PUBLISHER SAYS SUBSCRIPTIONS GREW BY IMPLEMENTING SOPHISTICATED MARKETING RESEARCH RESULTS

“Robust and powerful readership research has been a key success factor in informing our decisions regarding reformatting our paper,” says Salt Lake City, Utah’s Deseret News publisher, Jim Wall. “You can’t make those critical life and death decisions in a data vacuum or with the old “golden gut” touch. You have to have all the decision-making intelligence you can lay your hands on to inform your decisions. You need real, accurate and insightful information,” he says.

“We needed to know our customers, their wants, what we needed to do to satisfy selected segments and how much we could charge them. You can’t be everything to everyone,” says Jim Wall.

“Like everyone in the newspaper business today, we considered numerous potential changes and directions to retain or even build our readership and have that power to drive our newspaper’s future. We needed to understand pricing with product. With some very advanced market research, we were able to inform our decisions on change with statistics and real time data. We discovered some very key, direction changing readership elements that drove our change in format and content. As we have implemented changes suggested by the research, we have been experiencing a modest increase in subscribership over the past 6 months.”

“Everyone knew changes were essential and we needed to change to survive. However, it wasn't easy to convince ownership of some changes we needed to implement. But, with the research supporting our decisions and the predictive modelling allowing us to show what would happen when the changes were made, we were able to persuade decision makers and do what was necessary. As we have worked our way through the changes, the results have been what the models predicted would happen.”

“For example,” he said, “The Deseret News research identified the paper’s solid core readership and subscriber base and defined the various segments in detail. We learned how much loyalty and interest each segment had towards us and most importantly, what drove that interest and loyalty. We were able to define in significant detail what they want from our paper and what they aren’t so interested in getting and how strongly those preferences would drive their future subscriptions and readership. We knew how much each interest was as a driver of decision and how strong each was when compared to the others. We learned how to combine the most important drivers to build the highest level of satisfaction. As a consequence, we were able to reliably focus on the most important issues and elements.”

“We found our core readership, even though quite broad in interest, had some very specific interests that we are uniquely qualified to meet. We were able to implement a stronger focus for specific readership oriented content of our news coverage. This focus, resulting in new content both in print and online, has been the driver of our increased subscribership. We also found that the read to win them over. To say the research has paid off would be a huge understatement!”

> Click here to see the full article (PDF).