The early 2000s saw the inception of social media, primarily centered on creating genuine connections between individuals familiar with each other. These platforms emphasized networking rather than a media-driven experience. Checking in at favorite spots like a local café was more common than sharing a personal video.
However, as the 2010s unfolded, platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and even LinkedIn evolved to prioritize content sharing over just networking.
The Paradigm Shift to Content-centric Platforms
Over the last decade, content distribution has surpassed networking as the chief purpose of social media platforms. Increased smartphone accessibility and the race to enhance platform engagement have been instrumental in this transformation. With 85% of American adults using smartphones by 2021, the implications for social media consumption were profound. The continuous content feeds offered by giants like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook are prime examples of platforms adapting to these changes, even as they face criticism for potential addictive qualities.
The Downward Spiral of Facebook
Facebook’s decline is a multifaceted issue. Firstly, advertiser’s discontent led to notable revenue loss. 2020 saw significant brands boycotting Facebook due to concerns surrounding hate speech. The platform’s subsequent advertising policy changes in 2022 further alienated advertisers.
Additionally, business viability concerns have arisen. Despite generating immense profit, internal decisions like the massive investment in ventures like virtual reality and the metaverse have raised eyebrows. This, coupled with the company’s layoff announcements in 2022, could potentially harm its future recruitment capabilities.
Furthermore, recurrent controversies have tainted Facebook’s reputation. Scandals like the Cambridge Analytica debacle and the revelations brought forward by whistleblower Frances Haugen have deeply impacted the company’s trustworthiness and credibility.
Twitter’s Ongoing Struggles
Unlike Facebook, Twitter’s challenges are deeply rooted. Issues like a wavering profitability record and the recent upheaval caused by Elon Musk’s takeover have placed the platform under scrutiny. Management decisions, like the hasty layoffs of over 3700 employees (nearly 50% of its workforce) according to TechCrunch, have further affected its stability. Even major companies like Apple are distancing themselves from Twitter due to the platform’s inability to effectively moderate content and combat misinformation.
The platform’s lax policies against harassment and doxing have been another area of contention. In such a volatile environment, it becomes increasingly challenging for brands to foster genuine connections.
Exploring Alternative Digital Communities
While Facebook and Twitter grapple with their respective challenges, users are flocking to platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Diversification seems to be a plausible strategy. However, depending solely on another social media giant might be short-sighted. The need of the hour is to build and nurture a digital audience on platforms that you can control.
One effective way to do this is by leveraging SEO, advertising, and other strategies to drive traffic to your own digital space. Upon their arrival, it’s imperative to provide a modern, engaging digital experience. Without it, your audience will inevitably revert to their preferred social media platforms.
The Essential Components of a Robust Community Website
Two pivotal components are vital to curate an engaging digital experience: content and community.
Engaging content is fundamental. Regularly updating your digital space with informative or entertaining content can encourage your audience to return, fostering a sense of trust.
However, content alone isn’t sufficient. A thriving community experience is equally crucial. Instead of replicating the exact model of giants like Facebook or Twitter, focusing on creating micro-communities can be more effective. And that’s where Arena Live Chat can be transformative. By integrating Arena’s live blogs, you can offer engaging digital events and cultivate a sense of community. Dive deeper into how Arena Live Chat can reshape your digital engagement strategy.
With more than $360 billion in disposable income, brands that move fast to serve Gen Z will win. Understanding how Gen Z likes to shop is crucial to maximizing conversions and engagement. Capture more conversions in this market by leveraging these shopping trends.
The Top 5 Gen Z Shopping Trends
As you review these shopping trends, take a moment to review each one carefully. Ask yourself (and your team) where your business could make changes to accommodate these trends.
1) Social Proof Is Still King
Social proof has long been one of the most crucial marketing factors. With Gen Z, recommendations from friends, family, and other trusted individuals remain critically important. Assess your product pages, post-purchase marketing, and presence on third-party sites (e.g., Trust Pilot) for social proof.
Here are a few ideas to emphasize social proof for Gen Z in your marketing:
Encourage informal reviews
Logging into your website or platform to write reviews may feel like too much work for some people. Informal reviews can help you. Your social media posts encourage customers to tell you what you like about your products. These comments can inform your marketing efforts.
Your live shopping and online events can help you to generate reviews and social proof. With Arena Live blog, you can pull in posts from any accounts or hashtags you want.
Boost referrals with a Gen Z focus
There’s no reason to sit on your hands and wait for word-of-mouth recommendations to start. Give incentives to your customers for introducing you to others. To spark Gen Z engagement, make sure you create content in Gen Z-friendly formats like short-form videos (i.e. 30-60 seconds).
There are no shortcuts to building honest, positive reviews from happy customers. However, there is a way to rent social proof and credibility: working with influencers. That’s the next Gen Z shopping habit we’ll unpack.
2) Influencer Content Drives Engagement And Purchases
Gen Z constantly participates in the influencer economy as content creators, supporters, and enthusiasts. Platforms like Patreon and Kickstarter make it easier than ever for creative people to engage their audiences online. You can shortcut the social proof process by working with Gen Z influencers. Use custom tracking links and coupon codes to track the campaign results.
Smaller influencers with audiences under 10,000 may be willing to feature your product if you send it to them for free. More established influencers are likely to expect a fee. Before paying an influencer, get clarity on their audience and ask about their past campaigns.
There’s one drawback to conventional influencer marketing campaigns. Most of the action takes place away from your website. Instead of simply asking influencers to post about your brand on their social account, integrate those posts into your website. For example, you can host a digital event experience on your website by embedding YouTube. By hosting the event on your website, you have more flexibility to add calls to action and track conversions.
3) Offer A Sustainable Shopping Experience
Gen Z consumers care more about sustainability and corporate social responsibility than almost any other demographic. First Insight found that 75% of Generation Z consumers prefer sustainability over the brand name of a product when making a purchase.
How do brands win by appealing to Generation Z’s sustainability sentiments? The answer depends on your company’s strategy. First, review your company’s sustainability achievements and policies. Find out if there is anything genuinely impressive to celebrate. If the answer is no, it’s time to plan a new initiative. Proclaiming a commitment to sustainability without backing up your words exposes your brand to accusations of “greenwashing” (i.e., sustainability hypocrisy).
Use these tips to leverage sustainability in your Gen Z marketing campaigns:
Explain what you don’t use or do in your products and supply chain.
Some companies proudly use vegan products exclusively. Others focus on local-scale supply chains to reduce transportation costs and carbon emissions. Still, some companies apply a rigorous selection process for vendors to reduce costs. Use that fact in your marketing if you have excluded ingredients or processes from your company to improve sustainability.
Communicate your carbon footprint goals
A growing list of companies, including H&M (clothing), Cisco Systems (enterprise technology), CVS (health), and Etsy (marketplace), have set public net zero carbon emissions goals. Recently, these goals have shifted toward “net zero” goals. That means setting a date your company will not make a carbon impact. Achieving this goal may take several forms, like reducing waste, using LEED-certified buildings, and buying credits.
Market charitable partnerships and campaigns
Allow your Gen Z buyers to support sustainable practices with each practice. For example, you might donate $1 from each purchase to an environmental group like the Sierra Club, Rainforest Alliance, or Greenpeace. To deepen your connection with Gen Z consumers, find a Gen Z spokesperson at the charity or nonprofit to appear in videos and other collateral.
4) Make mobile payments easy
Expecting Gen Z customers to put down their phones to complete a purchase means lost revenue. Shopping research reported by Insider Intelligence found that 60% of Gen Z prefer to make payments using their mobile device. The shift to mobile payments will affect physical retailers even more. A May 2022 survey of UK consumers found that over 70% of Gen Z consumers are abandoning their physical wallets and switching to mobile devices.
Satisfying this mobile payment trend requires collaboration between marketing and technology. At a minimum, ask a friend unfamiliar with your website to make purchases on your website. Track how long they take to complete the purchase. Also, check if they have to resort to extra effort (e.g., zooming in and out to fill in a different field).
While the mobile experience is vital, the desktop web experience still has an important place. We’ll turn to that shopping trend next.
5) Gen Z Will Ignore Your Website Unless It is Fast and Easy
The central importance of website importance keeps growing. Generally, a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load will lose customers. Further, some surveys have found that Generation Z’s average attention span – 8 seconds – is significantly less than older generations. If your website takes too long to load, you wouldn’t have a chance to connect with Gen Z when they visit your website.
Slow websites don’t just irritate Gen Z, either. The Google search engine tends to favor fast websites over slow ones. If you depend on organic search traffic to grow your business.
Improving website speed and usability takes time and experimentation. Start by running Google’s Core Web Vitals on your website. Check the desktop and mobile experience. Failing to pass this assessment will likely leave your website at a disadvantage. In addition, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to find additional opportunities to optimize your website performance.
The Critical Ingredient In Gen Z Shopping
Understanding these Gen Z shopping trends is the journey’s starting point, not the end. The specific market preferences in your industry may be different. Some markets, like book readers, ultimately want to enjoy a non-digital experience with a book. Other segments, like gaming enthusiasts, tend to lean toward a highly digital experience. Traditional analytics platforms will only tell you some of the answers here.
To understand your audience better, you need to gather first-party data from your audience, by tracking which content, online experiences, events, and web pages your audience likes, optimizing marketing campaigns gets much more straightforward. Learn how Arena Personas can help you better manage your first-party data to understand Gen Z buyers more effectively.
For years, news organizations have struggled in the cold war with social media. Initally, classified revenue plummeted thanks to the rise of Craigslist, then, Google, Facebook, and Amazon stepped in, pulling billions of dollars in advertising revenue that used to be owned by traditional publishing. Today, a handful of mega-companies have successfully built global audiences around content: social media platforms.
To survive and thrive in the 2020s, news organizations need to study and model the specific tactics and strategies of the social media giants. Given that many social media platforms have been knocked down from their high-ground recently, the timing has never been better to take action.
Lesson 1: Offer A Highly Personalized Content Experience To Grow Engagement
Customized news feeds and streams lie at the heart of successful social media. Facebook gives you news updates on friends and family. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms offer a curated experience focused on individual users’ interests. Developing this highly curated experience requires the contribution of many engineers, algorithms, and countless experiments.
Applying this lesson to the news organization starts by offering filters. Some of your audience might only want business news, while others simply want coverage of their favorite sports team. Rather than forcing all users to flip through all of your news content, let them choose their interests. In addition, offering subject-specific email newsletters focused on different news interests (e.g., sports, business, local news) will help to deepen audience engagement.
Building detailed profiles of your audience’s likes and dislikes is vital for boosting engagement. Another benefit to offering a customized experience is that you will have better first-party data on your audience. Consequently, you will be able to market your subscriptions more effectively. Also, you will have the opportunity to offer more targeted advertising options to your advertisers.
Lesson 2: Adapt To Changing Media Consumption Habits
Consuming social media content and updates is addictive for a reason. These platforms offer the potential for social validation and a constant stream of novelty. That’s not all – many users are turning to social media to access news content.
Consumption of news is a primary driver of social media.
According to Deloitte’s 2022 digital media trends research, the top five reasons US consumers use social media include reading or watching the news (27%), listening to music (28%, watching TV shows and movies (23%), shopping (17%), play video games (22%) and watch sports (13%). These findings tell us that there is considerable appetite for news. Deloitte points out that the popularity of news consumption on social media is driven by algorithmic customization and cost (i.e., no paid subscription needed).
User-Generated Content Is Gaining In Popularity
Above and beyond news consumption, many social media users are interested in user-generated content. It’s important to note that user-generated content is a broad term that covers professional-grade content creators with high production values, hobbyists, and much more. Deloitte’s research found that 70% of Gen Z now regularly consume user-generated content – a figure that has rapidly increased over the past year.
Short-Form Video Content Is Booming
Short video content, typically less than a minute long, is thriving. The most popular content creators on TikTok, like Khabane Lame, Charli d’amelio, and Addison, have uploaded over 1,000 videos to build their audience. Many successful short videos feature videos, dancing, and humor.
Adapting To New Media Consumption Habits
Adapting to these habits as a news organization is challenging. Traditionally, news organizations focus on high production values and professionalism, which isn’t always found in user-generated content. Despite that challenge, there are opportunities to respond to this challenge. Take video content as an example. Your organization likely has significant strengths in video production and editing. Use those capabilities to create content like TikTok videos and YouTube shorts like the Washington Post.
Lesson 3: Emphasize Individuals In Addition To Your Corporate Brand
Many, if not most, social media success stories involve individuals. Take MrBeast (i.e., Jimmy Donaldson) on YouTube. With more than 100 million subscribers, he has built one of the most successful channels on the platform. Many other top channels on the platform are built around individuals like Eminem, Justin Bieber, and Swedish YouTube star PewDiePie.
Applying this lesson in a new organization is relatively easy. For the past decade, many successful journalists like Maggie Haverman (New York Times), Rachel Maddow (MSNBC), and Anderson Cooper (CNN) have built a large following on Twitter. The opportunity to interact directly with your journalists is crucial. Fundamentally, engaging with a specific person is easier than with a brand.
Building an audience around a personal brand is easier for several reasons. Forming a parasocial relationship where an audience member feels connected to the content creator is easier. Social media personalities sometimes deepen these relationships by adding exclusive experiences to paying customers using platforms like Patreon.
There are a few ways to apply this social media lesson to your news organization. Look at all of your public-facing journalists and personalities and their online profiles. Find out who successfully engages with their followers by looking at replies, likes, and comments. Invite your most successful journalists to present their best practices to others in the organization.
Lesson 4: Encourage Niche Communities
Social media platforms are excellent at bringing together small groups of people with shared interests. For example, there are online groups for people interested in obvious things like real estate investing, auto repair & fashion and each of these larger audience can be further cut into niche segments.
Let’s take sports as an example. Spending five or ten minutes searching through Facebook you can easily find groups like:
Obsessed with NCAA Wrestling Updates (9,000+ members)
NBA Fantasy Basketball Discussion (11,000+ members)
Mets Fans For Life (18,000 members)
Yankees Fans (100,000+ fans)
These examples show an audience like “sports fans” has multiple significant segments. News organizations with deep connections in local sports teams have an opportunity to shine by creating dedicated niche communities. Getting started is easier than you might imagine because news organizations already have high-quality content to build their communities on.
Lesson 5: Embrace Technical Innovation
Move fast and break things is a well-known saying in the technology industry. Social media platforms often launch new features as they observe their users and advertisers. For example, Instagram has recently focused on video content to compete more effectively against TikTok.
News organizations may not have the same kind of product development, engineering, and technical bench strength as social media companies. Fortunately, this is less of a disadvantage than you might think. The rise of no-code and low-code platforms and integrations means adding new technologies to your website is easier than ever.
Want to improve your coverage and engagement of rapidly developing news stories like international conflicts and elections? You can install Arena Live Blog on your website in a few minutes. Want to build online events like the Wall St Journal’s Live Q&A Events? Add Arena Live Chat to your website to supplement the video streaming experience so your audience can share their feedback and questions.
Don’t Ignore Your Greatest Strength As You Innovate
There’s no doubt that news publishers can draw lessons from social media platforms. Yet, there’s a danger in drawing too much inspiration from these platforms. You don’t want to lose the soul of your organization as you chase growth.
The most trusted news organizations have built audiences for decades. Social media companies don’t invest in investigative journalism. News organizations hold elected officials accountable for their actions and words. The best news organizations focus on fact-checking and admitting mistakes. In contrast, social media platforms have a much less impressive track record of quality and accountability.
Investigation, fact-checking, and taking on powerful interests carry a cost. Yet, those commitments are ultimately critical for maintaining your reputation and keeping engaged subscribers. If your audience loses trust in your organization, selling subscriptions and advertising space will become more difficult.
The good news is that you can innovate without selling your soul as a news organization. The first step is to add the right technology to your website. These technologies don’t require weeks or months of customization and implementation either. You can be up and running in a matter of hours when you choose Arena.
Transform The News Into An Interactive Community Experience
Publishing high-quality news, analysis, and information are no longer enough to sustain news organizations. Your website needs to offer an online community to win attention and engagement from social media platforms. Your audience wants to ask questions, meet people who share their interests, and more. Right now, social media offers these community experiences. Yet social media lacks the commitment to investigation, reporting, and truth that leading news organizations have.
Give your audience a chance to interact with each other, and engagement will go up. Page views and time on site will also increase. Book a demo with Arena today to discover how to engage your audience more.
Advertising spending on social media platforms is starting to fall. Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) reported that average revenue per user fell to $9.41 in Q3 2022 vs. $11.57 in Q4 2021 (source). And, more recently, it’s been reported that ½ of Twitter’s top advertisers have left in the last month (source). This represents a significant opportunity for publishers to regain advertising market share.
This shift of ad dollars away from social media creates a once-in-a-decade opportunity for publishers. Even as worries of an economic downturn cloud the horizon, there are several significant opportunities for publishers who innovate using these strategies.
Four Ways Bold Publishers Can Win In The Downturn
Rising interest rates, increasing unemployment (although still at historical lows…), and other signs of economic distress are starting to bite. A downturn is a perfect time to experiment with new approaches and methods to grow engagement and increase your value to advertisers.
1. Offer Exclusive Access To VIPs In Online Events
Reddit, a mid-sized social platform, is known for its successful “AMA” (ask me anything) events. Past participants in these events include Jeopardy! champion, Ken Jennings, businessman and philanthropist Bill Gates, and countless other CEOs and authors. These events are popular because they give the audience a unique chance to interact directly with a celebrity.
As a publisher, you have relationships with politicians, athletes & community leaders. A city news publication might organize a panel or AMA event with the mayor, local investors, or local sports team. There are a few ways to pursue this idea: large-scale public events and exclusive smaller events.
Public Event With VIPs
This event format is a great way to maximize your audience and advertising revenue. For example, a lifestyle magazine might organize an event on local craft breweries. Offer attendees the chance to ask questions, enter draws for free drinks and meet fellow fans. This focused event makes it easier to sign up for paying event sponsors because your audience is more likely to be focused and engaged.
Running a successful event public event will take more planning. There’s an increased risk of inappropriate content when anybody can attend the event. That’s why it is essential to use a live chat platform with both manual and AI automated moderation features like Arena Live Chat. If running a large-scale event isn’t a good fit for your publication, consider offering a smaller event just for your paying subscribers.
Subscriber-Only Digital Events And Benefits
The disadvantage to a public event is the scale – you may have hundreds or thousands of attendees! Creating connections with your guests and audience can be difficult at that scale. That’s where exclusive events for your subscribers play a role. Here are a few examples of subscriber-only digital event experiences that publishers offer today.
The British publication offers live events to its subscribers on topics such as The World Ahead 2023, The Year In Review, America’s Election Results, and China and Ukraine at war. The Economist’s digital events are relatively short – just one hour. Organizing a one-hour virtual event with a few of your top journalists is accessible to most publishers. It’s also a great way to surprise your subscribers with additional value.
The New Yorker Festival is a multi-day event featuring world premieres of documentaries, political events, and events with celebrities. The publication offers subscribers a 30% discount on ticket prices for the event. In addition, subscribers get early access to buy tickets. The New Yorker event has in-person and virtual aspects. The New Yorker approach takes more time and effort to organize. It’s also a powerful way to distinguish your publication from others.
With these smaller events, it’s smart to promote the limited nature of the event. For instance, if you only have 50 seats, emphasize that fact. In a smaller event, each attendee will have a better chance of having their questions answered.
2. Curate The Gold In Social Media Content
Editorial judgment is one of the most important ways publications add value to their audiences. Your journalists know their beats inside out. You can use that expertise to curate the best in social media for your audience. There are a few ways to curate social media content for your audience.
Enrich Your Coverage With Social Updates
Many publishers offer a live blog or series of breaking news updates when a major event occurs, like an election, sporting event, or conference. Publishing a steady stream of news updates as an event can tax the energy of your journalists. With Arena Live Blog, you can pull in social media updates through hashtags & specific accounts and apply filters to ensure brand-safe posts.
Fact Check Social Media Posts
Misinformation on social media is a major problem. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee published an analysis of COVID-19 misinformation trends in 2021 that illustrates one aspect of the problem. The study found that “fake cure” Tweets were common in the western US, while “Covid as a hoax” misinformation was more common in the mid-West.
Communicating complex scientific information, which often involves probabilities and uncertainty, is challenging. For publishers with professional reporters, evaluating this information critically is a strength. Fact-checking rumors, misinformation, and other social media content is important for publications to add value to their audience.
Invite Social Media Influencers
Many publishers have struggled to maintain a large staff of professional journalists, while others have closed up shop entirely (we miss you, Protocol!). Inviting freelancers and qualified influencers from social media to share their thoughts with your audience can help. For example, a growing community of true crime enthusiasts on social media are hungry to find the guilty and free the innocent. Inviting true crime influencers like Kendall Rae (over 3 million YouTube subscribers) and Shaun Atwood (over 700,000 YouTube subscribers) is one way you can enrich your coverage further.
Create the Best of Social Media Lists
Keeping up with all of the latest developments on social media is difficult! Help your audience save time by recognizing the best social media accounts in niche areas. Praising influencers is one of the best ways to get their attention and start building a relationship. After you feature them in one of these lists, you may find it easier to invite them to contribute to your website or join events.
Connecting your publication to other digital experiences may start with social media but it shouldn’t end there. Enriching the streaming experience represents another way to win in a difficult time.
3. Enrich The Streaming Experience
The average American household subscribes to 4.7 streaming services according to Bloomberg. However, Bloomberg also estimates that streaming service growth may have plateaued for the foreseeable future.
The relatively low cost of streaming services means they are likely to be somewhat recession-resistant. Unlike other leisure activities like travel and restaurants, streaming service costs remain relatively affordable for many households.
If there is a significant economic downturn in 2023 or 2024, affordable leisure activities like streaming services will likely gain more attention. That creates an opportunity for publishers to engage streaming fans more deeply. If your organization has significant entertainment news staff or access to stars, that is a significant opportunity!
There are a few ways to build or grow audiences around streaming service programming.
Organize Viewing Parties
Invite your audience to open their Netflix, Disney+, or other streaming service and watch the latest release alongside your staff. This type of virtual event works best when it is tightly focused. For example, a viewing party focused on fantasy adaptations like “House of the Dragon” or historical dramas like “Bridgerton” are more likely to attract audience attention. Use Arena Live Chat to power this event and make it easy for your audience to share their reactions as the event unfolds.
Invite Fans Behind The Scenes With the Cast and Crew
The chance to see your favorite actors, writers and directors talk about their work is incredibly appealing to many fans. Inviting a few cast members to a virtual event is relatively easy and low-cost. If you give fans the opportunity to ask questions, they’re likely to stay to the end.
Working with streaming services may not be suitable for all brands. What if you are focused on a different niche, like fashion and beauty? There’s another low-cost way for publishers to build their audience and keep people coming back for more: user-generated content!
4. Leverage The Authenticity of User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) built the social media platforms. It’s time for publishers to embrace user-generated content in new ways beyond comments on news articles.
Thoughtfully highlighting UGC on your website is smart because it can bring additional trust and engagement. Social Media Today reports that consumer-created content is perceived to be the most trustworthy. UGC is also considered the most significant in influencing purchase decisions. For media brands like the Wirecutter that generate affiliate sales, featuring UGC on your website makes sense.
While exciting, increasing the amount of UGC on a publisher’s website needs to be done carefully. Publishers need to exercise editorial oversight over this content including enforcing their codes of conduct. To reduce the burden of oversight, starting with less polarizing content themes like lifestyle topics and sports may be helpful. Influencers with a few thousand followers may be willing to contribute to your publication in return for exposure.
Do You Have The Right Technology To Grow Your Digital Audience?
A growing, highly engaged audience is indispensable to growing advertising revenue and thriving in tough times. Allow your audience to interact and join events with Arena. Arena Live Blog is the perfect tool to enhance your coverage of breaking news. Arena Live Chat is what you need to create more engaging digital events. The economic downturn is your opportunity to grow – seize it!
Adding a customer data platform to your sales and marketing workflow takes some work. So, it’s worth asking the question: is it worth the effort to use a CDP? To find the answer, let’s look at ways to measure the ROI of a customer data platform.
Calculating Customer Data Platform ROI Step By Step
In principle, deeply understanding customer behavior should drive higher revenue. Achieving that result takes time and the right approach. Let’s start by gathering the correct numbers.
1) Know Your Sales And Marketing Numbers Before Using A CDP
To fully understand the impact of a customer data platform on your business, it is crucial to gather some numbers. Precisely, measure these numbers before using a CDP and then look at them afterward.
The number of leads. This measure should be the easiest to track – count the number of leads you typically gain per month. If possible, look at six to twelve months of data and take the average.
Lead quality. There are different ways to determine lead quality. For example, you might measure the proportion of marketing-qualified leads that convert to sales-qualified leads.
Ad campaign effectiveness (e.g., cost per lead). Running a lead generation advertising campaign is much easier when you deeply understand your audience. If you’re just getting started, you are likely to have a high cost per lead. With better data, you can bring this figure down over time.
Sales cycle time. Measure the time between a lead’s first encounter with your business and purchase. While external factors, like the overall economic environment, also impact this figure, it is still intelligent to track.
With these data points in mind, let’s proceed to the next phase of the ROI measurement process.
2) Install and configure your customer data platform.
In this step, install and configure your customer data platform. For this platform to deliver maximum value, take the time to review your customer data for quality. The ROI from the CDP will be low if you start with poor data.
To assess your customer data quality, consider the following points:
Do you have accurate information about customers and how they became customers?
Take a list of your 100 most recent customers and look at the customer journey. Ideally, your CDP should help you to understand their experience. For example, did the majority of prospects interact with sales only after attending a virtual event? If you don’t have this customer data yet, start planning to gather it. Customer surveys and automated tracking can help to address these points.
Without the ability to accurately trace the customer journey, measuring marketing effectiveness and making data-driven decisions about what to focus on next is difficult.
Are you gathering zero-party and first-party data from customers and prospects?
Third-party platforms like lead providers and social media have a role to play. However, these sources are limited. They don’t tell you what a given person thinks or feels about your specific brand. A fully implemented customer data platform can equip you with these insights.
Zero-party data is data that customers decide to share with an organization like product preferences in a survey. For example, you might run a survey to customers about what websites and brands they like the most. Responses to this survey would be zero-party data. First-party data, on the other hand, is a bit different. It is data that a customer agrees to provide by using your website, interacting with your emails, and so forth. Regularly gathering these data points is an important way
Are you using a scoring system?
Scoring becomes more important as you scale up your lead generation and marketing efforts. Large companies develop higher sophisticated models to score leads, but that’s not the only way. You can take a simpler approach if you’re just getting started. For example, you might distinguish between new prospects (i.e., they have been on your email list for less than five days), highly engaged leads (i.e., they have been on your email list for 30 days and have participated in an online event) and customers (i.e., they have purchased in the past 12 months). Classifying prospects into these three categories will help you make better decisions about using your marketing resources.
With this foundation, you’re ready to install your customer data platform.
3) Generate first-party data for your customer data platform
On its own, a customer data platform does not produce a return on investment. To achieve results, there are two more crucial ingredients. First, it’s vital to feed more data into the platform regularly. Second, taking sales and marketing actions is vital based on what you find in the CDP. Let’s start with the first ingredient.
Generating a steady stream of first-party data is one of the best ways to make your CDP more valuable. For most brands, it makes sense to focus on getting more people to your website and ensuring they have an engaging experience. A website visitor that arrives and leaves a few seconds later will not give you much to work with.
There are a few ways to make your website more appealing to customers. You start with a foundation of design, fast technology, and a simple user interface. Next, publish content that directly speaks to your customers’ needs and problems. Finally, enrich your website by transforming it into a virtual events platform using a live blog or a live chat experience. Taken together, technology, content, and community experiences will make your website more appealing. As website visitors keep returning over time, you will have more opportunities to gather data about their preferences.
Once your website generates a significant amount of first-party data, how do you transform that data into valuable insights? That’s what we’ll cover in the next section.
4) Develop new sales and marketing ideas based on CDP data
Your next step is to develop new ideas based on the data you’re seeing in your customer data platform. Success requires both art and science. The art is coming up with sales and marketing ideas regularly. The science is grounding those ideas in the data available on your platform. Let’s illustrate this principle with two examples.
Online publisher
A digital publisher is concerned about subscribers not renewing their subscriptions after the first year. To solve this problem, the publisher reviews their CDP and looks for patterns between people who renew their subscriptions and those who do not. The publisher may notice that 90% of renewing subscribers access paid content once per week and have attended at least two subscriber-only online events.
Based on these patterns, the publisher decides to test the following marketing campaign ideas:
Highlight the “best article of the week” to subscribers. The objective is to make it easier for subscribers to use – read just one article.
Improve virtual events with special guests. To make subscriber-only virtual events more enticing, the publisher invites celebrity guests to a “Ask Me Anything” session to make subscriber-only virtual events more enticing.
After developing these marketing campaign ideas, the publisher can measure the ROI of the campaign using their customer data platform.
Ecommerce company
A clothing e-commerce company is finding it difficult to achieve a reasonable return on its online advertising campaigns. By using the CDP, the marketing manager quickly discovers the problem. Many customers buy only when the company offers discount codes and never buy again. Fortunately, the company has noticed that customers who come through referral campaigns (e.g., Instagram influencers creating sponsored posts) seem to lead to ongoing campaigns.
The e-commerce company developed a few new marketing campaign ideas based on these insights.
Increase budget allocation to influencer marketing campaigns.
Change the creative focus for paid advertising campaigns. Instead of advertising a discount offer, new campaigns take advantage of holiday promotions (e.g., back-to-school season).
Increase content marketing campaigns with partners to drive more referral traffic.
5) Gather the right data for a marketing ROI comparison.
If you’ve followed the process, you’ve installed a customer data platform, gathered new data, and implemented some new marketing ideas. Now, you can compare your marketing effectiveness before and after using the CDP.
To avoid confusing data, aim to make the pre-CDP and post-CDP implementation comparison as similar as possible. For example, focus on the same period (i.e., January to July of this year when you had the CDP vs. January to July of the previous year before you had the CDP).
Aim to exclude other factors that might significantly skew the results to the degree possible. For example, if there have been significant changes in the monthly marketing budget (e.g., $10,000 per month last year vs. $15,000 per month this year), be mindful of those changes.
6) Measure the ROI of your customer data platform
In this step, you’ll directly compare the results achieved before using the CDP and after using the CDP. If you’ve been feeding high-quality data to the CDP and making business decisions based on CDP insights, you’re likely to see a substantial improvement in CDP return on investment. In this case, take a moment to celebrate with your marketing team! You’ve successfully leveraged data insights to grow your business!
What if the return on investment results aren’t that exciting? That’s entirely possible! In this situation, remember that marketing is a work in progress. Learn what you can from the campaigns that didn’t work out and try something new.
Three Ways To Improve Customer Data Platform ROI
The following strategies will help you to get better results from your CDP. While each strategy is distinct, you’re likely to get better results using multiple strategies.
1) Look For Missing Customer Data
Missing key data points is a crucial reason customer data platforms provide limited results. For example, your focus might be on gathering data from website users. However, if the majority of customer conversations come from sales calls or social media, you might be missing key developments. Ensure your customer data platform gathers information from your website, social media, and key offline channels.
2) Validate Data With The Sales Team
For B2B companies, completing the transaction requires the sales team. Few customers are willing to make a $10,000 or $100,000 purchase without the chance to speak with a salesperson and get answers to their questions.
There are a few ways to validate your CDP insights with the sales team. Start by looking at reports and reports from your customer relationship management (CRM). For example, look at the most recent 10-20 completed sales. Does the customer journey involve multiple touchpoints with sales representatives? If so, you might be missing those interactions in your CDP.
In addition to reviewing reports, make the time to speak with your sales colleagues. They’re emailing and calling customers every week. They can give you insights into the relevance of marketing materials (e.g., “customers loved the state of the industry report we released this year in January – can we produce more reports like that?”).
3) Take More Chances
The final way to get better results from your customer data platform is to take more chances. Specifically, we often see people gather plenty of data from customers and prospects and look at the patterns. However, some marketers are reluctant to set aside their preferences and take a risk based on what the CDP is telling them. For example, your CDP might show that video customer stories lead to better conversions. Yet, recording customer videos are often quite labor-intensive and require permission from multiple parties. Despite these challenges, it may be time to invest more in creating these assets.
How To Get More Value From Your Customer Data Platform
You’ve seen that gathering data from a customer data platform is a powerful way to get more conversions and increase engagement. Ensure you have the right technology to gather and import first-party data into your systems to make the most of your platform. Arena Personas is a powerful tool to help you use first-party data to better segment your audiences and improve marketing efficiency.
User generated content, especially from customers, is an excellent way to enhance the quality of your live virtual events. Using this type of content in your events immediately demonstrates to event participants that you care about their thoughts and feelings. However, there are some challenges associated with using user generated content effectively. Use this guide to understand UGC and ways to use it effectively in your events.
What Is User Generated Content?
User generated content is any post, image, video, or other content created by Internet users. You can find user generated content on your website, on third-party websites and social media platforms. Generally speaking, marketers focus on user generated content in public settings. If a user has restricted access to their posts or shared comments in a non-public setting, avoiding using that type of content in your marketing or live events is best.
Should You Use User Generated Content?
There are a few ways to approach this question. First, consider the legal aspect. There are potential copyright issues if you use a piece of content created by someone else without permission. Suppose an artist creates a video and you want to use that video in your live event. If you’re planning on simply showing that video to your audience, it is best to ask for permission first. If you have any questions about the legal aspects of using content created by other people, seek legal advice.
Beyond the legal dimension, there are a few other aspects to this question of using user generated content in your events. There are rarely problems with referencing user generated content for market research, event preparation or other “behind the scenes” purposes. In the event you want to use UGC directly in your marketing or website, there are a few principles to keep in mind.
Three Principles For Using User Generated Content In Your Live Event
To guide your event development, we recommend using the following three principles. For simplicity, let’s focus our discussion on publicly available social media posts like tweets on Twitter.
Quality Curation
Curation is the art and science of selecting material that meets your goals. Museum curators don’t have the resource to display every piece of artwork that looks interesting. They must select the best paintings, sculptures, and other pieces that fit their goals and the interests of their audience. The same principle applies to marketers when selecting UGC content for their events. At a minimum, apply ‘negative curation’ to protect brand safety (i.e. avoid not safe for work type content). Ideally, look for ways to feature a wide variety of user voices and types of content (e.g. serious commentary, joke style content and others) to keep your audience engaged.
Add Commentary
Simply reposting user generated content in your live event isn’t very interesting. Your audience might think “Hey, I can see these posts for myself on Twitter – why am I here?” Instead, look for ways to add value to the user generated content you feature in your event. Tell your audience why you selected the content and why you like it.
The Spice Principle
Spices in cooking are a great way to make a meal more appealing and flavorful. At the same time, you would not eat an entire meal made up of cumin or turmeric! Instead, skilled chefs use small amounts of spices. Likewise, user generated content should be best seen as a spice. Highlighting a few posts from users that you liked is a good way to engage your audience. An entire virtual event made up of user generated content is likely to be perceived as lazy by your audience.
With these principles in mind, let’s look at a few practical ways to use this type of content effectively in your next virtual event.
7 Ways To Use User-Generated Content To Create Engaging Events.
Feeling stuck with user generated content? Use these suggestions to get started.
Regularly coming up with new ideas and material for virtual events, hybrid events, live streams, and other experiences is tough! One way to ease the pressure is to view user-generated content as a source of inspiration.
1) Audience Questions
There’s a reason why “ask me anything” (AMA) style experiences are so popular on Reddit and other platforms. People love the opportunity to ask questions and better understand people, especially celebrities. You can harness the same principle in your marketing by mining user generated content for questions.
Start by searching social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and elsewhere for questions about your brand and products. If you don’t turn up any usable questions, broaden your search to questions people are asking about your industry.
2) Competitor Content
You may not want to feature competitors in your virtual events and experiences. However, user generated content related to your competitors is very useful. For example, search for comments, reviews, complaints, and questions users are posing to your competitors.
Let’s say you run a software company, and your competitor is getting negative reviews about the complexity of their pricing. If your product has a simple pricing model, you might decide to use this fact (e.g., “we saw dozens of Capterra reviews complaining about hard-to-understand pricing in our industry, so we’d like to highlight our simple pricing.”)
3) Finding Trends
When you’re deeply focused on your product, you may lose track of broader trends. Remember the ice bucket challenge back in 2014? That trend took social media by storm, and it was a great opportunity to support a good cause and earn positive publicity for your brand simultaneously.
Spending some time observing your customers on social media may clue you into new trends you can feature in your marketing. In this case, user generated content might be a source of inspiration or you might decide to use it directly.
User Generated Content In Your Event
The value of UGC isn’t limited to inspiration or market research. You can also use it directly in your events. Take these tips as a starting point.
4) Feature Posts Using An Event Hashtag
A distinct hashtag is one of the easiest ways to encourage and identify user generated content related to your content. When users post content using the official hashtag, they might expect the company to read or reply to them. Featuring this type of content on a Live Blog is one way to incorporate hashtag content.
Keep in mind the principles we shared earlier still apply here. Creating a Live Blog on your website is more interesting if you interact with it. For example, you might ask your event host to refer to the best posts in the Live Blog a few times during a live event.
5) Highlight Influencer Posts
This technique is a more targeted way to incorporate social media content into your live experience. To use this approach effectively, we recommend identifying 5-10 influencers in advance who have at least 1,000 followers. Reach out to these influencers before your event starts and discuss a sponsorship arrangement.
If you are paying influencers, you can work out a posting schedule to increase attendee engagement. For instance, you might ask for a total of 10 posts and have most of the posts go live in the 24-48 hours before your event starts. That will give you a chance to review the posts and choose the best posts to add to your presentations and blog posts.
6) Lighten The Mood With Humorous Posts
Fun matters! Whenever you’re planning a virtual event, look for a few opportunities to add a dash of humor or jokes. This approach is particularly helpful when you have a multi-hour virtual event like a one-day or two-virtual event. Unlike the other approaches here, you can take a broader approach when seeking out user generated content for humor. You don’t need to limit yourself to discussions about your company or products. Instead, simply look around for user generated content like memes.
While humor is helpful in sparking engagement, keep your audience in mind. You don’t want user generated humor or jokes to trigger complaints! To minimize the chance of a problem, we suggest having two people review the humorous content before including it in your event.
7) Discuss UGC In Your Live Blog
When you run a live blog, regularly posting content is critical to maintaining engagement. As a rule of thumb, it is wise to post updates every hour at a minimum. Producing that much content in a short period of time can be quite taxing for your staff. That’s where user generated content can play a role. Here are a few ways to include UGC in your live blog updates:
Invite Guest Contributors
Ask some of your top community members to contribute a few short posts. Make sure to give them some broad guidelines (e.g. please make sure your updates are at least 250 words and relate directly to the event we are covering).
Respond To Social Media Posts
Take inspiration from the news media here – look for sharp disagreements. Are you seeing a large group of people making negative comments about your event? Posting a short response to your critics can be helpful in some circumstances. If the negativity is too extreme, look for other posts to react to. For example, what quotes are people sharing from your keynote speaker’s presentation?
Get The Right Technology To Leverage UGC In Live Events
Knowing the right strategies and tactics is a vital starting point to leveraging user generated content in your events. However, curating and using this content without the right technology can quickly get time-consuming. Learn more about how Arena’s products can leverage user generated content into your events. Find out how to be prepared for live events using Arena Content Manager for Live Blog.
Here at Arena, we’re big fans of football / soccer, so we used some of our out-of-the-box features to create live feed coverage of all the games in the World Cup. If you’re in media, publishing, or just a huge fan, we’ll show you how to do this on your site as well. This is a fun way to cover the event, even if you don’t have people on-site, but can also help you boost digital property metrics like average session time, registration rate or even CTR for direct or programmatic sponsorships.
Step 1: Create a free account
To build a custom version of this, you’ll need an arena account, or you can just DM us in the chat on any of the pages and we can send you the snippet you can add to any webpage or app. Still, creating an account is easy and free: just click here.
Step 2: Create an event for a match
We bet this is simpler than you picture. When you create a sports event in the Arena Dashboard, you can already pick “soccer”, the exact tournament you’ll cover – World Cup, in this case – and the list of matches will come right up!
This is when you can enable automatic sports features that make your life much easier:
Countdown the match
Live score update
Automatic play-by-play
These are features that will work automatically and set you free from updating everything that happens in a game, like goals, yellow cards and substitutions.
Step 3: Embed the Live Blog in your web page
Next thing is to add the embed code in your page. It’s usually just a copy-and-paste process, but it can vary depending on the platform you use (WordPress, Webflow, etc). If you have any difficulties, check Arena’s Help site.
Step 4: Add some social accounts for automated publishing
To create a live experience that also filters for more brand-safe content, we set two high level filters:
We pulled in any twitter post with the hashtags #WorldCupQatar2022, #Qatar2022, #WorldCup, etc but set a filter for only accounts with over 1,000,000 followers. This gives us global reach that can pull from any publisher, influencer or player post, but also ensures random garbage doesn’t clutter the feed.
We selected several official accounts, like FIFA World Cup, FourFourTwo, ESPN, etc to pull in any of their posts related to World Cup.
Next we add the countdown clock, then set live score counter to auto update. Now, anyone who comes to the page early will know when the experience will go fully live, but, for our team, it was basically “set it and forget it”.
Step 5: Enable the Live Chat
For engagement, we added a Live Chat to the right side which allows the community to engage with each other when the match starts. Since we’re NOT a publisher, and our website traffic is much lower than, say, pretty much any online media company, we opted to create a single chat that spans over every game, but, we could just as easily have created dedicated chats for specific game audiences. For high traffic sites, setting different chats for different segments of your audience can be a good idea.
Step 6: Add Conversion Cards for CTAs
After that, we added direct calls to action with Conversion Cards. For our purposes, we added two:
For these, we’re basically just promoting some cool content we made, but these could just as easily have been sponsored ads from partners, or even programmatic ads from a DSP.
Finally, we just toggled which match we wanted & copied and pasted this on to different pages and within about an hour, we had set up live coverage experiences for every game in the World Cup. For a list of all the pages, please see below!
Arena has two big news for iOS and Android developers – we’ve updated our SDKs. This means that Arena Live Chat & Live Blog can be added and enhanced in the most used mobile platforms in the world.
What’s new for Android developers?
Android developers can now add Polls and Q&A to their Arena Live Chat. This helps businesses increase engagement as well as get valuable insights from their customers. It’s also important to note that these new SDK features are only available to our Enterprise customers, but they are already included in the web version.
What’s new for iOS developers?
Arena’s iOS SDK allows developers to add Arena Live Chat to their apps with one of the most powerful engagement tools: Polls. This offers a great opportunity for businesses to increase retention, engagement and conversion by providing a more interactive experience. Plus, it gives businesses another way to collect valuable insights with an extra layer of real-time interaction.
Arena’s new SDK features: Polls & Q&A
About Polls
Arena Live Chat has a Polls feature, which allows to gather audience feedback, identify important topics for your users, and gain insight into what they think.
The Q&A is an Arena Live Chat feature that provides real-time engagement with users and gathers all of their questions and opinions in a moderation queue.
Arena is committed to helping businesses provide the best possible user experience. Our latest update is just another example of how we’re working to make that happen. We hope that these new features will help our customers increase audience retention, engagement, and conversion.
Improving your SEO with a Live Blog is simple when you have the right process. To help users to attract more organic traffic, we’ve broken the process down into two steps. The first step is technical SEO: configuration and technical matters that make your website highly readable for users. Once that foundation is set up, the second step of the process is to focus on strategy and content. Both activities are critically important because search engine optimization needs to meet the needs of people and work with search engines.
Technical SEO Foundations For Your Live Blog
The following steps to configure your website and live blog so that Google and other search engines can easily and quickly crawl your website. Without this foundation, your website’s live blog is unlikely to be noticed, indexed, and put in front of people searching for information.
Step 1: Install Arena on your website
The way you install Arena depends on your technology. For WordPress websites, use the Arena WordPress plugin. The WordPress plugin handles the technical SEO aspects of your live blog.
For organizations that have a different backend, there are a few options:
Don’t see your CMS or backend technology covered? Contact Arena to discuss your options.
Step 2: Verify your schema is valid
For liveblogs we add the markups based on schema.org specifically for that type of content. You can read more about it here.
Use Google’s free structured data testing tool to verify that your Arena integration is working properly. If the testing tool fails, contact Arena for assistance.
Step 3: Review your website’s overall technical SEO performance.
At this point, you have set up Arena Live Blog. At the same time, your website probably has other technologies, apps, and plugins in place for performance, SEO, marketing, security, and other objectives. It’s important to review your overall website from a technical SEO perspective.
By using an SEO tool like SEMrush, you can review your website for common problems such as:
Website speed. Everything being equal, faster websites tend to outperform slower websites. In other words, load time has a direct impact on your organic traffic and search rankings. Make it a priority to periodically test your speed. Use 3rd party tools like Pagespeed Insights.
Mobile Devices. Your website’s customer experience on phones and other mobile devices should also be fast and easy to use. A poor mobile website may have a negative impact on SEO.
Broken Links. Identifying and fixing broken links is an important way to provide a good user experience and show that your website is well maintained by search engines.
Security. Reducing your security risk by using HTTPS (Hypertext transfer protocol secure) is important. Check to make sure your website and any other key domains use it.
Review Keyword Optimization For Key Pages. On larger websites, you might have thousands or even millions of pages! Reviewing all of those pages in detail may not be realistic. Start by reviewing your top 10 or 20 pages by traffic to save time. At a minimum, verify that keywords in title tags are correct. Your keyword usage should also align with your overall content marketing strategy.
Step 4: Set a reminder to review your technical SEO
Achieving SEO success is a work in process. That’s why we recommend setting a reminder to review your technical SEO a year from now. For example, your content and strategy may change to emphasize international products which may require an update to your website structure. Therefore, set a reminder to review your website for technical SEO annually. If you work with SEO consultants or agencies, they may be able to help you optimize your website performance more frequently.
Creating Your Strategy And Content For Your Live Blog
The technical SEO blog set up is the foundation and frame of your home on the Internet. The next phase brings your website to life with engaging content that directly contributes to your organization’s goals.
Step 1: What do your customers want to know?
Knowing your audience is the foundation of a successful content strategy. When a blog post or other page on your website provides answers to search queries, you’re more likely to attract customers. As customers and search engines start to view your website as a resource for relevant content, reading time will go up and it will become easier to reach your growth goals.
Take some time to review your buyer personas to remind yourself of what your audience wants from your website. For example, are your customers looking for the latest political news? Alternatively, your customers might be looking for ways to connect with other people who share their interests. Your website’s analytics will give you some answers to these questions – look at the pages and resources generating the most engagement and leads. Depending on your audience, you might have hundreds or thousands of keyword ideas at this point.
Your content should align with your business goals. Consider the specific problems you can solve for customers. This might include questions about how your product or service compares to competitors. Or advice to achieve goals.
Step 2: What is your most successful online content?
The next strategic step to improve your live blog SEO results is to look at your website and determine what’s working right now. Open your analytics app (e.g. Google Analytics) and look at the pages that have the most traffic and are producing the most conversions. You can also study your social media analytics to come up with additional ideas.
Aim to come up with a minimum of three content ideas that have resonated with your market. We’ll build a live blog around those themes next.
Step 3: Develop a Live Blog event concept
It’s time to develop your live blog plan! Many of the most successful live blogs focus on news coverage where there is rapid change. Journalists use live blogs to cover news content like elections, high-profile cases, and conflicts. Companies can use live blogs to cover industry news, product launches, and company events.
It’s still possible to run a live blog without a connection to a breaking news event, but it may be more difficult to get your audience engaged. Fortunately, the next step will help to pull in your audience.
Step 4: Promote your Live Blog event
You’ve come up with your live blog idea that speaks to your audience and considers your business goals. Now, it is vital to promote your live blog to your audience! For example, if your live blog relates to a company conference, make sure you mention your live blog.
Step 5: Create your Live Blog
At last, it’s time to start making posts to your live blog. As your team creates updates, keep a list of SEO keywords and themes on hand. Look for opportunities to weave those concepts into your live blog updates.
Typically, a live blog will feature multiple updates per day. If your staff authors have limited capacity, consider bringing in a guest author to augment your team’s capabilities. News publishers do this all the time – they bring in special correspondents to enrich their news publishing.
In the weeks following your live blog event, open your analytics. It’s time to assess the results – did you attract more visitors? Did any of those visitors convert to your email list, purchase, or take another valuable action? If the answer is yes, start planning your next live blog concept so you can pull in more traffic. If the answer is no, check again in 30 days to allow the search engines to index your live blog content.
Achieving success in SEO takes practice. If your first live blog provided limited results, go back to the fundamentals to improve. For example, did your live blog offer unique insights that couldn’t be found elsewhere? Could you support your team better to use SEO concepts like keyword sets in their updates? Lastly, review your website’s technical setup to ensure that search engines can easily coral your website.
Grow Your Organic Traffic Today With A Live Blog
Content strategy and knowing your audience takes serious work and dedication. Fortunately, Arena is here to lighten the load. You can add a live blog to your website in a matter of minutes. Learn more about our Live Blog solution. You can get the free version today to see how the live blog works. Arena Live Blog supports both live updates and pre-planned content so that your content team wouldn’t get burned out.
What if you could bring new revenue to your business by engaging your audience more deeply? With Arena Live Chat, there are advertising and non-advertising methods to get more revenue from your website with Live Chat. Depending on your business model, you can use both methods to add new revenue streams to your company.
The Two Ways To Unlock New Revenue Streams Today
There are two primary business models to earn revenue from an online property today: selling access to your audience to advertisers and using the audience to directly sell your products.
Advertising Revenue Generation
The direct method is to sell advertising – a popular strategy used by major media brands, bloggers, and many others. There are multiple ways to generate advertising revenues. You can earn a fee for displaying ads (i.e., display advertising). Alternatively, you may earn a fee for recommending products (i.e., affiliate marketing). Some businesses generate revenue by creating sponsored content like reviews. These revenue streams require a creative approach, relevant advertising, and an engaged audience. Live chat can help you develop and grow your audience.
A key advantage of advertising revenue is that you do not need to create, manage or offer products or services of your own. Instead, you simply use an advertising platform (or make direct deals with advertisers) and start generating revenue! However, advertising revenue generation has its limitations. Advertising revenue tends to fluctuate throughout the year – the fall is often more active than the summer. In addition, your content and audience need to meet the needs of advertisers. If advertisers don’t like your website, they can go elsewhere.
Non-Advertising Revenue Generation
The other way to unlock revenue streams with live chat is to sell your products and services. The specific model you use will depend on how your business works. For example, an enterprise software company will likely be focused on lead generation for the sales team. On the other hand, a website with an online store may leverage live chat to sell its products directly.
Generating revenue directly from your audience is different from advertising. Generally speaking, you can earn much more revenue by selling your products. The downside is that you must invest in a sales and marketing process. For example, your audience may not be interested in buying an expensive product when they first hear about it. Instead, your sales team will probably need to reach out and engage leads. If you sell lower-priced products, following up with email marketing may be all you need.
The Core Ingredient Every Online Business Requires
An engaged and growing audience is the fuel that powers every online business. Without an audience interested in your content and online experiences, your growth possibilities become constrained. Without an audience, you will unlikely be able to generate meaningful advertising revenue. After all, why should an advertiser pay you if they don’t get access to a large audience?
A non-advertising business model can still operate without an audience. Yet, growth becomes far more complex. In essence, you will need to rely on other methods like an outbound sales program, advertising, and events. While all these methods work, they are more challenging to scale. In contrast, global brands like IBM, Accenture, and Goldman Sachs invest in building an engaged online audience.
Whether your goal is to generate advertising revenue or sell your products, an engaged and growing audience is vital. Adding Arena Live Chat to your website is one of the best ways to nurture an engaged audience.
How Live Chat Chat Helps You To Grow Revenue
Using a live chat session to generate additional revenue (i.e., live chat monetization) is easy when you use the right tools. Arena Live Chat is a no-code tool you can install on most websites in a matter of minutes. You can use two approaches to live chat monetization: directly using Arena Live Chat monetization features or using live chat to grow an audience and monetize them differently.
Arena Live Chat helps you to grow audience engagement with a few key features:
Q&A: Hosting your CEO or a VIP at your live chat? Use the Q&A feature to gather questions and then ask your guest to answer the most significant questions.
Direct messages: Your audience may not want to share everything directly in a public chat room – that’s why we offer direct messages so individuals can send messages to each other.
Reactions: Inspired by social media, reactions are a way for other users to express themselves without having to type.
GIFs. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. It might be worth even more when you have the right GIF. Arena Live Chat has access to a library of GIFs.
Channels. A chat experience can become disorganized if there are many unrelated discussions happening in the same place. By creating separate channels, your audience can easily find people who share the same interests.
Live Chat Monetization With Arena: 3 Features To Generate Immediate Revenue
Arena Live Chat. Today, Arena Live Chat offers three different monetization capabilities: Donation, Gifts, and Tip Jar. There are a few different ways to use these options, so let’s take a closer look at how to use these features.
Donation
With a donation, a user directly gives money to you. Before accepting donations, it’s essential to set clear expectations with your audience. Some people, they associate the word donation with a charitable organization. If you are running a fundraising event for a nonprofit, using the donation monetization option makes sense. For-profit companies should generally avoid using the donation feature because it may confuse their audience.
Gift and Tip Jar
Both of these live chat monetization features are useful in a few circumstances. For example, an ecommerce business might invite an influencer to a product launch event. The primary focus of the virtual event is to promote the product being launched. That said, you may want to give your audience the chance to send a gift or tip to the influencer participating in the event. Also, the gift and tip car monetization features are relevant if you are hosting a concert. As with the donation option, requesting tips may not be appropriate for companies to use.
How Does Arena Process The Revenue?
Let’s say you generate significant revenue from your live chat session. Your finance team will want to know if these funds will be tracked and managed. Arena makes this process easy through the payment integrations available through the Enterprise plan. Other Arena users can use PayPal to receive revenue.
Don’t use PayPal? Don’t worry – Arena is also working on developing an integration with Stripe. Stay tuned for more news on that front!
After you receive funds, take some time to analyze the results. For example, are there any users who sent unusually large amounts? If so, it’s wise to reach out to thank them. This extra effort goes a long way to keep the most passionate members of your audience engaged.
Live Chat Monetization: Optimizing For Conversions
The most powerful way for a company to leverage live chat monetization is to view it as a marketing platform. Start by using live chat as a way to build awareness and trust with your audience. By hosting a series of live chat events over time, your audience will become more familiar with your brand. As a result, they will be more likely to positively respond to marketing messages such as an invitation to join your email list, buy a product or meet with your sales team.
Many Arena users use live chat experiences as a way to generate conversions. For example, you can use Arena conversion cards to focus your audience on a conversion goal. Conversion cards can be used for several objectives like getting a prospect to sign up for your list, following you on social media, visiting a landing page or making a purchase.
Today, there are a few popular you can leverage Arena conversion cards in Live Chat and Live Blog to grow your business.
Lead Generation: Capture emails, Ebook download, Visit a webpage (e.g. a landing page)
Sales: Sell a product, sell a subscription to streaming services
Of course, you’re not limited to these options. Want to invite people to sign up for a paid, exclusive live chat experience? You can do that! Want to grow your following on TikTok instead? You can use conversion cards to advance that goal.
For the best results, it is smart to augment your conversion cards in the event itself. Let’s say you are running a virtual conference event with Arena Live Chat. Ask your presenters to verbally reinforce the call to action mentioned on the conversion card (e.g. “And now, please click the link in the live chat to get updates about our next virtual event!”). This approach is especially effective if your audience is new to use Arena Live Chat and conversion cards.
As you start to become more familiar with running live chat experiences, you’ll gradually collect more and more data on your customers. Use the Arena customer data platform to put your customer data to good use. Without a CDP in place, you’re missing out on a significant portion of your live chat monetization opportunity.
Get More Revenue From Your Website With Live Chat Today
You’ve discovered all of the ways that a live chat app can help you monetize your website audience. A more engaged audience means more pageviews and time on site which directly impacts potential advertising revenue. That’s not all. When your audience engages with you and others in a live chat, they are more likely to like and trust your brand. When you add live chat to your website, you’ll start to find that lead generation and sales become much easier. Learn more about Live Chat here.
