Adam Justis Senior Manager, Product Marketing Adobe Systems

For online media companies, conversion can mean many different things. The main goal may be to boost subscriptions for premium content, increase page views to promote growth in advertising inventory, or extend the amount of time visitors spend on your site. Often a company’s goals will include a combination of any or even all of these. Regardless of the desired outcome, online publishers today are looking to leverage their content and its presentation in ways that propel site visitors toward a desired action.

Traditionally, publishers have engaged with their audiences by operating under the adage “content is king”—the publisher with the scoops and exclusive stories had the competitive edge. But in today’s modern publishing world, this old adage, although still relevant, carries far less weight. While having exceptional content remains a prerequisite, the Internet has transformed content into a ubiquitous resource that is difficult to own or differentiate. Online content is highly perishable and—by and large—free. Audiences are more fickle than ever, and almost nothing prevents them from quickly jumping to another site to find the information and experience they are seeking. Today media sites have to be more than just relevant—they have to resonate with viewers.

As Many Opportunities as Challenges
While the challenges in today’s media landscape are vast, so are the opportunities. Audiences can consume content virtually anywhere, on multiple devices, and this translates into the chance for publishers to reach media consumers across many touch points. Public places, such as coffee shops and airports, are equipped with Wi-Fi access to make content and news constant companions. Social media sites have made media consumers active participants in the publishing process. New mobile devices make it possible to consume content on the go and in ways that were not possible just a few years ago. All of these trends have transformed and expanded the media ecosystem dramatically and have significantly increased media companies’ opportunities to inform, educate, and entertain consumers.

Along with these diverse, new opportunities for distributing their content, most media outlets are also sitting on enormous opportunities to improve the performance and revenue generated by their existing sites. In fact, many media outlets today focus immense budgets and energy on driving traffic to their websites—while investing far less on making proactive changes to their sites that facilitate visitors’ ability to accomplish what they came to the site to do in the first place. When publishers learn to effectively use analytics tools, they can track where visitors are spending their time on the site, which content and site elements are most engaging, which content and ads are most effective, and when and why visitors abandon their sites. Capturing and understanding session activity or historic visitor profiles can facilitate the delivery of relevant, targeted content and tailored messaging that result in more immersive and meaningful experiences for site visitors and competitive differentiation for the content provider.

According to Forrester Research, targeting online content drives productive visitor activity—yet marketers currently deliver targeted content to only 24% of website visitors, on average. Forrester further states 58% of marketers reported an incremental lift in conversions over the control group by 5% or more as a result of using relevance tactics. Content and messaging delivered with contextual meaning for website visitors—derived from current session activity or historic profiles—consistently outperforms generic one-size-fits-all content.

Next:  Making the case for optimization.