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Brent Hill is Vice President, Advertising Services, at FeedBurner, the market-leading feed management provider, where he cultivates relationships with both traditional and interactive marketing agencies and corporate marketers. Prior to FeedBurner, Brent was President of Classic Kids, a national children's portrait studio and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at OCA Ventures. He is a frequent speaker on the topic of feed advertising and his insights have been published in a variety of publications including Advertising Age, Adotas and DMNews

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Kickstarting RSS: How to Make the Right Decisions to Reach Your Target Market

Written on
October 24th 2006
Author
by Brent Hill  |
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In my last article, I profiled 10 companies in non-media sectors that are incorporating RSS feeds into their marketing communication mix to engage target audiences. We looked at a diverse group of marketers, from Expedia’s feeds of travel offers, to Ford’s “Bold Moves” campaign, to Zales and their feed of jewelry promotions.

Before making their feeds available to subscribers, each company’s marketing team faced a variety of decisions regarding their approach to RSS marketing. In this article, we look at five such issues that you should consider in planning your feed marketing communications.

Deliver Relevant Content By Identifying and Targeting Your Audience

When publishing RSS feeds, as with any other type of marketing communications, market segmentation and targeted messages are essential. Companies with multiple product lines may have many distinct target markets and thus should segregate their feeds accordingly. For example, IBM separates its feeds targeting developers and IT professionals from those that are most relevant to database administrators. Travel Web site Expedia segments its feeds by city of origin to best serve the interests of each segment of its wide subscriber base.

RSS feeds have seen a tremendous growth in popularity, in large part because they empower subscribers to dictate and control the content they receive, as well as the frequency of delivery. In response, many companies are highly segmenting their content to increase its relevance and encourage subscription. For instance, The New York Times delivers feeds from specific sections, such as “Sunday Styles” and “Book Reviews,” to respond to subscribers’ precise areas of interest. Once feed publishers identify and segment their target audiences, they can appropriately tailor their content and make their marketing efforts highly efficient.

Too Much of a Good Thing? Don’t Confuse Your Customer By Offering Too Many Feed Choices

While the breadth of a company’s product line and its market will be the main factor dictating the number of feeds the marketer opts to deliver, there are some other considerations. It’s important for a visitor to be able to easily browse the company’s feed offerings and discriminate among them. Marketers may want to publish a “feed index” page or, like Expedia, a parameter-driven feed selection tool.

Offering too many choices to potential subscribers could work to the marketer’s disadvantage. As subscribers are faced with growing choices from a variety of publishers, they will become increasingly selective about their subscriptions. We recommend that marketers err on the side of having too few feeds until they are able to analyze their feed performance, and that they concentrate on updating those feeds on a regular basis to sustain subscriber interest.

Content Strategy Can Affect Subscription Levels and Loyalty

Feed publishers should consider how much content to include in a given feed post. While most bloggers make the full text of their blog post available in the feed, media companies typically only feed headlines or excerpts. Marketers often face a tradeoff between convenience and the richness of the content.

If the content is composed entirely of text, the marketer could enhance subscription levels by making the full content available in the feed. If, on the other hand, the content does not lend itself to serialized publication, with each post containing new or updated information, then the marketer may choose to make headlines or excerpts available, leading subscribers back to the website.

Feed publishers also face a choice regarding the richness of their posts. While RSS feeds have not yet evolved to include full HTML, there is an opportunity for marketers to incorporate design elements into their feed posts. Zales, for example, regularly embeds photos and graphics to promote its products, as well as direct links to product details on its Web site. As feeds gain in popularity with subscribers, marketers should consider investing production resources in their feed publishing — particularly if statistics reveal that richer posts perform better in terms of clickthroughs or ROI.



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