually also give you content analysis of what audience segments you are engaging with your content as well.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And which content is being successful in reaching the target audience that the content is intended for. And finally the CDPs can be used to seed growth and engagement campaigns. And to give you a couple of ideas, you can develop audiences, lookalike audiences et cetera from behavior on your applications to nurture new growth campaigns to bring new folks who look like these folks or share similar interests into your publication, essay authors, or readers, as well as providing other products education, certifications et cetera that you might have available as you diversify your product line as Steve notes.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So Steve I ran through that real fast of the technology behind it but I think your act IV is probably the most important act here because it shows what can happen when you put all of these concepts as well as the technology into practice together.
STEVE LIEBER: Absolutely, thank you, Jake. Yeah, there are a lot of concepts that have been put out here and what we did starting some years ago before the existence of CDPs. These concepts became clear to my team and sort of foreshadow again a closing comment that team is now working with Hum and bringing what we learned into Hum and very much influencing the direction of that product.
STEVE LIEBER: We saw the importance of growing our core membership into a broader audience. We saw how we needed to create new products, new campaigns, and such to grow revenue and such. And so utilizing the very principles that Jake and I have talked about today. Here's where we were in 2013 and just to digress a quick moment, HIMSS had been an investor in a small publishing company in the early 2000s and by 2013 we had acquired 100% of that publishing company.
STEVE LIEBER: We brought new team in and really started focusing on the idea of growing audience, growing beyond our traditional publishing activities, and really starting to introduce all of those various strategies that I highlighted in the earlier presentation. So in 2013 when we really got underway with this we were sitting with a membership of about 50,000 people. Well, in five years' time as we went through this process of understanding our audience, pulling the data together, and again, this predates technology that existed today so we had to build it.
STEVE LIEBER: And the end result of this as we moved forward to today is a growth as we can see in this line of a factor of considerable effort. And this was done through a very-- today I can say-- natural process. It was not necessarily extraordinary even though when we look back on it, yeah, this is a pretty remarkable slide and one that serve the association well.
STEVE LIEBER: But it became a natural sort of set of processes for us as we built our audience funnel and work through the engagement process. And in the audience we're using here is engaged. This is not an active email list, this is the audience that was taking something from us. They were buying, they were downloading, they were engaging, they were taking an active step on their own to reach into the content and do something with it.
STEVE LIEBER: And so the process of pulling all this together of using analytics it works. It really translates into a very different sort of outcome. And on the revenue side we saw a comparable sort of growth. We basically doubled again the association revenue in this time period from about 50 million annual revenue in 2013 to about 100 million by the end of this point.
STEVE LIEBER: And that occurred across the organization because we took these same principles around the publishing side and made sure it was relevant across all of the activities of the organization. So it isn't just something that is relevant to the publishing side that is a very relevant to the entire enterprise. And this shows really how that is able to transform the entire enterprise, not just the publishing side.
STEVE LIEBER: And it very much is about going from what most subscriber-based organizations, member-based organizations have been faced with which is really a relatively slow moving change in that audience. 2%, 3% a year, especially in the association world is considered pretty average pretty standard in terms of growing membership. Well, at that percentage change you're not going to get the sort of numbers we saw what we were able to achieve without changing your approach.
STEVE LIEBER: Very much looking at personalization and engagement, understanding what it is people are interested in is as I used before it's understanding what they want, when they want it, and in the format they want to receive it. Very much. [INTERPOSING VOICES]
JAKE ZARNEGAR: If I could jump in and ask you a question. The new products and diversified revenues these were new information products, new newsletters and feeds, were there were new events, as well?
STEVE LIEBER: Yeah, I mean, the common denominator is content. Content can be delivered in a multitude of ways from face-to-face events, digital events to digital products and services, campaigns and such. So it really is starting back with the content and then thinking about how can I deliver that. Some of it is old tech, it's webinars but it's relevant, it's timely, and that sort of thing. Others are infographics and such that are delivered to the very designated audience because that's what they're looking at.
STEVE LIEBER: So they're interested in what's the market doing in this particular subject and that sort of thing. So yeah, it's all around content but it very much is very different from platforms and delivery mechanisms. And so I guess the summary point here at the bottom is all of this drove us at HIMSS. To be very different in how we looked at our association, how we looked at our responsibility as management objectives really making sure that we weren't overly deliberate, overly slow in reacting and actually working to be more proactive in how we addressed the expectations and needs of the audiences we were trying to serve.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. Steve, I think we-- although I added a quote here at the end from your digital Lieutenant here who mentioned how easier his job was once they started introducing audience behavior tracking into the system so he could figure out what's working and how to fix it, if things weren't well.
STEVE LIEBER: And just to elaborate on this the ability to change the pricing mechanism for those legion campaign was also significant because we were delivering qualified leads in a fraction of the time and they were highly qualified leads as well. And so the price per lead on that was considerably different than what we were charging before. So this also helped fuel the growth in the sense that we didn't have to grow the number of campaigns by 10x but we could change the price by 10x.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Right. Great, well, I'm glad we ended. Hopefully not a tragedy. Maybe not a comedy either I'm not exactly sure what drama this was. Hit the limits of my drama knowledge, but Stephanie I believe you've got a few questions for us and I want to leave us some time to be able to answer questions from the audience.
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE HANSEN: Yes, absolutely we've got a few questions rolling in. And two are related to each other sort of about getting started. So what's the best first step? And related to that what are some of the issues that typically hinder the implementation of a CDP? And how long does that process typically take?
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Sure. I can answer more on the technical side. I think Steve has more of a read on the organizational hurdles that might be there or the strategic hurdles. On the technical side, many people start with on a data audit of what actual customer information and behavioral data we have across our systems and what would be the most valuable to bring together.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So just even stepping back and understanding where your content is, how people are interacting with it, what data is being produced by those systems already is a good place to start. On the CDP side you would then hook your CDP into those data flows. So these are integrations. Most people will know that integration projects can be complicated.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Most CDPs have built translators already for most of the major marketing systems, most of the major CRM systems and CMS systems. So you can get a head start. Although folks have customized those systems quite a bit. So most implementations take somewhere between well, really anywhere between six weeks and six months, depending on how many systems you want to connect together, and how much data you have and how much you've customized those systems.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So if you've customized your AMS or your CRM heavily it might take a little more integration work to get the data out from that system and normalize into the CDP. So that's the pure technical, the pure technical side. I'm not so sure the technical hurdles or the hurdles that are holding a lot of organizations back on this, Steve.
STEVE LIEBER: No, it really isn't. I think it starts with business philosophy. Is the enterprise and I've used that word a couple of times to make this a bigger question than just the publishing unit or the digital media unit. It is an enterprise decision that this is the direction we're going to go. And so you need to-- in many organizations-- change the culture and recognize that this is what's going to drive us in the future and that we're going to invest in the technology that's going to make it possible.
STEVE LIEBER: So I think I agree with Jake, I think, most likely you should expect to be on the long side of that timeline, he said closer to six months than six weeks. It is a time where you may choose to make some changes in your technology because you will come to realize that some of the technology that you have in place isn't that great. And so let's change out.
STEVE LIEBER: Our CRM or let's change out our digital media. [INTERPOSING VOICES] Yeah, and so that also influences it. And so it is an involved process that takes time. There's a training period as well getting to the point of having your staff. Understand why you're doing this, what the benefit is, and then at the same time engaging your business development sales group to also build out the products and services that are now possible as a result of doing this.
STEVE LIEBER: Because there's great internal value for this but there is also great external value in terms of the ability to develop new products and services. STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: Great.
HANSEN: Well, thank you both. I think we have time for one more question. One question that I know a lot of people are thinking about any time the word data comes up is how is this affected by GDPR and other user privacy policies?
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Sure, that is a good question. I think one of the most important things to stress here is that in general, especially for publishers and associations we're looking at this 0 party and first party data as the primary sources. So this is data that should have been captured directly, which puts it in a much safer position for you to aggregate and use yourself than, say, if you purchase data or you're using third party data, which may be much more restricted by current and upcoming privacy controls.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: 0 party data is frankly volunteered to you and filled out directly. And most folks will accept the collection and use of first party data by an association. It may limit your ability to say resell those insights or in that manner but it shouldn't restrict you from using it in a closed loop system where you are using it to improve the products and services you're offering directly to those members.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I mean certainly at Hum at all the CDPs we keep a close eye on GDPR, other privacy policies in California, and elsewhere. And again, most of them are really focused on the third party data markets, the tracking across properties that you're not directly controlling indirect interactions being used. So you're generally on the safe side for now with using direct data that you've captured.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: Great.
HANSEN: Well, with that and we are about out of time. So I will just launch this poll here. Thank you so much everyone for joining us. If you have time to just give us a quick rating, we'd appreciate that. And otherwise we thank you Jake and Steve so much for these insights. They're both available for further questions if you want to reach out and get in touch. And I do want to just mention that the next event in this series will take place on September 9th, and it is titled Beyond Books and Journals, the Wild World of Content Formats.
HANSEN: So thank you again for joining us today, and we hope to see you on future events. Thanks, Steve and Jake.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Steve.
STEVE LIEBER: Thank you. Thank you.
Segment:0 .
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: Hello, and welcome,
HANSEN: my name is Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen. I am the director of marketing at Silverchair, and I want to thank you for joining us for today's event. This is the second in the 2021 platform strategies webinar series, and we're really looking forward to the day's discussion between Jake Zarnegar and Steve Lieber. But before I hand it over to them, I will cover just a few housekeeping items. As I mentioned this event is the second in the platform strategies webinar series, and we're hoping that when you registered you also registered for the next two events.
HANSEN: But if not you can still do so via the same registration link. The series is a set of free virtual events and just as with the in-person iteration, we're excited to field your questions and engage in discussions that carry beyond this hour. So please do engage with us via the Q&A as we go along and we will have some time for discussion at the end of the event. This event is being recorded.
HANSEN: A copy of the recording will be available on our website and sent out to you via email. And finally at the end, we will have a single one question survey, just requesting your rating of the event which helps us with future planning. So we'd appreciate your feedback. And with that, I'm happy to introduce our speakers today. With over 35 years experience and association management, Steve Lieber consults on governance, technology, and business strategy.
HANSEN: For more than 18 years, he served as the president and CEO of HIMSS, the world's largest association focused on health care information technology. During his time, HIMSS grew by a factor of 10 in terms of audience reach and annual revenues, and you'll get to hear more about that later today. As a nationally recognized commentator on health policy, health care IT trends and association management, he's a regular speaker and contributor to corporate strategic planning efforts.
HANSEN: And we are very excited to have you with us today. Jake Zarnegar wears two hats these days as the chief business development officer at Silverchair as well as the Chief Growth Officer of Hum. Jake has served professional association and scientific publishing community for more than 20 years by leading the development and adoption of SaaS platforms such as Silverchair's platform as well as online training and certification with Silverchair learning systems.
HANSEN: Now at home, Jake is working with technologists and association leaders to unify content and usage across their digital properties and to develop rich insights about individuals and groups. We are excited to have them with us today. And with that, I'll hand it over to you.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: All right, great, wow. After Steve's intro I thought you pretty much should have said and also Jake is here today. Steve and I have done a few presentations together in the past. We hope that we put something together today that will be thought provoking and help you think about how to implement some new strategies at your association or in your publishing operation around how to use customer data to advance new and existing business lines.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Now the title of our talk here today is how unifying your data expands reach, revenue, and impact. And if only it was that easy, it's the beginning step of an intentional strategy to do that at your organization. So you must use that data as well. And Steve is going to talk in particular about the real practicalities of using that data in his experience.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I am going to introduce us during the day and also take some time to describe the class of software that is new in the space, the customer data platforms and their ilk that are enabling this unification of data and what you can do with it. So we decided on a whim, mostly because I'm an English major to organize this webinar as in a Drama format.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So I have instructed Steve and I to only speak in strict iambic pentameter throughout the presentation. I hope no one's checking that because I've already blown it. And we're going to follow a very static or steady drama scope here. There'll be an introduction, some exposition, definitely some conflict and a climax like in the HIMSS example here.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And then I guess we'll have to move to the denouemont, and mostly I just wanted the opportunity to say denouemont as an English major later in life. So that is now checked off. So I'm going to start out and really frame what we're seeing as the opportunity for associations and for publishers around user data. And also kind of highlight a problem that is a little bit of a stumbling block for publishers and associations of using that data today.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Steve is going to introduce the audience strategy. We'll talk about the technology then we'll go into the HIMSS case study. So just to get us started here with the opportunity. I think it's really important to recognize the strong and positive position that many publishers and associations sit-in inside of their relationship with their audience. I think one of the most important things to start out with is that you're not simply a single-- you're not creating a single value for the audiences that you reach.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: You obviously have readers, you have authors, you have those that are learning, you have those that are getting credentialed in their discipline and looking to advance their careers, those looking to connect to a community or advocate, a position. So you're really providing a wide variety of value to your audiences. And a lot of times that's through many, many different platforms and many different digital touch points.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So it's the accumulation or the culmination of all of these values that establishes your overall value as a publisher or as an association with that audience member. The second thing I'd like to set up is that almost every publisher we work with, in fact, every publisher we work with, an association has a larger audience than it's paying subscribers or members. Well, of course, the member or subscriber who is very committed to paying money and accessing your product or service is extremely important and should be at the core of everything you do.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: There are a large amount of folks who orbit around your association or your publishing operation who get value from you. Sometimes not consistently or in lesser ways, and I pulled an organization here who volunteered to give me this data that an 8,400 member organization that has 100,000 people in their pro-active email lists that they can reach directly.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: But they also have a global audience of a million people that are coming to access their content. And the concept that they were working with is that, hey, we need to understand every one of these pieces of our audience. We need to understand every member not just the members, but we need to understand the audience that is coming to us occasionally or for certain purposes just as well as we understand our members.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And so that we can offer them value and also bring them closer into the organization and turn them into identified member or members. The other trend that we're really seeing right now, which I believe is that the potential of being a positive for publishers and associations, is the trend towards personalization personalized experiences and connected experiences. So this is really coming over from the commercial side.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: We think about the digital services that we interact with be the streaming services or news platforms or other types of services. They're really looking to connect your experience not just across devices but across products by the same organization. Understand who you are and what you want when you arrive. And this is becoming an expectation of digital information consumers across the board and this chart was put together by a sales force report and you'll see that the generational change is only getting more urgent as far as demanding these connected processes be seamless handoffs.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: The understanding who I am and how I use services before I start using them. So this is a trend that may only grow. Yes, Steve.
STEVE LIEBER: Yeah, so before you go off the slide I want to add a little additional context to this and actually throw in another word. Personalized also equals relevant. We have been in the process over generations of establishing-- I used to do it a year or two out we would have an editorial calendar and that's what we were going to publish on that calendar regardless of what else was going on. Well, that obviously has changed to some degree.
STEVE LIEBER: But I think really what Jake's pushing here is the concept of personalization meaning get me things that are relevant to me. Things that I want to see when I want to see it and we've got to connect these dots again later when we start talking about audience behaviors and such. But this is more than just simply when I open up my browser, and from my subscription that it says, hi, Steve, that's not enough.
STEVE LIEBER: It has to be more personalized that in the content that's being delivered is based upon what you know about me and obviously the more you know about me and the more you know about what I'm looking at, the more relevant or more personalized the engagement is going to be.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: That's right, Steve and thanks for that clarification. You also broke up my soliloquy. Sorry I had to get that word in there, also.
STEVE LIEBER: You've got a checklist of words to get in here today.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: How did you know that? OK, so the other thing that I think is a real advantage position for publishers and associations that most of your digital interactions are actually direct. You have your own websites and platforms where you're hosting your publications, your members are coming or subscribers are coming directly to you to get that data, and so you're able to gather what we call 0 party data.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: That which is people filling out forms to subscribe or to receive newsletters. But also you have direct access to observe data. So this generally is not happening on some other platform like Facebook or Twitter, where you don't have as much access to. If this activity is happening, the reading and value activities happening on your CMS, your LMS you actually have all of the observed first party data available to you, which is a real advantage for understanding those users better than others.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And if we really put it together here, there is really a strong strength position for associations and publishers. I've kind of outlined the strengths here that I see as key. The reputation and brand being extremely strong. You do have a large amount of subscribers and members and even larger audiences you're reaching worldwide with your content.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: There's great technology inside of publishers and inside of associations that is really purpose built to do things like deliver, content or education. And then of course the products and content is generally of high quality and very valuable in total. And finally, there's a lot of data being captured by all of your digital systems. All of that interaction data is generally captured.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: It's rarely thrown away. So it's somewhat available to you at this point. Now you'll note that there seems to be another half to this chart which has been excised here. We'll show that one in just a second. Because I wanted to bring up the kind of main thesis of today, which is that associations and publishers really currently lack the infrastructure to bring these coordinated digital experiences across.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Though you have the raw materials, as we noted, there are very few publishers and associations that are truly fully coordinating and understanding how to bring relevant and only relevant content to each of their audience members as individuals, and Steve is going to be talking about that going forward. So if I added a gap analysis to the strengths here and associations.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I don't think there's any gap in the reputation and brand, frankly. Where membership and audience is concerned, though you have a large group. Most publishers don't actually know very much about their audience as far as very finite segments as well as individual information about their audience members. Where there is great technology, there's not a kind of unifying data platform in many places behind the scenes bringing it all together.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: The content and products, well, they're very great in high quality are generally one-sized fit so you'll need to hunt through a large corpus in order to find the relevant content yourself. And then on the data side, the fact that the data is not unified means there's no kind of complete picture of your audience and individuals in there. So those are some gaps that we're going to talk about today.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And if this was a checkoff play, this would be the loaded gun introduced in act 1. You look at this chart right here and you see that as the younger generation, even though they're 75% of the workforce coming up, they're not joining these traditional institutions at the same rate. And this is the loaded gun which is due to go off sooner or later. You can't continue with an aging membership or aging subscriber and author group, you really need to reach the next generation of producers, of authors, of readers, and get them to find and see the value that your organization is providing.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So this is really the challenge here, is how do we get these numbers at your organization and other organizations to really even out, so that you're reaching all kind of digital folks together. So, Steve, with that setup in which I introduced some hope and also some conflict I'm going to pass it over to you for a bit of exposition here of the audience strategy.
STEVE LIEBER: Absolutely, well, as to English and drama majors, number two is usually called the confrontation. And it involves the obstacles as well as the complications. And so I'm going to introduce the obstacles that we have in getting to the ultimate outcomes of our play today. And so in particular, we're going to be talking about audience strategy. And we're also going to be talking about the complication that is occurring today and this is not just pandemic COVID complication, but as Jake just introduced the complication of changing demographics and other things.
STEVE LIEBER: So to get to the heart of the matter here what we're going to talk about is the audience strategy. And before I go into that, I'm going to talk about some broader sort of business strategies as well. But what we're foreshadowed the ultimate objective, the outcome of our performance today it is to improve revenue and impact. And it doesn't matter whether you're an association or society publisher, you have membership, you have subscribers, all of these objectives are consistent with what is in your business plan.
STEVE LIEBER: And so I think you'll find this to be extremely relevant. I've been down this path a couple of times. As I have served as the CEO of two different associations and the first one at the Emergency Nurses Association was pre-internet day. And so the challenge we had then in growing audience and an improving engagement was undertaken with a completely different set of strategies than I used at HIMSS.
STEVE LIEBER: HIMSS is a technology oriented association in health care. When I joined there in 2000, it was a relatively small $10 million a year operation. When I left there three years ago $100 million a year annual budget and really at the heart of that was a set of activities that we're going to introduce in act IV. Well, let's talk a little bit about what's going on.
STEVE LIEBER: What are the obstacles and what's going on in both the association and society world as well as in subscriber based operations. And so from a business standpoint, we have traditionally looked at things from a subscriber or member perspective. We called ourselves in the association of world, membership organization. And it really reinforced the thought that there was a primary line of business and everything else was secondary.
STEVE LIEBER: Hence the rise of the term non-dues income. It was as if it's something else. Well, in many associations, and I would suggest in the publisher world, you are starting to see if you have headed down this path. The opportunity to equal or exceed your revenue from your membership or your subscriber through other activities as you grow audience and engage in other business strategies.
STEVE LIEBER: And that really is where on the right hand side, we're getting to. We're becoming much more entrepreneurial. We're diversifying our business lines so that we're not held hostage in a sense to just that one primary line of business. Audience and we're going to dig into this in more detail later. Becoming much more expansive that we are moving from member or subscriber centric to audience, and we'll talk about what that means.
STEVE LIEBER: But the shorthand here is subscribers, or members, and others. Content again, the belief traditionally was nobody can produce content like I can't. We produce the best content and the readers really only need to read our content, well, that's not real. Never was and in the rise of the digital world and environment the access to other content is so easy that we need to move our thinking around just the content I produce to being an aggregator.
STEVE LIEBER: So it is our own content but also third party. Technology this is-- we're going to talk a little bit about that as well. This is what underpins all of it. It is rapidly changing and in fact, the ability to do what I did at HIMSS over the past 10, 12 years is significantly easier and cheaper to do today than when I started down this path 12, 15 years ago.
STEVE LIEBER: A product, the product strategy that you should be thinking about, again, is much like what I was describing before. We need to get away from the concept that we have one primary product, the subscription to our magazine or subscription to our website or our membership in the organization to be thinking about multiple products that we're focused on not only a high number of products but the ability to scale them and deliver them in large quantities.
STEVE LIEBER: And then media and marketing, again, a change from the way we've operated thinking that media and marketing was there to promote our business. And now the idea-- and to find out using that on who we're trying to reach. Well, there are many more things that media can deliver to us here and media here can be various kinds of digital and social media.
STEVE LIEBER: But it's not only using those for different purposes but also using analytics associated with them. And again, those of you in the publishing world much more so than I think in the association world, very familiar with the various analytics tools that are available to you to help you understand audience behavior and really get beyond just the who and getting into the why and how. What am I interested in, why am I interested in it, and how do I want to receive that content, all of those are things that are very much in the thinking today as associations and subscriber-based organizations move into a different environment.
STEVE LIEBER: As I mentioned technology underpins your ability to move from that traditional to transformational environment. The absence of the technology and the absence of your adopting it in each of those broad strategy categories, whether it's your audience strategy or your product strategy or media strategy all of those will involve technology to some extent.
STEVE LIEBER: And so questions you want to ask yourself, as you're sort of doing a self-assessment this is, I have a bigger model that I use in my consulting series of questions that results in a score sort of digital capability and technology intelligence. But these are three key questions to ask yourself and being really honest. Are you driven by your digital technology capabilities.
STEVE LIEBER: Now again, in the publishing world you had to. Print was dying 10 years ago. We put it in the ground maybe five years ago, and you folks are deep into this. On the association society side much slower to adapt to the digital environment and what I find quite often is, well, behind in terms of digital adoption. Making data driven decision.
STEVE LIEBER: We want to say that, oh, yes I'm fact based. I think if we test that a lot of times we'll find that fact is often the intuition disguised as a fact but having the technology to truly look at a situation, analyze it, and then come up with an informed decision that really is key. And then using audience behaviors preferences personalization, that relevancy that Jake introduced previously here.
STEVE LIEBER: Very key in making sure that you have that information, the behavior of your audience, their preferences, and personalization or relevancy for you to develop and grow the product services that you're wanting to. For the objective of growing the audience, size is important. We all know that. Increasing engagement, that's where your advertisers, your sponsors, your financial underwriters will pay more to the extent that you can show engagement versus just simply presenting it to an audience and hoping they'll click onto it.
STEVE LIEBER: And then obviously as a result of those first two things driving revenue. So digging more deeply into the one broad business strategy around audience. These are some key points for us to sort of explore in a little more detail. Again, I introduced the broad concept on audience strategy that we need to define it differently. We need to recognize that there are different people that you can reach and who are interested in what you have to produce your content, even if they're not subscribers.
STEVE LIEBER: So creating the opportunity for some form of your content to go to audiences other than subscribers. Do you differentiate what content you deliver to which audience? Of course, you do. But recognizing that you have a broader opportunity and therefore a greater ability to drive your reach, your revenue, and your impact is really key.
STEVE LIEBER: Understanding that vendors, companies, sponsors, underwriters, whatever you call those group of people who pay you things, they are also part of your audience. It's not just you are taking their money and helping to deliver them to an audience, but they are also an audience for you and so there are other products and services that you can create. Leveraging the very rich data resource that you have, which is your engaged audience.
STEVE LIEBER: Note I just changed the terminology there from subscriber to engaged audience. You have the ability to deliver to these folks, new products and services beyond your traditional subscriber product and they become a much more important audience to you because they again increase your reach, your impact, and the people that want to connect with them. You just keep adding concentric circles into your target.
STEVE LIEBER: Recognizing that those nonsubscribers are key and really do become a core audience, yet may not be the absolute middle bullseye but recognizing that nonsubscriber, nonmembers are people that you want to create access for them to receive some level of your content absolutely critical. Marketing and media, I talked about this before, that we're really focused here on engagement versus promotion.
STEVE LIEBER: And this is really a key concept. It's also important to recognize here that audience acquisition is only a step not the objective. Audience engagement is really the objective. You may have an audience but unless you engage them, you're not able to really maximize the opportunity not only in the reach but also the revenue that can be associated with this. And then from your technology standpoint really need to move beyond who, and again, Jake introduced this in your 0, first, and second party data.
STEVE LIEBER: We really need to move beyond just that who, is that-- we pretty well mastered that one especially if you're subscriber-based that you've seen that subscription fill out to them every year. So you know who but understanding why, and the analytics and the technology necessary to do that. That's really at the heart of what we're talking about here.
STEVE LIEBER: As society thinks. So again, I've introduced the concept here about moving from just simply subscriber or member to audience. And then have also introduced the concept here of engagement. And it really is an important aspect here is to repeat what I've just said before summarize the points here, it is about focusing your value proposition on audience preferences and behaviours.
STEVE LIEBER: Give them what they're looking for not what you're wanting to produce. And recognize the differences in your audience. And so being able to create multiple versions for different segments of your audience key. Next, summary point here very much about audience engagement. Really want to make sure that that's the objective. And then very much just, the final point here largest possible audience.
STEVE LIEBER: We all know that we want to grow our membership base, grow our subscriber base, but that is a limiting thought. Get out of the mindset of, I'm trying to grow my membership or my subscriber base, really trying to grow my audience, and then recognize that without the analytics of understanding more about them. The ability to drive engagement is going to be extremely hard to achieve.
STEVE LIEBER: Jake, back to you.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. Well, especially your last point here about reaching your audience through analytics. I'll take the baton here and move it forward. Although that was totally not a play related pun there. I will say that I introduced the fact to Steve that we were going to be using drama terminology all of five minutes before this presentation. So he picked it up valiantly, in fact, he really kind of started in media res, and carried the narrative forward for us.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So I'm going to move us to Act III here. And I want to introduce a piece of-- we've introduced all the things that you could and should be doing to unify and understand your audience but then we really need to get into the how. We don't want to only present you with a opportunity or a problem to be solved but not some tools to do so. And so I wanted to introduce a new class of software to you and in particular the customer data platform.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: But first, I wanted to show you a little bit of research here from Forrester that came out just a few months ago around what organizations are doing to try to create these relevant or personalized experiences. And one of the interesting things that was even called out in this report was that people are trying to skip the line and go right to relevance and personalization without actually building a foundation of understanding their audience or their customers.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: The idea that something could quickly adjust itself on the fly without actually understanding the fundamental interests or needs of the customers. So they called out the fact that you're twice as many people investing directly in personalization but not actually in customer analytics to understand their audiences. A little bit backwards. McKinsey coming from the same position really took the fundamental thing, approach here.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: He said, "Hey, listen you really need to set up a centralized customer data platform and start aggregating all of these digital interactions from your audience to understand." And that would serve as the foundation for all of these customer journey and relevance and personalization that you want to provide, coordination of experience for your customers. And they really see this as a foundational element here.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So this slide is scary because it pretty much represents the technology stack of a full organization. The way that you organize and reach your audience and provide your products from back to front. And the areas that are highlighted here in gray are the foundational services that underpin all of your websites, your applications, your products, your services, and right here in the middle around customer data management ingest process and unify customer data, customer data activation, managing data, and creating segments to understand your audience with granular levels, and then of course data intelligence.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So reporting and visualization prediction around what would appeal to a certain audience segments. These are all parts that the CDP, the Customer Data Platform is designed to cover. Now, you'll see there is a ton of other types of technologies and functions on this page. And in fact, the burgeoning customer data platform market which has really only been around now for about five to seven years has been really confounded by a lot of organizations inside of these other areas.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Trying to kind of claim that stale. Oh, we're running your advertising, so we understand your customers and contract them across. So we understand their behaviors and interests or our marketing system is understanding what is appealing to folks. And it's true that they can understand what's appealing in their interactions. But the whole point of a customer data platform is to bring together all of that intelligence together in one place and unify it.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So just to give you some examples if you are unfamiliar with the CDP market. There are large integrated CDPs, so both Salesforce and the Adobe experience platform came out with a CDP as part of their large integrated suite of products that include things like CRM and website builders and digital experience pieces. And both of them, actually-- last year-- introduced a separate CDP offering that can be purchased separately as part of their suite.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: There are also large standalone customer data platforms that again aren't attached to a large suite like Segment or Lytics. These are generally used in the what I would call the B2B2C markets. So those that are working with e-commerce vendors and others to sell products directly to consumers. And then finally, there's a large specialized CDPs, I brought Hum in here because that's my prerogative.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And I also brought in Wicket. These are two that are designed for associations and media rich organizations, in particular. Not trying to focus as much on the e-commerce conversion of the large standalone CDPs. So there are more out there. It's a very healthy and growing area of technology. It's really evolution of a lot of the marketing, the CRM, and the early and AMSs and early marketing platforms and trying to build in more capture of the digital interaction.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And in fact what they're really designed to do is to bring together all of the demographic and purchase and subscription and any sort of information that you have around purchase or event attendance together with the actual behavior, the customer behavior and interests as expressed on your products. So what content are they reading, what topics are they interested in. So you're bringing together all of your CRM and transactional information with your usage information.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And then also it's extremely important, you also need to unify your marketing data. So what actually works to entice or inspire someone to engage with you? What type of marketing is working? Is this someone who responds to your social versus email response to certain emails at certain times or in certain ways? So understanding how your audience members want to be marketed to and reached is also part of it.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So right now these three are all kind of kept separately. And the point of the customer data platform is to bring this audience data together. So the three main value propositions from a CDP that are separate and different from each of these three classes are, first of all it combines all of that demographic and purchase registration data together with behavioral data into one single record.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Those records are unified, they're also normalized so that you have you can have a bunch of different systems sending in data and it creates one unified record with many different fields and facets on it, of course. The second thing that's very important on the CDP market is that it thinks in real time. You need your digital customer information to be up to date. It cannot be old, it cannot wait weeks or months to be updated with information from activities say at a meeting or in an LMS about course, where you need that information to immediately update the next experience.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: If you want to have a coordinated and relevant experience each of your applications needs to know everything that's happening on the other applications and how it affects that user's interests immediately. It's also kind of a replacement for many associations, and publishers might use the editorial survey or the customer survey, a couple of times a year. That's extremely delayed data.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And it's definitely not happening very often. So interests change at the drop of a hat, and you can capture that in real time. And finally, the concept that if you're going to as you should work to provide make predictions about what's going to be relevant and what I should surface to audience members and segments you want to have the complete picture of that audience member.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: You don't want to be missing core aspects of their behavior or their interests. You need it all to be together. When it's not together you get things like-- I recently actually met-- many years ago, I visited New York City with my family and I went up to the Empire State Building and the observation deck which was great. And then I got a ton of advertising across Google for the next week about buying tickets to go to the observation deck.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Well, I just did that. So they saw that I had searched but they hadn't been updating and combining in real time to see that I actually bought tickets and went there. By the way I'm sure Google's figured that out by now. They seem to be able to combine data quite well. So the point of implementing something like a CDP or a similar technology to unify your audience is really to unlock this advantage you have.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: You have unique data that no one else has. If you're publishing content and you have an audience interacting with it, that interests expression, the behavior that is yours and yours only. So being able to take that, combine it with what you know about your audiences, your authors, your readers, your funders, subscribers, et cetera, and tailor experiences gives you an advantage to provide relevant content towards those users that other folks won't have.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So I wanted to give you a quickie look at what you can expect to see in CDPs. The first thing is that you'll actually see maybe for the first time your total audience. We have a lot of folks who are unclear about how many different folks are interacting with their digital properties across. So you'll start seeing a whole lot of anonymous folks and many identified sometimes members, subscribers.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: All CDP will contain audience segmentation tools so you can actually build segments that are relevant to you using any facet of demographic or behavior. So if you're looking for folks who have been heavy readers of a certain content in the last certain time period in order to promote a webinar on that same topic to them you can segment your audience that way and build profile lists like that to feed more effective marketing.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: You will have comprehensive individual profiles. CDPs are there to create a unified record around each customer. So it will contain everything from purchases to reading a history to other interactions all together in one place and builds a profile for each individual. Some CDPs, especially ones focused on media rich organizations like publishers and associations will actually also give you content analysis of what audience segments you are engaging with your content as well.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: And which content is being successful in reaching the target audience that the content is intended for. And finally the CDPs can be used to seed growth and engagement campaigns. And to give you a couple of ideas, you can develop audiences, lookalike audiences et cetera from behavior on your applications to nurture new growth campaigns to bring new folks who look like these folks or share similar interests into your publication, essay authors, or readers, as well as providing other products education, certifications et cetera that you might have available as you diversify your product line as Steve notes.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So Steve I ran through that real fast of the technology behind it but I think your act IV is probably the most important act here because it shows what can happen when you put all of these concepts as well as the technology into practice together.
STEVE LIEBER: Absolutely, thank you, Jake. Yeah, there are a lot of concepts that have been put out here and what we did starting some years ago before the existence of CDPs. These concepts became clear to my team and sort of foreshadow again a closing comment that team is now working with Hum and bringing what we learned into Hum and very much influencing the direction of that product.
STEVE LIEBER: We saw the importance of growing our core membership into a broader audience. We saw how we needed to create new products, new campaigns, and such to grow revenue and such. And so utilizing the very principles that Jake and I have talked about today. Here's where we were in 2013 and just to digress a quick moment, HIMSS had been an investor in a small publishing company in the early 2000s and by 2013 we had acquired 100% of that publishing company.
STEVE LIEBER: We brought new team in and really started focusing on the idea of growing audience, growing beyond our traditional publishing activities, and really starting to introduce all of those various strategies that I highlighted in the earlier presentation. So in 2013 when we really got underway with this we were sitting with a membership of about 50,000 people. Well, in five years' time as we went through this process of understanding our audience, pulling the data together, and again, this predates technology that existed today so we had to build it.
STEVE LIEBER: And the end result of this as we moved forward to today is a growth as we can see in this line of a factor of considerable effort. And this was done through a very-- today I can say-- natural process. It was not necessarily extraordinary even though when we look back on it, yeah, this is a pretty remarkable slide and one that serve the association well.
STEVE LIEBER: But it became a natural sort of set of processes for us as we built our audience funnel and work through the engagement process. And in the audience we're using here is engaged. This is not an active email list, this is the audience that was taking something from us. They were buying, they were downloading, they were engaging, they were taking an active step on their own to reach into the content and do something with it.
STEVE LIEBER: And so the process of pulling all this together of using analytics it works. It really translates into a very different sort of outcome. And on the revenue side we saw a comparable sort of growth. We basically doubled again the association revenue in this time period from about 50 million annual revenue in 2013 to about 100 million by the end of this point.
STEVE LIEBER: And that occurred across the organization because we took these same principles around the publishing side and made sure it was relevant across all of the activities of the organization. So it isn't just something that is relevant to the publishing side that is a very relevant to the entire enterprise. And this shows really how that is able to transform the entire enterprise, not just the publishing side.
STEVE LIEBER: And it very much is about going from what most subscriber-based organizations, member-based organizations have been faced with which is really a relatively slow moving change in that audience. 2%, 3% a year, especially in the association world is considered pretty average pretty standard in terms of growing membership. Well, at that percentage change you're not going to get the sort of numbers we saw what we were able to achieve without changing your approach.
STEVE LIEBER: Very much looking at personalization and engagement, understanding what it is people are interested in is as I used before it's understanding what they want, when they want it, and in the format they want to receive it. Very much. [INTERPOSING VOICES]
JAKE ZARNEGAR: If I could jump in and ask you a question. The new products and diversified revenues these were new information products, new newsletters and feeds, were there were new events, as well?
STEVE LIEBER: Yeah, I mean, the common denominator is content. Content can be delivered in a multitude of ways from face-to-face events, digital events to digital products and services, campaigns and such. So it really is starting back with the content and then thinking about how can I deliver that. Some of it is old tech, it's webinars but it's relevant, it's timely, and that sort of thing. Others are infographics and such that are delivered to the very designated audience because that's what they're looking at.
STEVE LIEBER: So they're interested in what's the market doing in this particular subject and that sort of thing. So yeah, it's all around content but it very much is very different from platforms and delivery mechanisms. And so I guess the summary point here at the bottom is all of this drove us at HIMSS. To be very different in how we looked at our association, how we looked at our responsibility as management objectives really making sure that we weren't overly deliberate, overly slow in reacting and actually working to be more proactive in how we addressed the expectations and needs of the audiences we were trying to serve.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Great. Steve, I think we-- although I added a quote here at the end from your digital Lieutenant here who mentioned how easier his job was once they started introducing audience behavior tracking into the system so he could figure out what's working and how to fix it, if things weren't well.
STEVE LIEBER: And just to elaborate on this the ability to change the pricing mechanism for those legion campaign was also significant because we were delivering qualified leads in a fraction of the time and they were highly qualified leads as well. And so the price per lead on that was considerably different than what we were charging before. So this also helped fuel the growth in the sense that we didn't have to grow the number of campaigns by 10x but we could change the price by 10x.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Right. Great, well, I'm glad we ended. Hopefully not a tragedy. Maybe not a comedy either I'm not exactly sure what drama this was. Hit the limits of my drama knowledge, but Stephanie I believe you've got a few questions for us and I want to leave us some time to be able to answer questions from the audience.
STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE HANSEN: Yes, absolutely we've got a few questions rolling in. And two are related to each other sort of about getting started. So what's the best first step? And related to that what are some of the issues that typically hinder the implementation of a CDP? And how long does that process typically take?
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Sure. I can answer more on the technical side. I think Steve has more of a read on the organizational hurdles that might be there or the strategic hurdles. On the technical side, many people start with on a data audit of what actual customer information and behavioral data we have across our systems and what would be the most valuable to bring together.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So just even stepping back and understanding where your content is, how people are interacting with it, what data is being produced by those systems already is a good place to start. On the CDP side you would then hook your CDP into those data flows. So these are integrations. Most people will know that integration projects can be complicated.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Most CDPs have built translators already for most of the major marketing systems, most of the major CRM systems and CMS systems. So you can get a head start. Although folks have customized those systems quite a bit. So most implementations take somewhere between well, really anywhere between six weeks and six months, depending on how many systems you want to connect together, and how much data you have and how much you've customized those systems.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: So if you've customized your AMS or your CRM heavily it might take a little more integration work to get the data out from that system and normalize into the CDP. So that's the pure technical, the pure technical side. I'm not so sure the technical hurdles or the hurdles that are holding a lot of organizations back on this, Steve.
STEVE LIEBER: No, it really isn't. I think it starts with business philosophy. Is the enterprise and I've used that word a couple of times to make this a bigger question than just the publishing unit or the digital media unit. It is an enterprise decision that this is the direction we're going to go. And so you need to-- in many organizations-- change the culture and recognize that this is what's going to drive us in the future and that we're going to invest in the technology that's going to make it possible.
STEVE LIEBER: So I think I agree with Jake, I think, most likely you should expect to be on the long side of that timeline, he said closer to six months than six weeks. It is a time where you may choose to make some changes in your technology because you will come to realize that some of the technology that you have in place isn't that great. And so let's change out.
STEVE LIEBER: Our CRM or let's change out our digital media. [INTERPOSING VOICES] Yeah, and so that also influences it. And so it is an involved process that takes time. There's a training period as well getting to the point of having your staff. Understand why you're doing this, what the benefit is, and then at the same time engaging your business development sales group to also build out the products and services that are now possible as a result of doing this.
STEVE LIEBER: Because there's great internal value for this but there is also great external value in terms of the ability to develop new products and services. STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: Great.
HANSEN: Well, thank you both. I think we have time for one more question. One question that I know a lot of people are thinking about any time the word data comes up is how is this affected by GDPR and other user privacy policies?
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Sure, that is a good question. I think one of the most important things to stress here is that in general, especially for publishers and associations we're looking at this 0 party and first party data as the primary sources. So this is data that should have been captured directly, which puts it in a much safer position for you to aggregate and use yourself than, say, if you purchase data or you're using third party data, which may be much more restricted by current and upcoming privacy controls.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: 0 party data is frankly volunteered to you and filled out directly. And most folks will accept the collection and use of first party data by an association. It may limit your ability to say resell those insights or in that manner but it shouldn't restrict you from using it in a closed loop system where you are using it to improve the products and services you're offering directly to those members.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: I mean certainly at Hum at all the CDPs we keep a close eye on GDPR, other privacy policies in California, and elsewhere. And again, most of them are really focused on the third party data markets, the tracking across properties that you're not directly controlling indirect interactions being used. So you're generally on the safe side for now with using direct data that you've captured.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: STEPHANIE LOVEGROVE
HANSEN: Great.
HANSEN: Well, with that and we are about out of time. So I will just launch this poll here. Thank you so much everyone for joining us. If you have time to just give us a quick rating, we'd appreciate that. And otherwise we thank you Jake and Steve so much for these insights. They're both available for further questions if you want to reach out and get in touch. And I do want to just mention that the next event in this series will take place on September 9th, and it is titled Beyond Books and Journals, the Wild World of Content Formats.
HANSEN: So thank you again for joining us today, and we hope to see you on future events. Thanks, Steve and Jake.
JAKE ZARNEGAR: Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Steve.
STEVE LIEBER: Thank you. Thank you.
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