Belden Interactive is a media research and consulting company that are firmly anchored in the twenty first century. Their focus and area of expertise is to assist media businesses to assess, understand and monetize their web based offerings.
Belden have worked with a wide range of media organisation from digital organizations, newspapers, television companies and even advertisers themselves. These businesses have included huge international businesses and local companies. Belden themselves are renowned all over the world for their acclaimed research. The business also focuses on interpretation of the data and helping design creative solutions that increase long term profits for their clients.
Belden firmly believe that the web is not just a national and international phenomenon. They are convinced there is a massive appetite for local news and information and that advertising actually helps give the local market solutions to some of their problems. Many believe the advent of the internet is the death knell for local news however Belden believe it represents a huge opportunity for the media companies who understand what their digital customers want. Belden help media businesses understand and grow these local markets in order to grow profits and awareness of a brand largely using local branded websites.
The research that Belden carries out is varied and in many cases bespoke to the needs of the client. The range of services includes online surveys, in depth quantitative research, telephone surveys, direct mail questionnaires and quantitative research. The style of research will depend on the needs of the client and the market. Belden and its staff have been involved in devising hundreds of surveys online and hundreds of clients. Several hundred thousand surveys have been completed online alone.
Among some of the services the company offers are the local economic conditions survey which does pretty much what is says on the tin. It delves into your local market so that you get accurate real local data rather than generalised national data that may have no relevance to your market. Belden also has an excellent comprehensive site and sales survey. This gives you data on visitor’s demographics, their favoured method of interaction with content, their behaviour at your site and competitors, their use of your print products (this is usually particularly insightful) and a mass of other relevant data.
The local economic survey is also incredibly useful for businesses. This looks in detail at how consumer perceive their finances, their confidence to make purchases in the future, how spending has changed, what drives this spending and a raft of other consumer data. The survey looks at many types of purchases from goods to services and looks at the impact the media has on the consumers in that locality.
There are also market based research programs for print media that can look at varying factors depending on the clients’ requirements. These can include brand loyalty, effectiveness of advertising, branding feedback, customer satisfaction and product perception and positioning studies.
Belden has also done some major research on the relationship between online consumption of media products and that of the physical version. They were also able to draw some very insightful conclusion about the potential future of print media and the pressure on it from internet services. Perhaps the most startling and interesting conclusion they drew was that print medias web business his wholly dependent on their print product. Yup you read that right. Many people, myself included, believed that eventually print businesses would die and we would be left with the web businesses otherwise a lot of them would be heading for a bankruptcy attorney. It seems if the print businesses stop their web business will soon follow. You may ask yourself why, well I’ll let the research do the talking. Before I do I’ll just explain that Belden used data from over three hundred thousand web users in over two hundred separate markets. The crux of this conclusion came from the fact that almost seventy percent of the visitors to the media sites are actually customers of the print paper. They also said this is why they visited the site. I for one thought the people who visited the sites were none purchasers who were not committed to the paper and were looking for a quick freebie. Turns out this assumption could not be more wrong. The print media is the driver for the web business and it’s the print media that gives the papers a brand and brand loyalty. If the print media was taken away some people believe the web business would flourish as the previous customers would convert to the digital format. Unfortunately Belden don’t believe this would transpire. As they explain without the advantages of the branding and loyalty from the print paper the web business would be thrust into a global marketplace and would have difficulty differentiate itself. They would have to fight for visitors amongst the fickle browsers of the internet, which is the same issue a number of physical discount new cars sites have. There is also another problem for this market and that is the behaviour of the young demographic. Young users just do not use newspaper websites and the average age of the users of these sites has gone up every year for ten years. Over half of newspaper websites traffic comes from people over forty five despite only thirty four percent of the country’s population being over forty five. At the beginning of the millennium almost half of newspaper visitors were between eighteen and thirty four but now that only stands at an alarming twenty six percent, which will leave the papers needing debt solutions unless corrective action is taken. Yet another reason print media websites would struggle is that their remaining visitors are derived from the search engines and they are fickle without any brand loyalty. They search for a story consume it, never to return to the site again. This is borne out by stats from Nielsen who say the average user only spends an average of twenty seven seconds on a newspaper site per day compared to three times that figure two years ago. The young audience are not engaging with newspaper websites because often they are not social and immediate enough. They have grown accustomed to social media space and the same functionality is demanded from their products so this is something the market must adapt to. They want to share with friends, comment, rank articles and lots of other functionality. If newspapers don’t adapt their web business will die with their older demographic base. It seems that newspapers are stuck with their high overhead print businesses for some time to come and they need to face the challenge of engaging that younger consumer. Some other interesting stats. Most loyal newspaper web readers visit the site several times a day and this group accounts for a surprisingly high twenty five percent of their unique visitors. These loyal readers account for eighty six percent of all the content viewed on the site. These core visitors also tend to be local to the publication. Currently around one fifth of revenue from these papers web presence is derived from classified advertising. There is also a gaping hole in the advertising space with only half of the advertising space being sold online and this reduces to around a third for local papers. Whichever way you look at it local papers have a difficult time ahead of them and they must learn about their markets and deliver to the shifting needs of these consumers.