Buyer's Guide: Reaping the Fruits of Marketing Automation Tools

This article is from the Publishing Executive Buyer's Guide which is a publisher's reference on emerging technology in the media industry. You can find other Buyer's Guide Sections here:

Digital Publishing & Content Management Solutions

Webinar & Video Services

Audience Data Management

The magazine industry has proven itself resilient. Despite a still-recovering economy, PwC projects a modest increase in the global magazine market, rising in value from $81.9 billion in 2012 to reach $83.3 billion in 2017. The MPA reported a 5% overall increase in magazine advertising’s “footprint” across print and digital magazines for 2013.

This is all good news, however challenges remain for magazine publishers. While revenues are holding steady, their sources are shifting. According to Alliance for Audited Media, paid print subscriptions for U.S. consumer magazines were down 1.2% in the second half of 2013 and single-copy sales were down 11.1%. Balancing this, digital revenue streams are rising in prominence. Digital revenue from both circulation and advertising will account for 16% of total magazine industry revenues by 2017, up from less than 9% in 2013, according to PwC.

These shifts all indicate a future of greater digital revenue, digital engagement, digital audience development tactics, and a faster-paced, interactive marketing approach. Finding an audience and helping an audience find you becomes crucial, as does retaining and growing those audiences with savvy management of reader data. Those tasks are achieved differently from in the past, and increasingly with marketing automation tools.

Extending Your Reach
Marketing automation tools (such as HubSpot, Marketo, SilverPop, Eloqua) simplify and automate online marketing tasks. Basically, you set certain criteria and the system responds according to the rules. For example, you might have a rule that sends a follow up email to people who recently cancelled a subscription. Or your email newsletter program might tag individuals who read a specific article and follow up with similar content or a sponsor product suggestion.