Newsmedia company attracts and retains advertisers with marketing campaign analysis by smartFOCUS ASTECH’s MAAX
OVERVIEW
With a circulation of 279,000, The Sacramento Bee is one of the 25 largest newspapers in the United States. However, its reach across multiple channels, online and offline, is much greater. In order to leverage that reach, develop new revenue streams and re-engage advertisers, the company embarked on an ambitious initiative to redesign its analytical and communications capabilities. The Bee believed it needed to provide the merchant community with comprehensive insights into the consumer marketplace, and give those advertisers a sense of not only to what audiences they should advertise to, but how to reach them most effectively. The Bee turned to the MAAX marketing automation and analytics solution from smartFOCUS’ newsmedia division, smartFOCUS Astech.
With MAAX, The Bee can now seamlessly integrate, profile and interpret customer data, helping its advertising clients define and quantify their opportunity, and optimize channel utilization to reach target audiences.
THE CHALLENGE
“Newspapers have seen dramatic change over the past few years, and we need to use the right technology and techniques in order to appeal to advertisers and get the industry back on its feet,” says Frank Wofford, senior research analyst for The Sacramento Bee. “Our biggest challenge is to show clients that investing in newspapers is worthwhile, and we need to help them understand the value of reaching our audience and using our variety of channels to do so.”
To attract and retain advertisers, The Sacramento Bee needed to learn more about its customers’ customers, and provide relevant data and analytics to advertisers to enable the cost effective targeting of appropriate audiences.
THE SOLUTION
The Sacramento Bee now analyzes customer data using MAAX from smartFOCUS ASTECH. “We can instantly pull information together and present it clearly and effectively to our clients,” says Wofford. “We can take this customer information and make logical decisions about where and how our clients can find the audience targets most important to their business. We‘re reaching an amazing array of advertisers and helping them to target prospects at the household level.”
The Bee’s improved relationship with advertisers has shown: the company has seen a substantial increase in audience-based profile analysis over the past two years, and the MaaX system has been integral to helping us retain business at risk as well as bring in new business. We have seen an increase in the success rate and the overall amount of business that we generate when we use the audience approach through customer profiling with the MaaX database. We have increased the number of customer profiles that we do by over 100% in the past year. Customers want to share their customer files because they see the value in the information that is returned through the analysis. We’re working with more advertisers at a more frequent rate. The insight we provide is paying off for our customers, and we see growing success in turn.”
“Our advertisers are constantly looking for chances to reach audiences they haven’t had much success with in the past. MAAX has opened up new ways for our customers to reach these prospects, and they can do so with a new level of customer insight.”
The Bee integrated MAAX with Nielsen Claritas household information as well as Equifax integrated register information, and uses MAAX Reporter to seamlessly integrate data with Microsoft Excel. “I was impressed with the minimal learning curve. I had no prior database experience, but I learned how to pull data, and it was very clear as to how I could make use of it,” Wofford says. “I’m still amazed at how quickly I can bring data together- and so are our customers.”
Using MAAX, many clients were seeing a complete customer profile for the first time, Wofford says. “The level of detail and customer matching was brand new to our clients, and they could really get a full view of our customers and how they interact with advertisements. They come away with data that helps them see customers throughout the Sacramento area, including the potential they’ve yet to capitalize on.”
“MAAX has changed the way we work with data internally, but it has also altered the tenor of our relationships with advertisers and made it easier for us to establish a more consultative, 360-degree partnership. We really feel like we can offer our clients a complete sense of customer data, and all parties are reaping dividends.”
Building on its success with clients, The Sacramento Bee is now using MAAX to engage with social media. “We’re excited moving towards the launch. MAAX brings laser focus into play for media dollars, and this kind of precision makes it easy for our clients to figure out what sort of campaigns make sense for customers online.”
PRODUCTS & SOLUTIONS
- smartMARKETER Analyzer
- smartMARKETER Campaigner
- smartMARKETER Reporter
- smartMARKETER eChannel
ABOUT THE SACRAMENTO BEE
Founded in 1857, The Sacramento Bee is the flagship of the 30 daily and almost 50 nondaily newspapers owned by The McClatchy Company. The third-largest newspaper corporation in the country in terms of circulation, McClatchy prints more than 3.2 million papers each day, read by millions more all over the world via a covey of Web sites on the Internet.
ABOUT smartFOCUS ASTECH
smartFOCUS ASTECH, a division of smartFOCUS Group plc, is the leading provider of marketing automation solutions to the publishing industry. The firm, founded in 1992, supports the strategic data-driven marketing initiatives of almost 200 media companies worldwide. Its innovative marketing systems include the MAAX™ Solution Suite (Marketing Automation & AnalytiX), a revolutionary system providing decision-makers with “unconstrained access” to marketing data and analysis – as well as a variety of consulting and education services and data products.
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