Our advice is the same across platforms: if you are trying to build, rebuild or tune your business model for an event or any other media product, first figure out what you want to say, and then figure out how to make it pay. Use this approach and your satisfaction is guaranteed.

Tap the creative passions of your organization by returning to what you want to communicate and why it is important to your audiences that you succeed. The heart-felt motives of your organization and your audiences are your most valuable resources. You need creativity and passion to develop possible solutions in a tough and changing market.

Media models are challenging because the factors are multidimensional and fluid. Factors include information needs and audience propensities; marketer interests; competitive factors; and industrial, technological, demographic, political, and economic cycles. And your different platforms for delivering information each have distinct characteristics.

Use creative intuition and data to narrow the possibilities. You can’t test the pay-off for every possible permutation. Your capacity to create or alter your business model is constrained by the time, talent and budget you can devote to new solutions.

Now detail your new plan, based on specific data and explicit assumptions, and break it down to milestones over time. If for instance you believe you have identified an opportunity to better appeal to an underserved segment of your audience and attract more people to your event, you need to quantify the prospect population and estimate the response that you can reasonably expect over time. You need to know realistically how you are going to identify the key prospects and how you will appeal to them.

The sensitivity of you model is key. Your model should be dynamic so you can test multiple scenarios by altering response factors, prices, and expense factors. Repeated runs of your model can give you confidence that it can work and show you how to monitor results in actual rollout. And obviously if you can’t make it work in theory you need to generate more ideas.

A good model gives you operationally usable information. For instance in the re-launch of a database subscription service with historical data, we saw that PR leads historically converted at a much higher rate than other sources of new customers. Our successful re-launch model focused on PR efforts, explicitly quantified. We created a cumulative lead generation target, broken out by week and reacted immediately to any shortfall. With enhanced PR, reduced costs resulting from automation, and the addition of events for users, we had a winner!

Moving minds in positive directions with good media/information products is deeply satisfying! And when you can make money doing it, it is even better! Feel free to share, by a post or privately, your own media model improvement successes or issues.

Labels: media business models, media business planning, media monetization