Using packages to spotlight your inventory and audiences

Senior product marketing manager, publisher solutions

As the advertising industry hurtles closer to the cookie-challenged future, the need for publishers to diversify their revenue streams has only grown. With first-party data rising as the heir-apparent to third-party cookies, publishers are rethinking their relationships with advertisers to ensure their data is the foundation for their monetization strategies. Now more than ever, it’s crucial for publishers to focus on their biggest asset – their readers.   

Readership being the cornerstone of a publishing business is nothing new, but activating those readers as audiences can be a different story. It’s no small feat to implement a first-party data strategy, especially when already tasked with managing multiple channels, growing revenue, and driving subscriptions in a rapidly changing ecosystem. So, let’s take a look at a tactic that works with the newsletter inventory and audiences you already have: packages. 

Packages, simple in practice yet powerful in impact, allow you to combine your newsletter inventory or audiences into bundles for advertising partners. They’re evergreen and easy to manage. However, when fueled by unique audience and content, they become premium deals that offer advertisers valuable insight into specific audience interests and behaviors. 

Here’s what to consider when getting started.

Know your readership

The power of packages comes from your readership. Pinpointing reader trends and behavior offers you greater flexibility and creativity when building packages. The more understanding you have around your readership, the easier it becomes to tailor audience segments that align with advertising partners’ desired goals. Having packages that spotlight unique audiences ultimately helps you offer more premium deals to maximize revenue. 

Try asking the questions below to start digging into what makes your audiences unique.

  • What do my readers engage with most?
  • How are readers engaging with content across my different publications? 
  • Are there correlations between performance and different types of content? 
  • Can the trends I’m seeing be used to create aggregate reader profiles based on behavior?

Play to your strengths 

It’s not solely audiences that make a reader base unique but also the newsletter content with which readers have chosen to engage. Each publisher has an industry category (or categories) where they shine. When it comes to creating packages, consider how your inventory contributes to your distinct audiences. Building packages based on content, audience, and season are great ways to highlight inventory. 

Here are some examples of these curated packages.

Creating packages based on content

  • Group inventory that appeals to common interests like food and entertainment into a content package. 
  • Get creative by experimenting with different combinations of publications, newsletters, and ad slots.

Creating packages based on audience

  • Try packaging your audiences around specific attributes like job seekers or travelers.
  • Try packaging audiences around valuable behaviors like high-conversion or high-spend.

Creating packages based on season

  • Capitalize on the calendar with packages aligned to events like Black Friday, Back-to-School, and Valentine’s Day.

Once you land on the right mix of packages appealing to advertising partners, you can deepen your relationships further by offering to help make campaigns more efficient through data. By combining partners’ first-party data with your first-party data, you can improve targeting and performance for marketing campaigns. For example, a list of customers from an advertiser’s CRM, CDP, or DMP and can be used to target or suppress those customers within a custom deal.

Provide value and convenience

Packages can be activated at scale as a curated deal. With curated deals, you can offer custom inventory and audience packages to advertisers as programmatic direct deals. Curated deals also offer advertisers convenience, as they can be targeted through their preferred buying platform. These direct-style buys through programmatic pipes can help you build greater trust and transparency between partners. 

The ease of use and access to specific audiences and inventory that curated deals offer advertisers provide you another means of diversifying your revenue and maximizing yield. One way of scaling curated deals with your sales team is by mimicking packages created for other channels for your email inventory. This allows for an easy entry point for your sales team, as well as a good test to determine if email packages will work for your business. Read how a global media company earned more revenue from programmatic buyers with this tactic.

If you are interested in exploring curated deals, reach out to your LiveIntent team or click here to learn more.