Publishers tend to have complex online brands: it can be difficult to maintain brand continuity as you grow and expand into new markets and adopt new tech.
Your customer journey needs to flow from your main brand website to any subsidiary brand websites, online reading platforms, subscription management tools etc. Many moments of this journey can be disruptive, so spend time doing user journey mapping to ensure your users won’t be tempted to drop off. Your user and customer experience must remain consistent.
We are experienced in managing enterprise publishers with complex back-end and front-end digital systems that span multiple domains: here are some quick user experience tips that we have found to be very useful over the years!
Brand continuity is key to retaining user trust – what you need to know
Brand continuity is one of the most effective ways to build trust with your users.
For publishers, brand continuity rarely means slapping the same logo with a different colour scheme on the left-hand corner of the website, it’s more a case of creating a high-quality house standard and style. Use this as a benchmark for any new ventures.
You can retain overall continuity whilst having different brand colours and experiences for different markets or user groups. There should always be a connecting thread, something that lets people know that they’re still within your brand universe. Think about what that “core” is for your brand.
And, more importantly, a user should never feel lost. Users should always know where they are and how they can get back to the previous step – you will lose trust if they suddenly stop to think “where am I”?
Continuity is also a technical consideration, relying on integrations between systems and a joined-up content delivery network. For publishers, this may mean some digital transformation work is needed before this becomes a reality. For example, for many publishers we recommend adopting single sign-on (SSO) identity access management (IAM). This way, people can use one email to log in and access all your different publisher services, whether that’s content, account management, etc. (Read our IAM blog for more details here).
Make your content accessible and easy to find across the board
One of the key challenges that publishers have when working across multiple domains is content discovery.
Really focusing on how discoverable your content is, how well it can be accessed across your different domains, across your different brands, is very important. A key part of that is having a very robust search function that works across different languages, across distinct technologies, and allows the user to very quickly go from place to place (like our AI-driven TimeSearch). Good metadata is also key for great internal search results.
SEO and indexing are also tricky. Creating a new sub-brand for an established publisher website can create a disconnect where the new sub-brand is not getting the same Google real estate as the old, trusted site. Similarly, new editions or new content vies for attention with older, more established content and URLs.
That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep publishing new content or even creating new sub-brands on subdomains, but you need to cultivate strategic awareness around how hard to launch a new digital brand and embed a new domain. You will need a robust launch and content strategy to help support your commercial goals. (Publisher ecommerce tips here).
Publishers can invertedly create dead ends for search engines and crawlers when there is not a clear enough path when it comes to interlinking between domains and maybe even in navigation for users. Crawlers need to understand how this is all connected. We underestimate the need for very explicit instructions and explanations of how old your different brands were together and what elements belong to what.
We have often seen this with publishers who have an element of their business that is a charity or an organisation and will have even a different business structure. Being transparent and clear with your user on who is the guardian of the content, who updates it, who’s in charge of editing, and even things like privacy policy and terms can terms and conditions can all help build trust not only with search engines but also with people.
Adding value through your subdomains means having the right tech environment
So what does adding value look like? Adding value means looking at how a new digital brand can help you streamline operations, launch new products and services, but, most importantly, how it can help your customers and clients engage with you. Having an integrated access management system is a great idea to dial down on complexity, but you should also look at things like membership portals and login systems to help people curate content and create their own relationship with you.
Having the option of starting with a fresh technical environment can also give you the opportunity to offer more content formats: you could pivot to e-learning, offer more video content, or you could consolidate some of your old content and online libraries into limitless subscription programs.
It can be tempting to restart when it comes to a digital or technical environment and leave your technical debt behind, but that can also lead to problems. We would recommend a strategic approach where you slowly add domains to your portfolio as needed, but you also explore the power of subfolders and retain ownership over your content. While there are some great content sharing and streaming platforms that are useful when it comes to seeding your content, you still want to retain overall rights to your content. Just ensure that you understand the data protection requirements in the markets that you’re operating.
Don’t shy away from creating new domains and adding complexity to your brand, but do consider your user experience and your user journey throughout your journey. It’s very important that you consider continuity and have a robust marketing strategy for any new online digital content or platforms that you are launching. Publishers are sometimes disappointed with their results when it comes to trying something new, and this often comes down to a lack of joined-up thinking. Be strategic from day one and you will be able to expand your brand successfully.
