Executives from Hearst Magazines & Refinery29 Share Tips for Adapting to Changing Digital Platforms to Enhance User Engagement    

Every business needs to connect with its customers in a meaningful way. And social media platforms can certainly enhance the ability of a business to reach existing and new clients. However, with social media platforms proliferating at a huge pace—even if they provide better, faster ways to connect—businesses sometimes struggle to manage their multi-platform marketing campaigns. Consequently, determining where their customers will sign in tomorrow is a giant guessing game. So what to do?

Marketing and Customer Contact in the Digital Age

Just as a brick-and-mortar business would add online marketing and website sales in an effort to meet customer demand, media outlets have faced similar challenges in parsing which digital platforms will allow them to stay relevant and sought-after by consumers. The goal is to solve a classic conundrum for any company: how can a business engage customers, build loyalty and keep up with changes in the market, simultaneously?  That conundrum now has a modern-day, digital twist.

Two thought leaders, media executives Neha Gandhi, Senior Vice President of Content Strategy & Innovation for Refinery29, an online-only media outlet, and Kate Lewis, SVP of Content Operations & Editorial Director, Hearst Magazines Digital Media (home of publications including the long-standing, successful trio of Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and Elle), shared their insights on building a better digital business both from scratch and via an organizational shift.

The Journey of Two Publishing Businesses

For Hearst, the evolution from print magazines to a combination of print and digital balances the needs of loyal print readers with the demands of a (relatively) new digital market, whose online-friendly consumers are eager to consume fresh content daily, rather than waiting a month for the next issue to arrive. And if any company can execute a nimble strategy to achieve this, it’s the storied Hearst conglomerate, which has a long history of adapting to meet changing needs: prior to his 1903 entry into the magazine business, the organization’s founder, William Randolph Hearst, had built a newspaper empire, starting with the San Francisco Examiner in 1880.

On the other hand, Refinery29 is a product of the new millennium, launched in NYC in the summer of 2005 by four friends with exotic-sounding names: Justin Stefano, Philippe von Borries, Piera Gelardi, and Christene Barberich . The website’s original mission was to introduce women to some of the brilliant, but lesser-known New York City fashion houses.  Since then, it has evolved its brand into a lifestyle platform for women covering topics such as tech, entertainment, beauty and fashion.

As for the dependence on digital marketing that Hearst and Refinery29 embrace? At Hearst, said Lewis, “Sixty percent of our user traffic is digital at this point, so we are really focused on what that user experience looks like.” That’s a large share of digital for a company that, for decades of course, was 100% print-based. Refinery29 did not have to shift its focus, as they were always a digital outlet, but while they once had fewer competitors, and a little edge in the industry, there is now not only greater competition, but a daily deluge of new platforms to juggle. Refinery29 now sees 27M+ monthly unique views, according to Comscore, and a cross-platform reach—shared across YouTube, Snapchat, Flipboard, Facebook and others—of over 209M.

The Influence & Strength of Social Media

Consequently, each of the brands at Hearst has 1-3 people dedicated to social media execution. Gone are the days when social media was used to market to the reader in hopes of enticing them to click and read a story. Instead, as Hearst’s Kate Lewis explained, these specialized editors are not only re-architecting articles to fit social media, they also develop unique content specifically for those platforms.

For example, Hearst recently added a team exclusively for Facebook Live, and almost immediately featured an impromptu concert with Scottish artist KT Tunstall filmed in a Hearst conference room. And Hearst Digital now specializes in showcasing the diversity of Hearst’s brands and how they can create brilliant digital content. According to Lewis, they might shoot video of a celebrity who is in-house for a cover shoot, or create a series of food videos—always popular on social media—during a food shoot for Redbook. It’s exactly these moments — telling a story in a new way by leveraging the resources they already have — from which other, non-media, businesses can learn. Mundane office activities become opportunities to engage customers, providing the interaction, the conversation, that they’ve come to expect and crave.

Furthermore, as Lewis noted, “A year ago, we weren’t even talking about Snapchat. Now it’s the second largest in terms of time spent for users on their mobile phones.” Cosmopolitan and Seventeen were the first Hearst publications to hit Snapchat. So they have experimented with those brands and applied what they have learned to others.

Four Tips From These Two Publishing Powerhouses:

Be Adaptable
One of the biggest challenges for any company using digital is how to best engage that consumer. For Hearst, that concern wasn’t limited to digital content viewed on laptops or tablets; it included bringing vibrant print images to the tiny screens of most mobile devices. “We changed the format of all of our websites so they are beautiful on mobile,” Lewis said. But they couldn’t stop there. The plethora of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat generated a need to not only adapt print content to social sites, but also to create content specifically for those platforms. Thus, Lewis related how at Hearst Digital, they now partner with the print teams to create content usable for platforms such as Facebook Live — for example, creating videos on set during a print shoot. The reader might not have a close-up of the bracelet on the wrist, but they get a feel for how the clothes move on a person, and how one might feel in them.

At Refinery29, Neha Gandhi said they recently underwent an organizational shift to better meet their strategy — an evolution of the brand — making her the SVP of Content Strategy & Innovation.  This move integrated their marketing group into the content strategy group, creating one team to provide quality content in every area (programming strategy, insights, and social), all moving toward meeting the common goal of delivering the product their audience wants.

Takeaways:

• • • Consider mobile users when developing website and visual content
    • Engage customers in a conversation
    • Don’t be afraid of video
    • Understand when organizational shifts are imperative to move a brand forward

Be Nimble
The shifts in new digital and social platforms require being able to move resources around with flexibility and agility, making it imperative for companies to meet users where they are. Gandhi suggests that in order to keep it, “It requires you to be smart and nimble.” For Gandhi and Refinery29, “That means at the inception of an idea you’re considering, where is this going to go?”  It’s important to consider how and where the user will engage in the content, not just the content itself.

Gandhi noted that great content ideas should rest on three pillars: expertise, instinct and insight. Expertise means the sources should know what they’re talking about; instinct is the ability to predict and explore what people will want; and insight comes from the users’ reactions to a piece—what engaged them or what are they asking for more of? This perspective guides everything at Refinery29, whether it’s a video, infographic or editorial piece.

Reflecting the changes in the industry, Refinery29 thinks about not only where to place content, but about whether it will live in one place or several, or how it can be adapted for, say, Snapchat. They also will try several angles of a story or various headlines to see how content is best received by the user.

The lesson here for mainstream companies? Smart leaders will allocate resources and data analysis tools to determine where their clients want to engage, instead of guessing. For instance, pretty displays with heavy advertising jargon won’t engage today’s buyers in the same way that real people using the product will.  Not every story can be retro-fitted for social platforms either.  Important details like this need to be considered in any effort to reach and retain customers.

Takeaways:

• • • Brainstorm alternate styles of bringing your product or content to users- think demonstrations, or visual storytelling from live users
    • Don’t be afraid to test multiple platforms simultaneously
    • Listen to user feedback and apply those insights to future marketing efforts

Trust Your Teams
The Refinery29’s social teams are trying each new platform as it erupts, to stay ahead of users even before they fall in love with those emerging platforms. They don’t micro-manage, but instead, allow that department to experiment with, say, forty different platforms and then gauge user reactions. “We let them try, and when they have a great idea, we let them execute it,” Gandhi said.

“You’ve got to be willing to roll with it. If you aren’t willing to roll with it,” Gandhi said, “you’re kind of missing the point of the internet.” However, that doesn’t mean you keep trying on a platform that isn’t working. They give each new platform a three-month trial period.

Takeaways: 

• • • Empower your marketing/social media teams and allow them to execute
    • Embrace the fluidity of the internet; social platforms can be popular today and gone tomorrow
    • Don’t devote too much time or resources to a platform that isn’t generating results

Create a Unique User Experience
“Our object is to make the user experience as excellent as it can be,” Lewis said, and that extends to advertising and helping their advertisers craft their messages to connect with readers in the same way interesting content does. In other words, the goal is to keep readers from wanting to scroll past advertising as fast as one might flip the page of a magazine. According to Lewis, Hearst’s strategy is to find creative ways to engage users by sharing content across their own brands; for instance, Country Living and Delish routinely share content, and a new column crosses Popular Mechanics with Cosmo, leveraging the expertise of one brand on another to share cutting-edge tech trends.

Takeaways:

• • • Combine your products and content for a special user experience that encourages the audience to share with their friends and followers
    • Revise traditional marketing to provide users a forum to share their experiences with their friends and followers
    • Create teams across departments to share information and expertise

Delivering Tailor-Made, Targeted Content to Delight Customers

It’s apparent that for both publishing platforms, the core of the user experience and the heart of everything they do is the user’s takeaway from the experience. Did they laugh, cry or learn something from their interaction with the brand? Not every experience is life-changing, but every interaction should include an added value for the person reading the content. “Where we win is engagement,” Gandhi said. The user should leave with a feeling of “it was worth it for me to spend some time here.”

Business and marketing professionals overwhelmed by the onslaught of new digital platforms, take heart. And take it from Lewis and Gandhi: you don’t have to rush into every platform, but you do need to understand that the digital pool isn’t stagnant. Some days it will feel like a powerful, moving current. A multi-platform marketing strategy adaptable to the changing tides in social platforms will allow you to successfully navigate.