Peter Prestipino has over 14 years of experience in digital media and online marketing. He is the Editor-In-Chief of Website Magazine, a print and online trade publication for Internet business professionals that garners hundreds of thousands of subscribers. We talked with Peter about content marketing, the future of websites, how to get the most out of data collection, and more.
Key Learnings:
1. Websites level the playing field between big and small businesses.
2. Companies that demonstrate a commitment to client education are going to be the winners in an increasingly competitive online environment.
3. Independently, social media, sophisticated email technologies and SMS cannot replace the website. However, a website by itself also won’t ensure success. The most successful brands today focus on the experience across channels.
4. Very few people are interested enough or capable enough to design a solid website. But those who understand the potential benefits are more quickly able to correct mistakes, position their messages in a way that’s meaningful to users and really understand the customer.
5. You have to know what data is the most meaningful to collect for your organization, and you have to implement the things you learn.
6. In the future, we’ll see less reliance on ad revenue and a greater reliance on subscription revenue.
7. It’s particularly important for the C-Suite to use Business Intelligence dashboards, because it provides them with a more holistic understanding of the performance of the whole enterprise.
8. You can’t publish one blog post and think that customers are suddenly going to come rolling in. You have to do this every single day.
9. In terms of content production volume, you have to create as much as your users are willing to consume, and you have to publish information that consumers want to consume.
10. A recent Google algorithm update is going to put greater reliance on real time information, so if you’re not publishing regularly, you’re probably going to get left behind.
Interview:
ML: I’m a huge fan of Website Magazine; everyone at our company reads it, myself included. How did you get started in the field, and what have you learned over the past 20 years of being Editor-in-Chief?
PP: I got into web marketing when I was in college in the late 90s. The field was starting to take off, and I was sending a lot of email and marketing individual products at the time. Then, I started working for a digital advertising company and transitioned from there to Website Magazine. We’ve been covering the digital business space for about 10 years. My experience is pushing 20 years, so I’ve seen a lot of progression in the sophistication of techniques and technology over time. I think it provides me a pretty unique insight into where it’s going since I’ve seen where it’s been, and that helps us distill the most important information for our readers.
ML: So, after 20 years of doing this type of work, what would you say is your main driver to stick with it? Why are you passionate about covering websites?
PP: I don’t think there’s ever been a more accessible way to level the playing field between big and small businesses. It’s very possible for start-ups and traditionally offline enterprises to make a significant impact on the web, but there’s an enormous learning curve that comes along with it. So, while you might be successful offline, there are so many intricacies involved in design development, management and monetization of digital properties that you can’t do it alone; you have to have solid background knowledge in order to make any of it work at all.
ML: I know that you have hundreds of thousands of subscribers to the magazine, but is there a certain audience that you specifically cater to? Is it more for small to medium sized businesses or for Fortune 500 companies?
PP: This is a good question, but I don’t know if it’s the right question. I think the right question is, “What do we hope to accomplish by publishing information at all?” We believe that when our audience is more educated, they’re able to make better decisions on things like the software they use, the techniques they’re considering deploying on their web property, their analytics and monetization methods. We want to give our readers a 20,000-foot view of what’s really important and educate them on how to go about achieving all these different interconnecting goals, whether those readers run a small business or head up a Fortune 500 company.
ML: As you’ve pointed out, the industry has evolved significantly over the past couple of decades. But, are there any particular topics or themes that you’ve seen consistently repeated over the course of your career?
PP: I think software always provides a really good litmus test for where we’ve been and where we’re going. We used to publish software that only did one thing, and today we have solutions like CRM systems that do almost everything on our behalf. They can’t necessarily design a website, but they make it possible to communicate with users across channels and to really speak to customers. Looking at 20 years of digital history, I think the most successful companies are those that truly put the customers first. This is why Salesforce is so successful; not because they provided a CRM, but because they provided an ecosystem where they were able to “plug and play” with all the other top-tier technology providers and really develop a product that is meaningful to its users. Now, it’s obviously one of the biggest companies in the world, but nobody knew what it was 15 years ago. That focus on the customer has always differentiated brands, and if software providers or agencies or designers demonstrate a commitment to educate their clients, they’re the ones that are going to be able to sustain in a truly competitive environment, and it’s only going to get more competitive in the future.
ML: So, regardless of whether they do marketing automation, website analytics or SEO, there are thousands of tools that work together nicely in this “plug and play” way. Do you think it’s an advantage that we have so many, or does it actually create a disadvantage since we tend to jump from one to another without truly understanding what we truly need vs. what’s nice to have?
PP: I think the answer depends on the type of business that we’re talking about. Is it a freelance designer using Adobe Creative Suite as their primary tool? Or, are we talking about a medium-size to large business? The needs of those organizations are very different, and their objectives may vary by department. If the head of a major company is responsible for overseeing a thousand different software installations, it becomes very cumbersome. Bigger companies turn to solutions like Adobe, and they use the digital publishing suite and the analytics and the marketing cloud, because all they have to do is train their people once on the technology. I think that when you choose one method to teach and manage, you’re able to better monetize it. If you’ve got 20 or 30 different solutions, it becomes really complicated to oversee and train people. It kind of goes against my thought that you should never put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, but I think that there are some instances when that’s OK because it’s less expensive, more efficient and a better way to get us closer to profitability and success.
ML: You’ve said before that websites (and mobile sites) accomplish awareness, a means for connection with consumers, and monetization. Do you think those things can be accomplished through a combination of social media platforms (like YouTube, Facebook, a Wiki Page, etc.) to the point where a company website almost becomes unnecessary?
PP: People have been asking this for a very long time. Independently, I don’t think that social media, sophisticated email technologies or SMS can replace the website. However, I also don’t think that a website by itself will ensure your success. I think that most successful brands today are those that focus on the experience across channels. They need a presence on major social media networks, but they also need a website because ultimately, whatever happens on those social networks could disappear tomorrow. There’s no ownership on the level that brands really demand. The only place that you can truly own your content, and the best place to monetize and manage customers, is still going to be on the website.
ML: Agreed. So, let’s talk more about Website Magazine itself. Every time I open a new issue, there’s a new theme. You obviously gathered the analytics on that theme months beforehand. In a space that’s constantly changing, how do you decide when to run certain content?
PP: About five or six years ago, I wrote a book called Web 360, and it covered what I call the “12 Fundamentals of Web Success.” Those fundamentals mirror what we do at Website Magazine in many ways. Our website homepage displays categories that we’ve built up over time, like domain names, hosting, search marketing, advertising, social, analytics, design, etc.; all the fundamentals. We try to take those broad categories and space them out evenly throughout the year along with overarching seasonal themes. Around October or November, we typically publish the e-commerce issue, because we know that merchants are looking for last-minute solutions to push them toward greater year-end revenue. At the beginning of the year, we always look back and see what the most popular tools were from last year; early in the year, we talk a lot about software because typically, that is when people buy software. And we talk about CMS in the summer since there’s a lull in activity and people tend to switch over their systems at that time. But most of the topics we cover are pretty timeless, like SEO and the latest design techniques. We cover a little of each evergreen topic, along with those broad, seasonally-driven themes in each issue. That way, people can go in and say, “I’m only interested in analytics” or “I’m only interested in design and development” and piece together their own experience and learn what they want to learn at their own pace.
ML: Among those broad categories, which 1-2 do you see companies struggling with the most?
PP: I think everyone struggles with design because it’s sort of subjective and it’s really difficult to create an experience that makes everybody happy. So, we focus on functional features that users can learn relatively easily (like jQuery, for example). We might highlight a tool that rotates text, or do a tutorial on a software script that assists in onboarding users. It’s really all about how we can best educate the user.
ML: How do you think analytics can help an organization design a better website experience?
PP: I’ve always said that I think designing a solid website is the single most important thing people can do. However, very few people are interested enough or capable enough to do so. But those who are interested and understand the potential benefits are more quickly able to correct mistakes, position their messages in a way that’s meaningful to users and really understand the customer. We’ve seen technology evolve to where we’re able to process immense amount of user data and understand context and intent and lots of other variables. Just 15-20 years ago, we were only tracking basic metrics like pageviews. We thought it was the greatest, but it was so basic. It’s incredible how much more we know about our users today. But more importantly, we also know more about the journey they take. Our responsibility is to take the data we have and use it in a way that’s meaningful for both our brand and our customer.
ML: It seems like there are a lot of solutions out there now that help us collect more data than ever by making analytics deployment much faster. But, do you think we’re actually getting smarter as we collect all of this information? Because it often seems like we’re getting better at collecting the data, but we’re not really improving at understanding the consumer. Do you agree? And, if so, how can we change this?
PP: I do agree that it’s easy to collect data, but it’s hard to put it into use. It’s simple to learn how to improve your life, but it’s another thing to actually go out and do it, right? What I would advise people to do is to figure out exactly what you want to collect. Analytics is sort of a loop; you design something and you analyze it at the end, and then you design again. If you’re not implementing the changes, the process becomes a line instead of a circle; there’s no end goal in sight. You absolutely have to know what data is the most meaningful to collect for your organization, and you have to implement the things you learn. For example, let’s say that an e-commerce merchant is concerned about his abandonment rate for mobile users. Just collecting that information is useful, but let’s say those users are actually in China and the abandonment rate has nothing to do with the user experience, but the marketing. If you know what you’re looking for initially, you’re able to get a little closer to the answer, and you’re able to develop a suite of questions that you can ask by looking at the data. You can find the answer in many different ways, like, “show me conversions in the US.” If that looks OK, then great; look at the conversions outside the US. From there, you can identify the problem, but you have to know what you’re asking. If you don’t know what you’re asking, you don’t know what answer you’re looking for, and I think that’s where the big problem stems from in terms of people being able to utilize all the available data.
ML: What can companies learn from the publishing industry about content creation and distribution?
PP: Your audience is just so important. If you can identify an audience that is interested in a certain type of information, you should use that knowledge to develop a plan for content marketing. If you think you can just shotgun content out there and attract a following, you’re sorely mistaken. People want relevance and authority, and it takes a lot of time to build up both of those. But if you really focus on your relationship with your audience and stay in tune with their needs, you’re going to achieve success at a much more rapid pace.
ML: As Editor-in-Chief, what analytics metrics do you personally look at regularly?
PP: Since we’re a pretty small company and I want everybody around me to be successful, I wear many hats and look at a lot of different metrics. We look at all the traditional metrics like unique visitors, page views, time on site, bounce rate, session average, etc. I also look at the conversion rates for other goals we’ve set based on the promotions we run. To find the source of conversions, I do a lot of referral tracking to see who’s generating conversions and why. For example, if somebody writes about a post that we did and he has 50 users or 100 users that come in, I want to reach out and say, “Hey, thank you for the link back; is there anything else I can answer for you?”
ML: Does your office use any dashboards?
PP: I just wrote a white paper on business intelligence tools, which is really a fascinating subset of analytics. I’ve done some informal surveying of people that use dashboards, and it turns out that very few do; many are actually still working in Excel. It’s amazing because they’re dealing with all this very siloed data from across an enterprise, and they’re unable to make really smart decisions about everything from staffing to what’s in their warehouse and everything else down the line, including how many conversions they make. I think it’s particularly important for the C-Suite to use Business Intelligence dashboards, because it provides them with a more holistic understanding of the performance of the whole enterprise and not just their own individual departments.
ML: On your website, there are a number of B to B companies that consistently advertise with you. In your opinion, what are some of the things that those advertisers do well?
PP: I think they make their product accessible. There are a limited number of people who are interested in what we’re interested in, so the available market is going to be pretty small. They have to have realistic expectations. Some people price their product too low, and some people have an expectation that one ad is going to impact their whole business. A lot of advertising (in any medium) has to do with awareness. If I came up and introduced myself to you at a crowded, noisy bar at midnight on a Tuesday, chances are good that you’re not going to remember me. But if I meet you a few more times, you’re going to remember me eventually. That’s what’s important here. It’s not one and done. You have to continually be present. You can’t publish one blog post and think that customers are suddenly going to come rolling in. You have to do this every single day. You have to publish content every single day. You have to engage in very creative forms of advertising that are designed to engage and entertain and educate your users, and you can’t only do it one time. You have to pound people over the head with it, and you have to do it in a very polite and generous and meaningful way.
ML: So, do you have a rule of thumb for content production volume? How frequently should you publish to yield good results?
PP: We get that question a lot, and it’s a difficult one. People don’t like this answer, but I think you have to create as much as your users are willing to consume, and you have to publish information that consumers want to consume. Content production should be built into processes all across the enterprise by having all sectors send relevant information over to the content marketing team. For example, customer service people should be responsible for identifying topics that are trending in the support tickets they see; salespeople should identify barriers to the sales conversion; customer support staff should send over questions from existing customers. Every company should have a knowledge repository, even if you don’t think anyone is going to use it. Businesses need to go to great, almost excruciating detail about everything, because once they’ve gathered all this information across the enterprise, they’re able to produce immense amount of information. And you can’t just publish it all at once. A big Google algorithm update just happened in early January that’s going to cap in the next month or so when Penguin comes out, and it’s going to put greater reliance on real time information. This means that if you’re not publishing regularly, you’re probably going to get left behind a little bit. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use content you’ve already created.
There are so many ways to turn content that you’ve already produced into something new. So let’s say that you have 100 questions in your “frequently asked question” knowledge repository, and 10 of them are focused on a certain topic. Well, that might make a great infographic or even a quick video. I think when people think content, they think long-form articles, but there are so many different ways to do it. Content is a poll on Facebook or Twitter; it’s a question on Quora; it is so many other things other than a long-form, 1500-word article with citations. And I think that’s where we get hung up. I think if you understand where your users are coming from, you’re able to format content that really resonates with them. For example, we have a couple of different digital properties besides Website Magazine, but we know that one of our audience subsets really likes infographics, so we publish infographics that cover business topics. It’s important for businesses to realize that content is not about a certain number; it’s about serving your customers. If you have answered every question that your customer would ever ask, you are ahead of the game. But chances are, most of us are falling way short of that.
ML: You have to stay current on a tremendous amount of research and writing. What do you do to stay current on industry trends when your magazine covers such breadth?
PP: I’ve had to train myself on how to do this; it’s really not easy. My job, and what I’m most interested in, is providing our readers with a holistic understanding of what it takes to achieve web success. So, I don’t know as much as many people do about analytics or design or SEO or digital advertising, but I know enough to be dangerous, and I know enough to educate someone to ask the right questions about what it is that’s impacting or affecting their success. I think that’s the most important thing.
In terms of specific learning tactics, I subscribe to about 260 feeds on the pro version of Feedly, and I go through it on the hour ride into work on the train and probably about 20-30 minutes in the morning when I get to work. I’ll check it again in the afternoon when I’m on my way home. I’ll flip through it and identify the things that I think are interesting; I follow a lot of different feeds. I follow some press release wires, but not as much anymore. I mostly read individual blogs to see what people are talking about across different things. I also subscribe to the big publishers like TechCrunch and Adventure Beat and a lot of smaller ones that don’t publish as often, but publish very good information. I scan through roughly 2,000 items a day just to get a pulse on what’s happening, and I probably pick out about 15-20 that I think are interesting. I’ll share those with some of our associate writers and managing editors and then I’ll pick out a few for myself and maybe write them up, and I save them in Evernote (which I love).
ML: Right now, there are many interesting analytics topics on the horizon, like machine learning, predictive analytics and artificial intelligence. Is there a certain topic that you’re most interested in? What would you like to see over the next 3 or 4 years?
PP: I would like to see businesses and brands use data more often to personalize the experience. Personalization has been an emerging trend over the past few years. The problem is, we all think we’re doing really well at it, but we’re not, so I think that there’s huge potential to grow. Focusing in on that will really benefit bottom line numbers. How we execute that is a little more complicated. I think there are a lot of software solutions in the market that help people develop a personal experience, and I think that at this point, it’s a matter of investment in those tools and education about how to best use them.
RESOURCES:
1. Connect with Pete Prestipino on LinkedIn and Twitter.
3. Website Magazine.
