This CMO’s 4 Takeaways From The Leaked New York Times Innovation Report
Over the past week, the discussion around the leaked New York Times Innovation Report has taken on a life of its own. Pundits and other journalists are throwing around phrases like “defining moment of the digital generation” and “one of the key documents of this media age.”
The ultimate truth in these proclamations remains to be seen, but you can be assured that marketers will be studying and learning from the report in the weeks and months ahead. And although the report is rooted in journalism, it is in many ways reflective of the challenges facing marketing organizations in any industry or market. For these reasons, it’s worth the time to read the document itself (here’s the full version) or at a minimum, check out some of the well-written summary reviews.
As a marketer at a marketing analytics company, I took a few minutes to digest and compile my key takeaways from the report:
1. The homepage as we know it is dying.
People are no longer proactively crawling to fixed content entry points. Rather, they are being carried to content destinations via shared links to specific stories. According to the report, The New York Times’ homepage traffic is down almost 50% in the past 2 years. At TrackMaven, our total website traffic is growing immensely, but the percentage of that traffic going to the homepage is steadily declining. This is partially due to a richer website with more pages, but also more specifically due to more traffic going straight to blogs and other resources.
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Implications for Marketers:
Think social first. Continue (or start) to aggressively build your communities of followers, and encourage and facilitate easy social sharing. Don’t publish anything without a supporting array of compelling social sound bites for distribution across channels. Also, make sure that any calls-to-action worth surfacing on the home page can be found from other parts of the site.
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Implications beyond Marketing:
Sales and account management teams can increase credibility in prospect and customer conversations with this insight into how buyers arrive at their digital doorstop. Understand that your customers are becoming more aware of this challenge, so make sure you know as much about it as they do. Stay ahead of it. This is where the need for granular, real-time insight into content performance becomes even more important.
2. Content doesn’t have an expiration date.
If your content was good enough to publish in the first place, then you should stand behind it for months and years to come. In many cases, content ages like a fine wine. Resurfacing and infusing existing material into an ongoing stream of fresh content can add credibility and drive traffic. The report cites cases where The New York Times’ competitors got more traffic from NYT stories than the NYT itself, based on re-packaging past NYT content.
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Implications for Marketers:
Recycle content strategically. Don’t be afraid to re-surface some of your strongest material over time. Tactically, this means point-in-time plays like “Top blog posts of XYZ time period,” or promoting something based on current events. You can also re-purpose content in different formats (longer/shorter, visual/text/video, etc.). More strategically, this highlights the opportunity to carve out or create topically oriented, living/breathing resource centers spanning content new and old.
3. If Content is King, Search is Queen.
On so many levels. The digital report included lots of discussion around how The New York Times’ internal politics slowed down their inability to or lack of success at tagging content, resulting in much lower search rankings and page traffic.
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Implications for Marketers:
Be conscious of how you tag content of all types and formats. This will help with user discovery, which helps with social sharing. Keep your foot on the pedal with SEO everywhere — homepage, blogs/resources, and static “about” pages. People aren’t looking for you (or don’t know how to), so make sure they can find you blindfolded.
4. “Employed” is your most under-appreciated Marketing channel.
Just as critical as paid, owned, and earned. The New York Times’ report illustrated how strong the correlation is between traffic to stories and journalists who cultivate their follower bases and promote their stories. Marketers often overlook the fact that they have a built in army of advocates for their company, their products, their customers and the challenges they address.
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Implications for Marketers:
Infuse employee advocacy into your company culture so that content sharing happens organically from within. We must all commit to sharing our own content in a genuine – not overtly promotional — fashion. We are all incented for our companies to succeed; we are all brand stewards, and we must all be part of the conversation. This also gives us the opportunity to be Challengers — to become trusted thought leaders for people you’re connected to across your networks — online and off.
The report generated some thought-provoking conversation internally here at TrackMaven, and I’d love to hear your thoughts as well. Join the conversation with us on Twitter at @TrackMaven.
Ian Walsh is CMO and Chief Marketing Maven at TrackMaven. A veteran B2B marketer, Ian's charter is to make sure that TrackMaven is aligning with — and leading by example in — today's rapidly changing marketing landscape. See more of Ian's posts
