Michael Dam is marketing manager at Bohn Stafleu van Loghum, but his scope extends much further. When it comes to data, what matters to him is more than marketing: all parts of the publishing process must be data driven.
Transition from print to digital
Dam is a marketing guy by trade; his career initially led him from Wolters Kluwer to PCM and back again. In 2007, however, he decided to go into business for himself and did many interim jobs with various publishers, media companies and also others. When he was asked to make a plan for Bohn Stafleu van Loghum (BSL) for marketing intelligence and the use of data, he thought it would be nice to be able to work on a project for a longer period of time and contribute to the transition from print to digital. That opportunity was offered to him at BSL in 2017, and so he joined the publisher.After first harvesting the low-hanging fruit, setting up data intelligence in such areas as sending newsletters and recruiting visitors for events, he was able to cast his gaze further. My vision is that editors, process coordinators and publishers should also work with data. To get them used to it, we have now started to present them with real-time data in dashboards, including on the development of subscriptions, webshop orders, NPS, customer feedback and social media, so that they can see: 'this is what we do it for'."
Customer data central
Dam sees the next step as further feeding campaigns and e-commerce from data insight, and things like further monitoring of customer and author feedback should also contribute to improving our performance. "Customer data gives insight to everyone, what do they think of us, what do they say about us. We need to understand what they want, but also what potential pain points are. After all, our mission is to help our customers become better at their jobs and thus contribute to improving healthcare. We need to provide them with the knowledge and learning solutions to do that.""It can be good for editors to know which text is best to use, which articles are best read. Customer behavior provides input, it often says even more than talking to them: behavior always says more than intention. And so monitoring drives our product development."
