Roadmap To Increase ROI For Digital Publishers

Understanding a digital roadmap

A roadmap for an organization is supposed to help them set their path for their future endeavours. This means that a roadmap ensures that you are not lost at any point of your journey as growing business.

For a publisher, this would mean visualizing goals and objectives to allow the company, stakeholders, employees and agencies to understand where the company is set to go in the foreseeable future.

A roadmap should be conclusive of all efforts the company will put to reach the desired goal list. It is then communicated to the people involved to set the process in motion.

Improving the digital roadmap for ROI

Competitor Analysis:

If you don’t have a comprehensive list of your competitors across the global, pause immediately and build one. Knowing your competitors is as important as knowing the industry and the trends. You need to know what you are working against and working to be a part of. Know their strategy, what’s been giving them the best results, their reach, their campaigns etc. Having a thorough understanding of competitors can also help you avoid blunders they’ve done.

Build your own way:

While a roadmap is supposed to guide you, allow yourself to make bold and challenging decisions. Learn from the mistakes of others, grab onto the positive strategies but never forget to customize a solution that would bring value to your team. How do you target your audience right? How are your audiences different from others? What new can you do?

Cross-platform presence:

Have your presence known across as many channels as possible - new and old. While you may lean towards channels that assure success, don’t forget that the more easy to access you are, the more users you will attract.

Sustainable digital community:

While discussing increase in ROI for publishers, we need to look into sustainable solutions. Loud promotions, coupons and offers will only get you to a certain stage. In order to stay relevant and to have a steady flow of revenue, it’s important you look into sustainable ways to gain and retain subscribers.

How Do you get the most ROI through a roadmap?

The approach is everything! Do you want your site to be the most popular? Knowing what you want out of your site is crucial. A shared goal is that of high ROI i.e return on investment for digital publishers. How do you put your money in the right place and get the value back. Let’s dive deep.

Technology:

As a technology provider, we can assure you that the technology support you have is most likely to give you instant results. Publishers often pause when they have to invest into a CMS or monetization platform. Technology is expensive and a hard step to take. However, the right CMS facilitates smooth and effective workflow which directly impacts the quality of your content, user experience and ergo - subscriptions.

With a CMS like Bold, you get to not only ensure that your editorial team is comfortable but also extend better performing pages at all times to your users. Investing in the right tech stack is step 1 to getting better ROI.

SEO:

If you need your content to sell, you need the right tech stack and the right SEO tools. There are many SEO experts out there who spend hours and hours on making articles rank higher in relevant searches. Google's algorithm has gotten smarter and with it, so must you. You can drive traffic to your blog through quality keywords.

Investing in the right SEO tools helps you create content that is guaranteed to attract an audience. Without SEO a lot of your content may end up in the depths of the web. Hiring experts, analyzing the performance of your current content pieces, investing in tools are all definite ways to benefit.

Personalized ads:

In platforms like LinkedIn, Meta, Instagram, Google, you are now able to send personalized ads to consumers/readers. It helps you target your ads to a very specific demographic which allows you to avoid spending aimlessly.

Platforms like Google have another benefit - that of purchase intent. This is a platform dedicated for users who are “in search” of what you have to offer. With Google Ads, users see paid advertisements for things relevant to their search. For folks searching for stories specific to your niche, you have a better chance of gaining a subscriber this way than through classic search.

Sell your content along with experience:

You need content to run your website but you need it with a side of exquisite user experience. User experience can include the simple aesthetic of your website, the loading speed, the inter-linkability, the potential for engagement and shareability. In order to go from organic traffic to subscriber traffic, you need to sell an experience that audiences will pay for.

This isn't restricted to the content alone, how smooth is the payment transaction for your subscribers? Are your stories shareable? Have you created a sense of community within your platform that promotes engagement? These are questions that add to a larger picture.

Evaluate your roadmap

Is your roadmap targeted towards getting more traffic or towards getting more long term subscribers? Getting your roadmap into action can be difficult if you have too many aspirations, however a good roadmap will help you look into matters with perspective. As a digital publisher, your first motive should be to gain value out of your efforts. This comes through strategising. Understanding your audience and then building a fierce plan to achieve subscriber loyalty is the only thing in your control. It can take time to observe positive results but having the right path to traverse always makes it easier.