At Gardner Business Media the new product is advertiser ROI

Gardner Business Media spent a decade executing an SEO strategy involving editors, consultants, full-time team members, and specialty software – all bent on enhancing content appeal to Google’s search algorithms.

Then, two years ago, after beta-testing Google’s not-yet-released AI summaries, they had had enough.

“Google flipped the table on us,” said Kate Hand, Executive Vice President of Customer Success, who oversees web development and customer success departments for the historic B2B magazine group that specializes in manufacturing titles.

Hand refocused her teams on producing content audiences want, capturing opt-ins, and investing in technology that assigns affinities to audience profiles.

In the process, Gardner fundamentally altered its audience strategy and spawned new, in-demand revenue models.

Their marketing services division, Grow, powered by audience data, acts as an engine to drive advertiser ROI via a variety of products and services.

Their ground-breaking approach just may pave the way for niche publishers everywhere.

Here’s how they did it.

1. Back story: “Google flipped the table on us.”

When Gardner Business Media, with 10 titles serving industrial manufacturers, started to see traffic drop in 2019, Hand focused her teams on all things SEO.

But when her team beta tested the not-yet-released Google overviews project in 2023, she did not like what she saw.

Hardest hit by Google’s AIO would be evergreen “how-to” content – an inventory Gardner Media spent decades amassing as super search-friendly content.

At the 2023 Niche Media Conference, Hand warned publishers about zero-click search – the drastic fall in click-through soon-to-be-launched AI overviews.

“What?” one publisher asked. “What about all the work we did on SEO?”

It won’t matter anymore, Hand said. She wasn’t going to chase the nearly non-existent clicks from AIO, either.

Back at company headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio, she told let her team to pivot.

“Stop thinking about Google” she said.

“Think about what readers want.”

Over the next two years, Gardner turned its focus to converting unknown, mostly Google-driven audience into known audience, gathering audience profiles, and building new kinds of marketing products.

2. Gating the Content

The first step was gating the content. Hand decided against a “soft gate” approach that allows at least one article or two before requiring an email.

“They find a way around it,” she said.

Instead, she initiated a hard gate all on all articles, testing the concept with the title with the most “raving fans,” i.e. the most engaged audience.

There was almost no slippage in traffic, and a cascade of opt-ins. In fact, it worked so well that Gardner “slow-rolled” hard gating across all their properties in the next two years.

“I wish we had done it ten years earlier,” Hand said.

There were plenty of other experiments to be had: How much information to gather beyond an email on the first touch without losing the opt-in.

“A medium level of front forward information is what works best for us.” Hand noted.

3. Omeda’s CDP busted data silos

Capturing the audience’s basic email and professional identity was only half the battle.

Also critical was knowing their interests based on the actions taken, opening emails, visiting the website, and signing up for other options.

That information could be used to create highly targeted advertising campaigns.

Fortunately, Gardner had a jump on the issue, having deployed Omeda’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) as early as 2021. The taxonomy of Gardner’s websites was underlaid with a structured tagging system so that every piece of information viewed can be considered an expression of a specific affinity, or interest.

So even without an opt-in, Omeda could use cookies to start building profiles of unknown users by tracking their ISPs.

Then, when an audience member drops an email at a gate or a webinar, the existing profile of affinities attaches to their profile and accumulates as more information is known.

In addition to website data, Omeda is also the ESP and handles print subscribers. So it was able to immediately unify three critical key elements of data: print, website, and email.

This data was now available for subscription pushes, re-marketing, website ads, webinar promotions, and customer email campaigns.

Manual uploads for all this data would have been impossible to keep up with, slowing marketing down to a crawl and creating missed opportunities, Hand said.

The marketing team could use an internal dashboard to create targeted sends that had superior open and click rates, as well as determine the quality of customers by job title and even company name.

With the CDP, once a subscriber is known, every next action they take — every article read, webinar attended, plus clicks and opens — is tied back to their profile, powering Gardner’s own audience engagement and advertiser ROI.

4. Grow Performance included data from more tools and sources

A few years ago, Gardner also developed Grow Performance, an in-house customer analytics dashboard that unified data from both Omeda and other systems and tools into “a single point of truth,” Hand said.

The software pulls in data from external tools like AdOrbit’s CRM, Google Analytics, lead generation contact forms, and trade show software, plus surveys and polls across the 10 titles.

The team could now use the Grow dashboard internally to craft super-targeted campaigns based on known affinities.

Grow could power marketing services, including multiple lead generation campaigns from webinars, white papers, and exclusive email sends for clients frustrated with their own dropping search traffic.

Gardner Business Media was not alone in its desire to shift its audience strategy. Their clients were, too.

An Omeda integration can even be set up to send “sale-ready” leads into some clients’ CRMs.

A few years ago, Gardner had also developed Grow Performance, created in-house, which unified data from both Omeda and other systems and tools into “a single point of truth,” Hand said.

The software pulls in data from external tools like Ad Orbit’s CRM, Google Analytics, lead generation contact forms from JotForm, and trade show software MYS, Convention Data Services, an events platform, plus surveys and polls from Crowd Signal, across the six titles.

Data from 200+ webinars a year alone generated 56,000 data points.

The team could now use the Grow dashboard internally to craft super-targeted campaigns based on known affinities.

In a recent innovation, clients can log in to their own Grow dashboard to access most – but not all – of the information about the known audience that spent time on, or interacted with, their campaigns or content.

The dashboards give not just the number of clicks, but also a rough profile of who read or clicked.

Not available are specific names. If a client wants to send to a list owned by Gardner, they have to do so through Gardner’s marketing team.

“They can’t go and look someone up on LinkedIn and hit them up” for a sale, Hand said. “We get asked that all the time.”

The sales team is now trained to say “no” to these inevitable requests. “

They understand that this is our intellectual property.”

Instead, Gardner’s teams get deeply involved in the targeting, content creation, and helping clients with follow-up strategies, including drip campaigns.

An Omeda integration can even be set up to send “sale-ready” leads into some clients’ CRMs.

5. A new marketing brand is born

By mid-2025, the approach to investing in technology to build and track the known audience was showing promise as a new brand for data-driven services.

Grow expanded as the brand for several offshoot services: Grow Marketing Services, Grow Studio, the custom content arm informed by the data, and Grow Intelligence, a rebranding of their research and data services.

And they are just getting started.

Lessons learned

While technology companies are known for their “anything is possible” attitude, media companies rarely are. The two-year-old project at Gardner Business Media is a notable exception, a study in how a century-old media company can meet the Google Zero moment:

Leverage the advantages of a historic brand with highly engaged audiences
Taking bold initiatives to gate all content
Investing in state-of-the-art technology to identify and segment the known audience
Take on essential tech not available elsewhere as in-house development projects
Shift the product suite around in-demand preferences of advertisers seeking new services and more targeted solutions.
Empower a new generation to play a key role in leading the charge.

Many thanks to Kate Hand of Gardner Business Media for sharing their story.

Let’s get creative! We researched more than a hundred different lead magnet campaigns to find the best ideas that command top dollars from niche advertisers, and how they did it.

First, to define the terms: A lead magnet is simply gated information a publisher creates that is valuable enough to persuade the audience to leave their contact information.

Advertisers will invest 2 to 5x the cost of a major campaign and in some cases $30,000 to $50,000 – for publishers to create the content, host the lead capture page or system, and deliver the leads generated. They, too, are worried about Google Zero.

The Lead Magnet itself could be a white paper, e-book, video, podcast, or webinar — as long as there is a “hook” that attracts the audience to exchange their contact info for access.

Steal these ideas: Below is a list of the most powerful peer-shared ideas for lead magnet campaigns from case studies and research.