‘Own your audience’: if publishers are doing it, so should semiconductor companies
The recent agreement by a German media industry giant to buy a venerable British national newspaper for £575m ($770m) might not ordinarily be a reason for semiconductor company marketers to choke with surprise on their morning cappuccino. Forecasts by music industry experts that global streaming services are living on borrowed time might also seem far removed from the world of semiconductors. But bear with me: these changes in the media world have important lessons for creators of technical marketing content about semiconductors and other deep tech products.
Let’s start with the story of the UK newspaper. The German media company Axel Springer has just agreed a deal to purchase the Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph is a British institution: it is so entwined with the country’s right-wing political elite that it almost operates as the house magazine of the Conservative party. Before he became UK prime minister, for instance, Boris Johnson was a highly-paid columnist for the paper.
But like so much of the traditional press, the Daily Telegraph had struggled to adapt to the shift from print-based to digital publishing, and suffered with both declining circulation for its continuing print editions, and with declining advertising revenues. To make up the difference, it had – like many publishers – turned to search engine marketing to try to drive traffic to its online site. Finally, the paper went through a long-running sale process, resulting eventually in the Springer purchase.
Now Axel Springer, which has found a successful business model for its German and US-based media operations, looks likely to apply it to the new British member of its stable of publications.
And according to a new blog by Fraser Nelson, a former editor of the Spectator magazine and a prominent figure in British political journalism, this model will abandon the previous reliance on search engine-driven clicks, and instead put a new emphasis on building a long-term audience of subscribers. Nelson reports Matthias Dopfner, Axel Springer’s boss, as saying,
‘The business model of maximising clicks and advertising is over. We must focus on deep and long-term relationships.’
Here’s how Nelson describes the new approach to maintaining and expanding the Telegraph’s audience:
‘Rather than platform dependency – the addiction to Google traffic and social referrals that has slowly killed so many titles – [Dopfner’s] view is stark: “Dependence on search and social is a weakness. Owning the audience is a strength.” The relationship with subscribers is where it’s at, and the method of looking after them is quality, trust, super-serving them.’
There is a lesson for semiconductor companies which publish material on their ‘owned media’ – their own website and blogsite, for instance: you can try to juice the search engine and AI algorithms to attract clicks, but you will get continually diminishing returns. The clicks from content which is engineered to fit the search algorithm will not be loyal, permanently interested viewers – they are just transitory clicks.
What you need to establish the technical authority of your brand is continually returning visitors – or as Fraser Nelson puts it, ‘the relationship with subscribers is where it’s at’.
It is technology which makes this subscriber-led approach to content marketing possible. It is the driver of disintermediation, giving creators the opportunity to have a direct relationship with their audience (and therefore, their customers). It is technology which tore apart the old newspaper model, and the old music publishing model. And technology is now threatening the model of music streamers such as Spotify, according to veteran music technology executive Jimmy Iovine.
Reported in a new blog by industry watcher Joel Gouveia, ‘streaming services...are minutes away from being obsolete’. Their problem? They have built a generic, undifferentiated service for a mass audience, while the value is in highly personalised content for niche audiences. As Gouveia says,
‘We are witnessing the death of the “mass audience” and the birth of the “micro-community”.’ As he comments, ‘The music industry has spent a decade obsessing over how to get a million people to listen to a song once. The next decade will be defined by artists figuring out how to get 1,000 people to care forever.’
Owning your audience. Micro-audiences which care forever. This is the new task for technical content marketers – and for ideas on how to do this, take a look at my white paper on subscriber-led content marketing.