It’s not news that media companies are struggling to maintain healthy revenue. Seismic shifts have occurred over the past two decades that have dramatically altered publishers’ ability to leverage advertising to make ends meet. From programatic buying to banner blindness to the rise of owned media, publishers’ revenue streams have been slowly chipped away to the point where many can no longer survive.
But there is hope. There is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. While that might sound trite and overly optimistic, it’s not.
Today, HubSpot Publishing and ISV Partner Program Sales Manager Melanie Collins wrote a blog post entitled Why Media Companies Are Struggling (And How Inbound Marketing Can Help) which outlines four ways inbound marketing can help publishers maintain a healthy revenue stream.
The gist? Publishers become resellers of inbound marketing services. What does that entail? In a nutshell, the publisher works with the advertiser to create an offer — say a whitepaper download, webinar, seminar, etc., creates a sponsored story/post to promote that offer, creates and manages the landing page on which the blog post points the reader to so they can enter their contact info and download the offer and manages the leads (which will be passed to the advertiser) collected from that offer.
That’s just a quick overview. Give Melanie’s post a read and we’re confident some bells of wisdom-learned will begin to ring inside your head. We’ve been employing a version of this approach for quite some time here on Adrants and we can confidently share that, hands down, it works and can most certainly recoup revenue lost through old school banner advertising.
