B2B Publisher Shrugs Off AI, Search Threats By Honing in on Audience Data

Touchpoint Markets may be barely a month old, but this newborn doesn’t want a rattle: it wants granular user data.

The publisher of brands like Credit Union Times, Treasury&Risk and financial advisor news service ThinkAdvisor, was spun out of ALM at the start of May, shortly after the legal publisher merged with UK-based Law Business Research.

Two years ago, ALM reorganized itself by vertical instead of revenue stream, creating a legal division and a business and finance division, Jason Wesalo, Touchpoint’s SVP of digital and IT, told AMO on an Omeda-sponsored webinar. That was Touchpoint’s first step into becoming its own entity.

The company’s main focus has been on mapping users within their ecosystem and specific revenue outcomes—for example, tracking someone who arrives on a given site and ultimately produces a transaction worth $500. 

“The model that we’re really trying to go to is move users down the funnel, and as we know more about them, get them into something that’s very high value,” he said. Touchpoint’s largest revenue source today is marketing services, followed by events and paid content. 

“At a bare minimum, we’re going to start to require registration on our sites. That way we start to be able to really hone in on: who is this user? Do we have those first-party data attributes? And then from that, because we’ve pooled all of our content together, be able to map that content against specific attributes of that user.”

That might mean recommending a specific white paper, event or subscriber-only content to bring them deeper into its products. But until the data is that rich, Wesalo said it’s “really just a matter of, if we keep a user within our ecosystem, that in and of itself is a win.”

The move to registrations has juiced an already “pretty sophisticated” approach to audience segmenting inherited from ALM, Wesalo said.

Its Audience Intent digital advertising product, for example, lets Touchpoint “monitor all of the companies that we serve in terms of—are there more employees now searching for a CRM [customer relationship management solution]? And then we can look across all the email addresses of individuals in that company in order to be able to spin up a custom marketing campaign.”

Touchpoint’s leadership team realized that it was “highly valuable to be able to target a specific financial advisor, because essentially, if a financial advisor moves from one company to the other, they’re taking their entire book of business with them…

“We’re able to stitch together a lot of traditional marketing services levers—advertising and logo placements—but we had editorial content about advisors switching firms. So within that content, we were able to spin up a very custom module that says: ‘Are you interested in making a move?’ Yes or no. They hit no, it takes them over to the client’s website. They click yes, it takes them over to a lead generation page.

“The application of that, we want to scale across the board—not just in the recruitment space, but that would pertain to a vendor that wants to be able to sell their products and be able to really apply really granular targeting.”

Bad Design

While data has been a major part of driving users down the funnel, Wesalo said he was also focused on design.

“One of my biggest frustrations through the years working in the B2B industry is that a lot of times we sort of settle for bad design,” he said. “Or we settle for this expectation that the user will figure it out on their own.”

In his opinion, publishers have to do a better job at making offerings “blatantly obvious.”

He gave the example of Touchpoint Markets’ ThinkAdvisor brand, which targets at financial and wealth advisors.

“If you’re really interested in tax-oriented content, well, we have this subscription-based tool over here that you could check out… There’s an award show I could check out. We set up a relationship between these different products so they have a shared design component, so that if you’re a user, you stay within this universe.”

It has to be done in an elegant way where it’s showing value to the user, not just throwing an ad at them.

“Part of our core strategy at Touchpoint has been ‘let’s bake all of this into the core user interfaces in terms of the core templates.’ Really just make this look and feel like it’s all digitally connected.”

Even if it is B2B, Touchpoint is being consumed like any other content: on smartphones, while sitting on the couch, on the Tube, etc. The expectation about the user experience and good design doesn’t change, so that has been a focal point.

Wesalo said he had been somewhat surprised that “one of our most successful launches” since the formation of what has become Touchpoint Markets has been a paid subscription business within Credit Union Times, which is on track to be about a $1 million launch 12 months after kick off.

“We did a lot of customer research and we realized that we’re the brand in that space, and there was a real opportunity to launch a paid model there,” Wesalo said. “There’s premium content, there’s some exclusive webinars and there’s some other things that are weaved in there.”

The company is now considering how it will apply that subscription model across its different communities. “It may not be the same flavor across the different markets, but the components are there and they’re recyclable.”