Insights from TBI’s State of Marketing Report, the latest Google Algorithm Update, and more.

Welcome to our monthly newsletter from TBI Communications, Tiny Sparks to The Big Idea. We’ll be sharing updates in marketing and publishing, discussing everything from the latest insights and news to what we’re reading.  

In case you’re new to TBI, we’ll also be showcasing our talented team and wide range of services to support the growth of publishers, societies, university presses, and beyond.

Analytics and Technology: Top Challenges for Marketers 

What are the biggest challenges facing marketers in academic and scholarly publishing? According to TBI’s recent survey of 70 marketers across the sector, two key themes emerged: data, analytics, and measurement and innovation and technology adoption. 

What is it that makes these particularly thorny challenges? 

1. Pinpointing the metrics that truly matter remains a challenge for many teams.“Measuring return on marketing investment, in any meaningful way, remains extremely challenging,” one Marketing Director told us. Teams are employing a wide variety of analytics to inform their strategies, including website and on-platform engagement metrics, yet they often struggle to determine which data points should drive their decisions. As one Company Director added, “It is really difficult to narrow down on what metrics to focus on to guide marketing initiatives.”  
2. Good data is the foundation of effective marketing, yet many teams find that access to the right data remains particularly challenging. As another Head of Marketing/Communications commented: “So much of what we do relies on good data. And when you're lacking a database you can query, or if you don't have a customer lifecycle mapped out, or if you're not leveraging automation you're behind. Years behind.”   

The upcoming phaseout of third-party cookies only adds to the urgency. While most survey respondents reported feeling moderately to extremely prepared, the focus is now shifting to building robust first-party data strategies.

The Impact on Budgets and Skills: Unsurprisingly, we’re seeing increased investment in data, technology, and infrastructure. Over half (59%) of respondents thought their technology stack was “somewhat suitable” for their objectives, while others will be gearing up to place data and analytics requirements higher up their 2025 priority list. 

There’s also the matter of team skills. As one respondent told us, “With a very small team, everyone has to wear multiple hats and the martech stack is changing so fast, it's hard to keep our skill levels updated, much less thinking ahead to what tools we should be considering. People who are really good at marcomms, strategy, etc, are not necessarily skilled at deploying beautiful and effective email or social campaigns.” 

To explore more insights from TBI’s Marketing in Scholarly Publishing Survey, email us for a full copy of the results. Let’s keep the conversation going! 

Team Meeting Takeaways 

Another month, another successful TBI team meeting. From welcoming three new team members to the rise of artificial intelligence, here are five of our discussion highlights! 

• Video Content is King, TikTok is Queen: It’s no secret that video content is the crown jewel of the digital world, but how can visual media enhance communication in the academic research community? TBI broached this question by examining existing communities on TikTok and evaluating how we can implement video into our business practice. Watch this space! 

• The Future of AI in Publishing: We discussed what’s brand-new in AI software to keep abreast of industry insights and continue to support our clients navigating this ever-evolving technology landscape. 

• China and Global Academic Publishing: In the past two decades, China’s research output has overtaken the US significantly and doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. We spent some time reflecting on how TBI can assist scholarly publishers in reinforcing their messaging to researchers globally. 

• TBI Online: We post weekly on LinkedIn and X with industry news, tips and tricks and behind-the-scenes content, and our team meetings are an open forum for more big ideas. We always take the time to consider how our own channels can keep thriving and delivering value to our followers.  

• New Skills and Experience: This quarter, we welcomed three new members to the TBI team, all from different marketing and publishing backgrounds. This month’s in-person meet-up was an exciting opportunity to share knowledge and assess how we can make the most of our individual strengths across diverse projects. 

Meet the Team 

TBI’s recent growth presents the perfect opportunity to reintroduce ourselves! Our team is made up of strategists, writers, campaign planners, and digital channel specialists who inspire our clients with new ideas and always keep the big idea in mind, whether it’s launching new products and services, developing brand and business strategies, or managing marketing campaigns and content.

Lynne Miller – Managing Director

Lynne is a hugely experienced senior marketing executive with over 25 years of experience in publishing. Since joining TBI in 2015 she has overseen the expansion of TBI’s strategic marketing and business development services and led our consulting projects worldwide. 

Kelly Henwood  – Senior Consultant

Kelly has worked in marketing and publishing for nearly 20 years and specialises in strategy, communications, brand engagement, and evidence-based decision making. She is an ALPSP tutor for ‘Effective Social Media for Scholarly Publishers’ and is CIM qualified.   

Mithu Lucraft  – Senior Consultant

Mithu is a strategic content marketing expert with a passion for business storytelling. She has led, authored, or co-written more than 15 white papers and industry research reports, as well as speaking on these topics and delivering workshops at international conferences and academic institutions. 

Rowan Banham  – Marketing Manager

Rowan joined TBI Communications in 2018 after graduating from Oxford Brookes University with a 1st class honours degree in Business and Marketing Management. She has developed extensive market research experience and manages digital marketing including reporting with Google Analytics, and events promotion for publishers and societies.   

Anita Neal  – Marketing Manager

Anita is an experienced digital marketer with publishing knowledge gained from Wiley and Oxford University Press. She specialises in B2C and B2B email campaign planning, implementing and optimising customer journeys, user experience (UX), and value proposition messaging to support clients increase submissions, readership, and awareness. 

Poppy Iles  – Marketing Executive

Poppy joined the publishing world in 2022, as a Marketing Executive at a book distribution, marketing, and sales agency for independent publishers. Poppy brings an understanding of the human impact of language and storytelling to her marketing approach, delivering creativity and precision to every campaign she helps shape. 

Freya Carberry  – Marketing Executive

Freya is an experienced digital marketer specialising in paid media campaigns across social platforms and Google Ads for both B2B and B2C clients. She brings a results-driven approach to her work, managing all aspects of campaign execution from setup to performance tracking to ensure objectives are met.

The Changing Channel Mix for Marketers in Scholarly Publishing 

Our recent survey also explored the top channels marketers are currently using – and the results provide valuable insights into how strategies are evolving. Although there is a lot of chatter right now about the changing role of social media – notably X – it’s important to remember that marketers continue to have a diverse mix of channels at their disposal to reach their target communities effectively.  

• Top Channels in 2024: For our respondents, the most widely used channels were led by email marketing (12%), followed closely by organic social media (11%), organic content marketing (11%), and paid social media (10%). Conferences, both in-person and digital, tied in popularity with paid social media.

• Going Up in Importance: Teams saw multimedia content, such as video and podcasts, as becoming increasingly important (67%). We can also see this reflected in the work we’re doing for clients, with teams recognising these formats as effective tools for educating and informing in a more engaging way. With advances in smartphone technology and AI-powered editing tools, creating high-quality multimedia content has become more accessible than ever. You can read about some of the tools we’ve experimented with at TBI here. Video advertising (53%) and organic written content (57%) were also highlighted as key growth areas. 

• Going Down in Importance: Respondents continue to pull back on print as an activity and cost, with 64% of respondents indicating reduced use of print in their activities. Organic social media, although still in the top ten channels, was also on the decline. As one respondent commented: “ROI for social media is ever decreasing, so finding new high visibility channels is challenging. Key stakeholders anchor on to channels or ideas that worked 10-15 years ago but no longer do, but there are few new opportunities that work at scale.” Paid social media (36%), conferences (36%), and display ads (35%) were also flagged as declining priorities.

• Looking Ahead: These changes in approach echo one of the key findings from our survey, which is the increased focus on analytics for marketers in 2024. Although being able to identify the right metrics to support decisions can be challenging, teams are striving to demonstrate the effectiveness of their activities and use data to inform channel choice. 

Teams need to stay agile, reassess their channel mix regularly, and invest in formats that resonate with their audiences. Whether that means leveraging the growing potential of video or optimising email strategies, the key is ensuring your efforts are aligned with your audience’s preferences. Continuing to invest in data and analytics will provide the insights needed to make these decisions strategically.  

If you’d like to receive a full copy of TBI’s marketing in scholarly publishing survey results, send us an email.

The Latest Google Algorithm Update 

If you’ve noticed unusual fluctuations in your site’s traffic recently, it could be due to the latest Google algorithm update.  

Google’s algorithm determines what position a site appears in on the search engine results page (SERP) following a user’s search query. The algorithm is updated regularly, with the most recent update launching on the 11th of November and expected to take 2 weeks to complete. These updates change the criteria that contribute to a site's ranking and often result in changes to site traffic (for better or worse).  

If your SERP ranking or traffic has been affected by the update, Google recommends that you: 

• Delay making any changes to your site content until the update has finished rolling out. 

• Make changes to pages that have seen significant drops in their ranking positions following the update (Google considers fluctuations of 20 or more positions to be significant). 

• Use Google’s quality content guidelines to update affected web pages.

Thank you for reading our newsletter and we look forward to sharing more exciting industry updates and news. 

Please visit our website and fill out our contact form if you have any questions.