2 in-person events in 2 weeks after 2+ years working from home!  They were invigorating, educational, fun and a little tiring.   Omeda’s recent Idea Exchange (OX5) in Chicago–following the Northwestern program that I wrote about here— did not disappoint.  Creative, insightful speakers discussed today’s media landscape from both corporate and audience marketing perspectives.

Here are 9 key things I learned from the conference that you can use now:

1. To help with lead generation for advertisers, create a standardized suite of multi-channel advertising opportunities. (ie. web presence, white papers, print ads, research, white papers). This is easier to manage than one-off sales requests.
2. Build out standard reports to give to advertisers, during/after campaigns.  This is less work in the long-term, especially if you can automate email sends for advertisers.
3. Brands are selling by letting an advertiser “own” a website topic for 30/60/90 days. This includes pop up static ads for a brand website, branded newsletters, etc. One company was able to increase revenue $100K annually selling these spots across multiple brands. Another has a waiting list.
4. Targeted pop-ups can help to increase knowledge about “unknown” site visitors, not negatively impact site traffic, and increase engagement on the newsletters. You can read more about pop up ads in this post.
5. Paid subscription “memberships” are back, as a revenue driver.  These can include the magazine, and exclusive site content, podcasts, webinars, white papers, and newsletters. 
6. For paid subscriptions, auto-renewals can improve renewal rates.  Once firm sent out automated emails and a pop-up to subscribers 30 and 60 days before expire, if their credit card was going to expire during the renewal process. They saw a $10K lift doing this effort, with a 6.2% conversion rate.
7. Correct tags on your website content allows for better knowledge about what subjects your site visitors are viewing. 
8. Brand websites are increasingly putting up both soft “gates” (ie. 3 site visits then a pop up appears asking for non-required email addresses) and hard gates/paywalls ( ie. to see more than 3 web pages, the visitor must supply some information like email address, name, country).  More detailed information on “gates” can be found here.
9. Ideas to convert unknown site traffic to known visitors include metering/pay walls, pop-ups, creating white papers and additional content that can be syndicated across other sites. 

This is a lot of ideas! If you try to incorporate just one item in your business in the next quarter, hopefully you will see increased customer knowledge or revenue–or both. The journey continues. Cindy