Ceesjan de Vos is CMO (chief marketing officer) at Vakmedianet. With a track record of nearly 18 years in the publishing industry, he has experienced the transitions up close. According to De Vos, it's clear: data helps you stay relevant as a publisher, and that's what it's all about in the year 2016.
Relevance is starting point
De Vos gets straight to the point during our conversation. "Publishers have always had a lot of profile data, it was just never linked to content. Now it can be, technology offers us those possibilities. If you don't do it, as a publisher you will be overtaken left and right by parties like Facebook and Google, but also by smart people in their attics."
The basis, according to Ceesjan de Vos, is "relevance. "As a publisher, you want to be relevant to readers and advertisers. You want to keep those two groups connected in a good way. With publishers, there was always a separation between editorial and marketing & sales. Online, those are intertwined. The first need professionals have is to find information and knowledge when faced with a problem. Companies can tell the appropriate story as long as they focus on the issue a professional has and do not immediately come up with their own solutions."
The word content marketing is mentioned a few times in this context. De Vos is clear about that too. "Here, too, relevance plays a role. The key word remains relevance to your customer and as a publisher you have to respond to that."
Dynamic and personalized content
Vakmedianet does that through a data strategy. A strategy that has not gone unnoticed as they have now been nominated for a DDMA Customer Data Award 2016. De Vos explains briefly what Vakmedianet does with data. "We traditionally know a lot about our customers such as buying, subscribing and event behavior and what we are doing now is also collecting a lot of data about their reading behavior online. We combine those data sets and profiles come out of that. That means we can start offering customers tailored content, even on a personalized level. That way you achieve the relevance we were just talking about: the right story at the right time to the right person."
"This also offers opportunities for Vakmedianet to do this cross-title. There are naturally people with similar profiles at different titles we publish. So by combining data we can facilitate existing clients even better."
