How Questex Drove Nearly $6M in Ad Revenue with Its Content Channel Campaign

    Recorded on: June 8, 2023

    Advertisers need to reach audiences on a growing number of platforms, all while facing tighter competition than ever. To drive revenue in this complicated landscape, publishers need to help their advertisers get as much as exposure as possible without wasting time and resources on unprofitable channels.

    In this webinar, we’re spotlighting a company that’s doing it right: Questex. They’ve driven nearly $6M in ad revenue through its use of Content Channel, highly contextual ad placements that gave its partners full ownership of a topic on the Questex website.

    Watch to learn how Questex gained a sustainable source of revenue — and strengthened its advertising relationships — through content channels.

    Some key takeaways include:

    ✅ how to use Omeda’s CDP to create cross-channel advertising campaigns
    ✅ how to translate single website visits into sustainable, long-term engagement across channels
    ✅ how to drive positive ROI for your ad partners with content

     

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    Speaker 1 (00:00):
    Hello everyone and welcome to Omeda’s Success Story webinar series. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Bill Selek, I’m a client success manager at Omeda, and I’m joined today by Josie Archer, director of Marketing and Audience Management at Questex, LLC. A couple housekeeping items before we start. This webinar will be recorded and will be viewable on demand. An email will be sent out to all registrants in the next few days with a link to the recording. If you have any questions, please open the question pane in the go-to toolbar and type your question there. We’ll try to answer questions at the end of the presentation. If time permits for any questions we don’t get to in the live broadcast, we’ll respond directly via email. So let’s get started with today’s webinar. So Josie, can you please explain how you rolled out your integrated content channel campaigns? Thank you

    Speaker 2 (00:55):
    I’m really excited to share with you how we rolled out our campaigns that drove revenue and rebooking while leveraging the Omeda database. But first, let me share what our content channels are. Here are some examples of content channels. As you can see, we position the client as a leading authority on a selected topic. We do this alongside Questex’s topically relevant content.

    (01:27):
    When you first arrive at a content channel page, an ad appears at the top about a third of the way down the page and holds for three seconds. Additionally, the client is also positioned in a variety of spots throughout the page, including their logo alongside the topic, headline ads throughout the page, and they’re also allowed to provide us with up to three assets for download on this topic. Additionally, the sponsor’s ads are featured on pages that are tagged with the same topic keyword. Our customers purchase these programs and receive a hundred percent share of voice. This is a competitor free program that allows the client brand to be paired with this relevant topic and position and position them as a trusted brand for that topic. This program is not a lead gen program, although we will deliver leads to clients for their assets that are supplied to us, but instead, it’s more of a brand recognition program, which is in the early stages of the buying process.

    (02:48):
    Often when appears when a company purchases a an integrated content channel campaign, they will also add on newsletters and emails. We find these to be an essential key in the success of content channels. The sponsor can be featured in a normal newsletter, or we have also done some spinoffs of successful content channels into special edition newsletters. As you’ll see from this example for emerging Biopharma, our sponsor was featured at the top, as well as one of their pieces of content was included above our Questex articles, this emerging biopharma newsletter through and sustained a readership of over 10,000 subscribers. Additionally, we often upsell to targeted emails with the example on the right.

    (03:49):
    These are extremely successful and a key component in our campaigns. How we leverage the Omeda data for these emails is based on article tag visits. By identifying these readers, we’re able to send extremely targeted emails. Here’s an example of a third party email we did for emerging biopharma topic. In Group one, you can see that we are targeting visitors of the content channel page, whereas in group two, we are targeting people that have visited any page tagged with emerging biopharma. This is because as I mentioned before, the sponsor’s ads are shown not only on the content channel, but also on pages with the same tag, and therefore we’re able to broaden our our reach. Additionally, we’ve also included in these groups our base query. That’s how we refer to ’em as at Questex. Those base queries ensure that they are meeting our fatigue filters and are also valid emails, et cetera, and the results are pretty fantastic from these campaigns.

    (05:08):
    Here is an example of the special edition biopharma newsletter from September of last year. As you can see, it sent to the 10,000 subscribers of this newsletter. Our open rate, our unique open rate was at an astonishing 48%, and our unique click rate was at almost 7%, which if you had received the Omeda report that came out not too long ago with statistics on opens and clicks, you’ll see that that part exceeds a standard one point a half to 2.5% unique. Click this success in these emails and special edition newsletters. Foster a very easy renewal conversation conversation. These customers who purchase content channels purchase them with other items. As I mentioned, there’s newsletter sponsorships, possibly an ad, a web ad and email Emails are, are a key here, as mentioned before. So in this case, here’s an example of a customers program for both September and December.

    (06:28):
    When you combine what the customer spend is on, customers who have included a content channel in their package, Questex generated over $5.7 million in revenue in 2222 from these clients. And what’s really fantastic is that there’s a higher spend year over year. We have a 53% rebooking rate with those customers, and we saw an increase in revenue from those customers in 2020 to 2021, I, I’m sorry, since 2020 to 2022, we saw an increase of $800,000 in revenue spend from these customers. It’s basically a simple upgrade because they’ve seen great success in the brand recognition and the emails and special edition newsletters that they’re purchasing that now they’re ready for that next step of lead gen with programs such as our written content webinar and survey programs that have a guaranteed lead a lead guarantee on them. Additionally, we just recently rolled out custom resource centers, which are already proven to be a great rebooking option for our clients.

    (07:47):
    Not only do they have the lead guarantee component, but it also allows the sponsor to not only position their branding alongside our content, but also their own assets in positioning them even more As a, an expert on that specific topic, it would not surprise me if we have another success story in the upcoming years around custom resource centers as they have already taken off as a great next step from content channels. So just to recap, we take our content channels and we have email and newsletter add-ons, maybe other add-ons such as content programs, webinars, et cetera. This totaled $5.7 million in revenue in 2022. It led to high rebooking rates and even higher value BA buys in their renewal programs. The success recipe is simple key branding, positioning the sponsor as a trusted brand alongside Questex content. Emails and newsletters are then sent to those people that have already seen the brand. They have brand recognition, and it is targeted to people that are also interested in that topic making for a nice high engagement rate on these communication. And then our sales team leveraging the success and upselling these customers into more expensive lead gen programs. Thank you.

    Speaker 1 (09:25):
    Thank you, Josie. It looks like we have time to answer a few questions, so let me pull those up. Okay. First question. How do you develop the article tags? Are they based on tags, editors organically assign, or does sales and audience help identify tags that align with sponsor’s desired audience targeting?

    Speaker 2 (09:54):
    That’s a great question. Typically our editors tag what they write when they write their content. They are very well versed in this. It’s a component of all our standard processes that they tag appropriately and you know, we then evaluate those page analytics to determine if there’s enough interest from our audience to then convert it into a paid content channel.

    Speaker 1 (10:24):
    Okay. So the, the it’s editor driven, driven tagging and then you, you do the analytics based on the tags they assign?

    Speaker 2 (10:33):
    Yeah, exactly.

    Speaker 1 (10:35):
    Okay. let’s see. Let’s go to another question. Do you have a sense for how many leads sponsors are generating through these campaigns?

    Speaker 2 (10:47):
    That’s a slightly tricky question because the main goal of these content channel campaigns is more for brand recognition versus lead gen. We have some sponsors that don’t provide any assets, in which case everything they’re doing is brand recognition and possibly driving traffic depending what they’re promoting in their emails. I would say that I can’t really assign a number because of the focus on branding, but I would say that when they move onto a lead gen program, we’re seeing really great success with those campaigns as far as lead gen.

    Speaker 1 (11:29):
    Okay. So those lead gen programs are kind of the, the, the next step.

    Speaker 2 (11:33):
    Yeah.

    Speaker 1 (11:34):
    Okay. What is the typical campaign timeframe? One month, three months, six months?

    Speaker 2 (11:44):
    So these programs are designed to be a quarterly campaign, so three months, and we find that three months is a really great length of time. It really allows people to engage with the topic and have the brand recognition. We do allow our clients to switch out assets and or ads on a monthly basis, but it is a three month campaign.

    See full transcript

    Speaker 1 (12:11):
    Okay. So do you do you have sponsors that come with like three months’ worth of collateral and, and roll that out or do they just kind of you know, play it by ear and, and see how the, the content’s doing and then decide whether they wanna switch things out? I

    Speaker 2 (12:29):
    Think my marketing programs team would love it if a client provided all three months of that, that’s

    Speaker 1 (12:35):
    All that, wouldn’t that be nice , that would be a dream

    Speaker 2 (12:37):
    Come true. But unfortunately I would say generally we would collect the con the assets for the first month and then someone does a reach out closer to the end of the month just to check in. If something’s doing poorly, we would obviously make some recommendations there, but generally they do perform really well and if the client wants to continue with their assets from the previous month, it is totally fine. If they get us the assets late for that second month, we generally still switch ’em out once, once they’re sent. But overall we find that the client typically in some cases just goes with the three months with the same assets unless there’s reason to to switch ’em out, a new product launch or something that makes it more appealing to switch it out. We do like to switch ’em out every month just because it kind of creates a freshness on the page as well.

    Speaker 1 (13:40):
    Let’s see. It looks like we have time for one more question. Let’s see. What is the typical lifespan for a special edition newsletter?

    Speaker 2 (13:54):
    Ooh, I would say this is also a question that varies greatly because if you’re dealing with a hot trending topic, it might, you know, it’s really hard to predict how long that topic is going to stay hot. So we definitely closely monitor our content channels and if we’re starting to see that there’s a shift, then we might start shifting with, with that trend. For example, COVID, you know, was extremely hot for a long time and then now it’s not as prominent, so we probably wouldn’t have a covid content channel today if we had had one three years ago. So I think it just really depends. If we have a topic that’s more evergreen, it can definitely stick around for years. But we just kind of developed these more recently. So I would say that I wish I had a better answer for you, but it really has a lot of factors to consider here as far as how long it’s gonna stay a hot topic.

    Speaker 1 (15:04):
    Makes sense. Makes sense. Okay, it looks like we’re coming up on time, so we’ll compile the remaining questions and respond to you via email. Thank you Josie for presenting and thank you everyone for joining us today. Again, an email will be sent out within the next few days with a link to the archive webinar, and please join us on June 22nd for our next success story webinar with Rick Ellis at CFE Media. You can view the list of upcoming webinars and register for those webinars as well as view webinar archives in the resource section of our website at omeda.com/resources/webinars. Hope everyone has a great rest of your day. Thank you.