The worlds of media and marketing are constantly changing as both industries become more innovative and shift how they serve customers. Technologies advance at an accelerating pace. The landscape fragments and becomes more complex. There’s SEO. AI. Programmatic. Content services. Account-based Marketing. Lead identification and generation. A vast new spectrum of digital services.
Little wonder, then, that individual advertisers and agencies are rethinking their models. One example is January Spring, the seven-year-old Denver-based marketing-services firm that dedicates itself to solely to niche businesses. January Spring serves both niche-based publishers and marketers. Its unusually wide array of services includes typical offerings like creative support, SEO, social media, web design, and programmatic. But it goes beyond that to include membership growth for associations, event-attendee marketing, subscription marketing and even sales coaching for media companies.
“We act as the back-office service provider for our publishers,” the company says on its website. Partly because of its direct relevance to the Fox Tales community, and partly because of its innovative approach to the classic agency model, we thought our readers would value hearing January Spring’s perspective on the world of media and marketing. We caught up recently with Sales Director Christopher Tippie. Here’s our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity.
Fox Tales: January Spring was founded in 2017. What was the impetus?
Christopher Tippie.
Christopher Tippie: We recognized that companies were nearing an inflection point where they needed to make the digital transformation or else lose their spots in the marketplace. This is especially true in the publishing industry. Making the decision to embrace digital transformation is one thing, but actually doing it is wholly another. We founded January Spring to partner with companies dedicated to becoming part of the digital world of tomorrow. We like to think of ourselves as our clients’ ace in the hole. In a relatively short amount of time, our clients can offer industry-leading digital-marketing programs to their advertisers without having to go through what can be a very expensive and painful learning curve.
Fox Tales: How have you grown since then?
Tippie: Since our inception, we’ve grown to over 20 folks here at January Spring. We currently work with over 120 different publishers and counting. We grow organically by hiring the best-experienced people we can find who breathe the high-touch, high-quality ethic of January Spring. We all come from different backgrounds, with different skills and experiences. Together, we make a formidable force. I love being a part of this team—I can’t think of a single situation I’ve run into thus far in which somebody at January Spring didn’t already have direct experience.
Fox Tales: Why niche, or B2B, media as a customer base?
Tippie: In a phrase? Because first-party data is golden. As a sales director, I mainly work with B2B publishers in the niche-media space. In my opinion, niche-media companies are operating from the high ground against the digital competitors out there. To put it simply, niche-media companies still own their audiences.
It’s true that if you want to reach, for instance, women between the ages of 18 and 24, who live in Arlington, Texas, like Pokémon, and have recently begun thinking about starting a family, there are plenty of ways to target that audience without working with a media company.
But if you want to reach people involved in the mining of copper, the leasing of school buses or the purchasing of tree-nut harvesters, the only way to efficiently reach that audience is to work with the B2B media serving that industry. When it comes to digitally targeting these sorts of audiences it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Niche media companies are literally needle finders. They already know the audience you’re trying to reach because they’ve been serving them for decades. They know who they are, where they work, how to contact them and the industry events where they can be found. In the industry, that’s known as “first-party data” and it is the exclusive property of the niche-media company. That’s why we like to say, “there are riches in niches” because first-party data is golden.
Fox Tales: January Spring has a broad array of services. Web design, sales coaching and support, campaign management, media buying, programmatic advertising, memberships, subscriptions, event attendees, etc. What’s the foundational principle that ties it all together?
Tippie: There are two foundational principles that tie our broad array of services together. The first is that we are dedicated to helping our clients transform digitally—no matter where they are in that transformation. For some clients, that may just mean equipping them to sell programs such as programmatic display and video or paid social. Other clients may need deeper assistance in their transformation, such as sales coaching or structuring compensation plans. We are here to share our wealth of experience to help our clients in whatever manner they need.
The second foundational principle is when it comes to digital marketing, it is all about the delivering the right message to the right audience—it is not the advertising medium. If you can target the audience, you do so by whatever advertising medium you can. That might be programmatic display or video. It might be paid social or even a good old-fashioned e-blast. It might be all the above. We are constantly adding new advertising mediums and targeting technologies as they become available.
Fox Tales: Where does your firm see itself in two years?
Tippie: I see us becoming more and more enmeshed with select clients. As I mentioned earlier, some clients just need the ability to sell some of our services, and that’s great. But some clients truly want to embrace the digital world and take their operations to the next level and beyond. We love working with such clients, as it allows us to bring our vast array of experiences and skills to bear to make a massive difference. We essentially can be game changers. We actively look for such opportunities.
Fox Tales: One more: Describe your relationship with Fox Associates.
Tippie: Fox Associates and companies like Fox play vital and complimentary roles in the industry. We all know that hiring and retaining great sales talent is a challenge for any publisher. While we’ll assist in the interviewing and selection of new sales hires on behalf of our clients, we cannot put a sales team in the field on their behalf. We love the opportunity to work with Fox Associates because it becomes a train once/deploy everywhere type opportunity. Fox’s ability to drop in or augment a sales team with digital-ready sales talent on day one can be a difference maker for many of our client publishers. How cool is that?