Gaining knowledge with analytics

In the same way analytics is being used in the more general sectors of business to gather intelligence on specific target markets, Geraldine Mitchley, Catalyst at Knowledge Factory, says analytics is playing an integral role in a publisher's ability to gain intelligence on a specific reader base.

Analytical and data mining offerings from specialists like Knowledge Factory can pinpoint gaps in a specific publication's readership, while at the same time help to identify readers' interests for offerings and opportunities that publishers are looking to bring to market.

"Many publishers are also not sure of what new markets they can branch out into. Knowledge Factory has conducted studies for publishing houses wanting to identify new potential markets that could be addressed by both niche market and broadly focused, magazines and newspapers," Mitchley says.

"Like any other form of business analysis however, companies must first know what defines success in their specific market. In the publishing industry, the variables to success at a high-level are strong readership; growing print runs; healthy advertising revenues; how well the market profile of the publication is suited to the audience and where or how easily the publication is obtainable."

Mitchley explains that generally this kind of analysis is not easily done in-house, since publishers have a great deal of knowledge about their own customers, but little or un-integrated knowledge of the general market and relative success factors: "What a company may think defines success from an internal perspective, often ends up being quite contrary to what the market actually needs and can sustain."

This is one of the key reasons Knowledge Factory's skills have been so extensively used in numerous industries and more recently in the publishing industry.

"Having in-depth knowledge of a target market from an internal perspective is not a bad thing, but often doesn't get to the crux of the matter. Knowledge Factory's differentiator lies in its ability to enrich a client's data with external data from the relevant data sets it has on tap, and then draw on its expertise and experience in order to perform relevant analysis on the data.

"When it comes down to it, analytics is becoming one of the biggest drivers of company strategy, giving decision makers insight into how internal efficiencies can be improved on, the impacts of external factors and what and where future growth areas exist.

"With the publishing market becoming more competitive and players vying for a bigger share of the ever shrinking pie, differentiators like deep insight into current and potential target markets is the difference between those companies that will still be in business in ten years time and those that won't," she concludes.