For most media brands, website traffic far and away exceeds its number of subscribers, whether it’s to print magazines, email newsletters and the like. And now, in the cookie-less future, it’s more important than ever to have a plan for developing insights into anonymous website visitors. You need to know who they are, how engaged they are, whether they overlap with your current subscribers, whether they’re qualified in your market as a reader or advertising prospect.
That’s where Fusion92 comes in. The Chicago-based marketing and technology services provider has services that run the gamut from strategic consulting, marketing, ad tech, commerce, data, activation and more. It has a platform and process dedicated to converting anonymous visitors into qualified leads through content engagement. This process is ultimately aimed at engagement—with a media brand, and especially with its advertisers. It starts, in short, with the capture of IP addresses and URLs, and identifying the visitor through third-party marketing data. Then, they’re segmented and scored for marketing potential, which is followed by delivering relevant content to prospects.
Todd Rankin.
We caught up with Todd Rankin, Fusion92 director of high-volume marketing, for a look at how his business is helping media companies and their advertisers. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity.
Fox Tales: Tell us what Fusion 92 does and how it’s innovative.
Todd Rankin: Fusion92 is a marketing transformation partner fueling business transformation in today’s digital economy. We imagine unexpected solutions and invent ways to solve business problems with seamless integration across marketing disciplines. With tech stacks across data and analytics, strategy, creative, technology, Web3 and activation, we understand the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Fusion92 is more than an agency, more than just creative services and media expertise. We’re located in four core markets (Chicago, Detroit, Austin and Denver) and we have more than 270 expert team members across the country.
Fox Tales: What media-company tasks and departments is your business primarily intended for?
Rankin: Fusion92 can help publishers maximize revenue from their websites in various ways. An initial website audit will help determine the most effective and cost-efficient solutions to implement. The next step is often an anonymous pixeling process to generate a unique first-party set to target and activate against. That in tandem with lookalike and other advanced-targeting methods will ensure publishers are maximizing their reach potential with the most likely interested and invested users.
Fox Tales: Are there secondary intents?
Rankin: We’d love to have a discovery conversation to understand each publisher’s GTM strategy and future goals to see where Fusion92 can be most impactful. We may find that creative services could be recommended, or a specific API integration could help increase the performance of a website. Similarly, CRO or SEO programs could transform website effectiveness. Based on unique goals and challenges, we recommend a variety of solutions that tap into varying “tasks and departments” to help our partners grow.
Fox Tales: How does it help drive revenue?
Rankin: As mentioned before, a brand’s audiences are valuable. Aside from generating ad revenue from current media kit ad units (digital and print), we can commoditize subscribers into an audience play for clients to purchase against. Our data- and insight-driven approach to audience development and targeting is unlike anything in the market.
Fox Tales: How does it shorten the sales cycle?
Rankin: Once we connect and understand the current sales cycle, perhaps there might be an AI or API application that we’d deploy to save time, shorten sales cycles, and drive more revenue in the future for publications that Fox Associates serves. We have both plug-and-play solutions as well as in-house data and insights, technology, and transformation teams at the ready to customize solutions to be a perfect fit for our client’s partner’s needs. One size often does not fit all.
Fox Tales: How does it increase marketing efficiency?
Rankin: Clients want results that drive business growth, whether it’s through expanded reach, increased awareness, better attribution or simply, more sales. From a marketing consultation standpoint, we’d love to dig in deeper to understand a publication’s needs, and from that, identify where specifically the challenges exist.
Fox Tales: What should the media company do to maximize value?
Rankin: Do you have a conversion team that can understand the impressions being generated, which content is performing best, and how it all impacts audience actions? How can use cases and case studies be created that can demonstrate short- and long-term value? These are just some of the many questions we would love to explore together to determine what transformative solution(s) can be developed to help publications grow.
Fox Tales: What’s the learning curve?
Rankin: Great question. Every client and every campaign has a unique learning curve. Once a campaign’s objective and KPIs are determined, we’re continuously gathering and analyzing data that helps inform future optimizations in an effort to increase proficiencies across the board. We embrace the learning curves—without them, we wouldn’t be able to create transformational results. The net of this is that our team comes in and simplifies the process with marketing-transformation technology and managed services that allow your team to focus on what you do best—while achieving transformational growth.