Digital Marketing in 2017: Turn that Cost Center into a Money Maker!

Marketing might help push revenue, but it doesn’t usually directly create it. Most companies see marketing’s job as maximizing messages and list reach, and then describing the value of products and services available. Epic fail!

You can actually transform marketing into a true profit center.

What if you could create a marketing department that creates so much value for your audience that it actually begins to pay for itself? In addition to creating quality content, the revamped, revenue-generating marketing department of today should focus on these three core functions:

1. Creating valuable subscribers that opt-in to your content
2. Developing a content destination for your audience
3. Developing monetization strategies for that content for both direct and indirect revenue

We interviewed Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute, to learn more about the transformation of marketing within media companies.

Marketing in the old ways doesn’t work any more. Why do niche media companies need to reinvent the marketing model? What opportunities could they be missing?

There are 10 different ways that niche media companies can generate revenue, yet most niche organizations only leverage one or two sources. The key for niche owners is to understand that marketing and publishing have converged, and start making decisions now that will generate in substantial revenues later…including…actually selling products and services.

Every publisher wants to figure out how to best monetize their niche content.  What are some good guidelines to get started? Any pitfalls to avoid?

The most successful niche publishers today are focusing on opt-in email subscribers…keeping and growing those.  Once that happens, it opens up a multitude of revenue opportunities.  We recommend focusing on one at a time, solidifying, and then adding another revenue option.  For example, events are huge and growing in most industries, so our recommendation is to plant your flag on the event side and deliver on that promise, then move on to another revenue category, such as sponsored content, or consulting, or lead generation revenue.

What is the one most important thing you think niche publishers should focus on in 2018?

Email, Email, Email.

Editor’s note: Joe is a keynote speaker at the 2017 Niche Digital Summit in Chicago, Sept. 25-27. He’ll be talking about Road to Riches: Your Roadmap to Revenue-Focused Digital Marketing.

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More about Joe: Joe Pulizzi is Founder of Content Marketing Institute, a UBM company. CMI is the leading education and training organization for content marketing, which includes the largest in-person content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World. Joe is also the author of four books, including his latest, Content Inc. If you ever see Joe in person, he’ll be wearing orange. It’s his thing.

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Niche Media has the best events, education, and training in media! Our super niched-out events & content give target-audience publishers in the B2C, hobbyist, B2B, city & regional, and association markets the tools they need to build revenue, audience, and more.

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