Overview
Endeavor wanted to maximize the value of broad and niche media brand acquisitions as the company has grown from just three brands in 2018 to more than 90 today.
Strategy and Solution
To maximize the value and intelligently manage their media brand and audience acquisitions, the Endeavor Business Media team unified its audience data with Omeda, which streamlined data management, email and marketing workflow automation, and subscription management.
Outcomes
- Grew their audience from 350,000 records to 13 million and counting
- Implemented audience engagement at scale
- Conducted personalized welcome, re-engagement, and reactivation campaigns across 90+ brands
- Scaled the digital team to 20+ employees
- Re-engaged nearly half a million audience members and reactivated approximately 150,000 through reactivation campaigns
Intro
Growth is a major milestone for any media company – but it also introduces new questions and potential pitfalls. How can you incorporate new employees, systems, and data processes into your culture without losing what made them effective? How can you create a new organization that’s greater than the sum of its parts?
Endeavor Business Media’s story has been defined by those questions. Since 2018, it’s grown from three brands to 90+ and counting. But by championing an audience-first strategy and a purposeful acquisition growth strategy, Endeavor hasn’t just overcome its growing pains. It’s blossomed into one of America’s biggest B2B brands.
Driven by a purposeful acquisition growth plan, the company has grown to 90+ brands and an engaged database of more than 13 million B2B professionals. For perspective, that’s 3,000% growth in five years. The brand, assets, and audience additions provided valuable opportunities to enter and grow in new, opportunistic B2B markets.
To maximize the value of their many new audiences and databases, the Endeavor team needed to ask itself:
- How could Endeavor meaningfully engage each of its new audiences without resorting to one-size-fits-all messaging?
- How could they stay on top of each audience member’s needs without sacrificing their productivity?
- And how could they do all of this efficiently enough to remain profitable?
Leading the audience charge is Amanda Landsaw, who joined Endeavor in 2019. As VP of Audience Development, Landsaw is charged with bringing all the new brands under the Endeavor umbrella while maintaining Endeavor’s commitment to excellence.
“You have all these different companies with their various processes. Now, how do you standardize it?” Landsaw says. “It’s not ‘Endeavor’s Way is the best way.’ We have all these companies, so how are we taking the best from every little bit and creating an Endeavor standard?”
Endeavor’s advantage: Using a single audience view to drive smart growth
To address these needs, Endeavor turned to Omeda, an integrated audience marketing platform with a native customer data platform, marketing automation solution, and subscription management tools. Before, they might have needed to use several tools to see how their content performed, create campaigns, and then engage their audience across their website and emails. Now in one search, Landsaw’s team can see exactly what each audience member is engaging with. They can also see what’s resonating, what isn’t, and adjust quickly enough to make an impact.
“The marketing and audience teams have immediate access to the information and can tie [their strategy] back to the results,” Landsaw says. “They can say, ‘Here’s really what’s happening. Here are the unsubscribes that you’re seeing because you’re just hitting your list over and over again with irrelevant information, as opposed to identifying what each audience member really wants at the time that they want it.’”
Now in one search, Landsaw’s team can see exactly what each audience member is engaging with. They can also see what’s resonating, what isn’t, and adjust quickly enough to make an impact. That’s because Omeda takes in audience data from the channels Endeavor uses — from email and print to website, events, and webinars — and stores it in one place. Whenever someone reads an Endeavor site, or attends an event, it’s recorded on that person’s audience profile.
Omeda’s integrated database helps Landsaw keep her audience’s needs at the forefront of her decisions, rather than recycling the same old content. And no matter what Endeavor website a visitor is on or what channel they’re engaging with, the Endeavor team knows how to reach them. That’s helped Landsaw and her team maintain an audience-first, personalized approach, even as Endeavor takes on new brands and audiences.
“Because at the end of the day, my job is to do what’s best for Endeavor and for my team,” Landsaw says. “That is my guiding light within everything that I do. At the end of the day, is it best for my team? Is it best for Endeavor? If the answer is even remotely, ‘maybe no,’ then I’m not going down that path.”
Harnessing audience data for personalization and marketing action
With Olytics, Omeda’s website analytics solution, Landsaw’s team can track each individual activity on each article, eBook, webinar, and whitepaper. And each interaction is immediately added to the reader’s audience profile. From there, each audience member is immediately added to new segments as soon as they meet specific criteria. So when someone downloads an eBook, they’re added to a “read eBook” segment, which the Endeavor team can immediately query within Omeda. And since Omeda has native email and marketing automation, the Endeavor team can immediately engage that individual or segment with relevant content and offers. (No uploads required!)
“It helps us to be able to say, ‘Hey, we want to target this e-book about safety to everybody who has visited the related web page in the last 60 days. Being able to hone in on that audience and target based on specific f ilters and utilizing the personalization is huge for us.”
That’s where Omeda has been the most helpful, Landsaw says. Endeavor uses Odyssey — Omeda’s marketing automation solution — to execute welcome, re-engagement, and reactivation campaigns across email, ads, and their website. And since they base their targeting on engagement and audience data from Omeda’s CDP, they can personalize each campaign without sacrificing productivity. Rather than just blasting emails to their audience and hoping something sticks, the Endeavor team can give each person in their audience exactly what they want in the places they’re already visiting.
“It’s not just about email,” Landsaw says. “It’s utilizing every touch point to create a holistic audience approach and experience, instead of just shooting emails off regularly. Odyssey allows us to serve our audience members, between frequency filters and being able to [target content] based on each audience member’s behaviors.”
Even better, the team can templatize campaigns and apply them across all their brands without using other tools or teams. And when you’re managing 90+ brands? Those time savings add up fast.
Lessons learned from the front line
These efficiencies have helped Endeavor successfully navigate a series of acquisitions to become one of America’s largest B2B media companies. Beyond that, Landsaw has developed a team of 20+ people to meet the needs and business opportunities the strategy has created. So, what’s next for Landsaw and her team? Besides refreshing their automated campaigns, Landsaw wants to grow and maintain an audience-first strategy with privacy and respect at the forefront.
“The more that we can make audience privacy and overall audience respect known, and make that the go-to standard across B2B media, the better off we are,” Landsaw says. “Because if we just blast everything to everybody without accounting for, ‘What do they want, what are their behaviors, what are they diving into, and what’s their intent?’, we’re setting ourselves back.”
What else has Landsaw taken away from their progress to date? Here’s what she says — and how you can apply it to your strategy: Focus on the right platforms: You can’t be everything to everyone. That’s especially true if you’re managing almost 100 brands at once. With this in mind, Landsaw prioritizes quality over quantity. “If you have 100,000 people in your database or on your list, and they’re not going to be the quality people that are going to read your content, there’s no reason to have them wasting time.”
Prioritize collaboration
Landsaw has risen through the media ranks. But success is a team sport at Endeavor, Landsaw says. “I have phenomenal people to help guide and drive that strategy along with me. We sit down on a regular cadence, and we challenge ourselves with the questions of, ‘Are we going in the right direction? Is Endeavor going where it needs to go?’” Landsaw feels incredibly fortunate to have buy-in from Endeavor’s senior leadership. “Our executive team is open, they’re honest, they’re transparent, they’re supportive. I have big aspirations. I have a lot to say and Endeavor’s a place where I feel like I can be heard.”
