Head of Content, Insight and Analytics | Life Sciences | Informa Connect
The main way we are using Turtl is to create e-books. We’re looking at really hot topics within the various industries that we work in and doing deep dives into them, doing interviews with well-known figures in the industry and analytics on data from surveys. Turtl has been working really well for these in terms of revenue generation. We’re getting sponsorship on them and as we're an events business and no events have been happening over the last few months, that’s going to be pretty important for us.
We also have lots of virtual events starting in July. Whereas previously our face to face events would have had a physical event guide, obviously with a virtual event, we won’t have these, so we’re using Turtl to create virtual guides instead. We've just started looking at these and again, I think it’s going to look great and have a lot of really nice functionality that our users need.
The third main way we’re using Turtl is for an agriculture magazine. This has traditionally been a physical magazine but we’re just starting to migrate it towards digital-only and the 1st edition came out this week. That’s been a bit of a different project. A magazine is far bigger than anything else we’ve done. It’s well over 100 pages so it’s been trickier to work out where the different sections will be and pulling everything together. It’s a new way of working for a lot of the team who are used to creating the physical magazine.
All of our content was either online articles or PDFs if it was a lead gen piece. We’re actually migrating all of our PDFs over to Turtl. We’ve been going through an AB test of click-through rates and download rates for our old traditional PDFs and lead gen forms vs Turtl, and Turtl consistently comes out better. The analytics is amazing because you can see so much more. With a PDF you can see who has downloaded it but you can’t then see what they’re interested in. We’re using the analytics to really inform our content both within future Turtl pieces but beyond that helping inform what our users are interested in.
We’re seeing far better conversion rates in terms of completing forms. We’re also seeing longer engagement rates and longer time spent within the pieces. Pretty much every metric we’ve tracked has been improved by Turtl.
Things like location and device are interesting but I think that’s largely replicated in what we’re already seeing through Google Analytics. Whilst it’s good to get it as a confirmation, it’s nothing new for us. Whereas seeing the read time, click-through rates and registrations for the different sections in Turtl is new. For example, the magazine which was previously a print edition has about 20 different sections on lots of different topics and we had no idea what people were actually reading. For the team that creates the magazine the analytics is amazing. Suddenly they can see which topics are performing best. Even just seeing who is clicking on the contents pages has been interesting. Some of the findings are really surprising.
I think for me it’s the pinning functionality. You can make a piece of text a feature, pinning an image and working those two together, and in about 30 seconds it can look very professional. Our design team is really stretched and things like that have taken some weight off their shoulders. The other thing that is a big help for us is the themes. We work across close to 100 different brands so being able to quickly jump into those themes and having the right logo and colour palette there saves a lot of time.
I’ve gone through training with most of my team now and the most important thing I tell them about is learning to use the feature tool and pinning. I pin almost everything and that forms the real structure to the content. The other thing is copying and pasting of individual Surf sections between Stories. Rather than duplicating the entire document, you can make a template and duplicate certain sections.
The one other thing is how good the chat support feature is. Almost every day I have some minor question that is almost always solved within 10 minutes and that’s a great feature!
I think probably one of our ebooks. They are a relatively new thing we've created, so the first couple I produced I'm really proud of. They look really great and pull together a lot of really good information. Our clinical trials ebook we launched in April is one that I'm particularly proud of.
Take a look at the piece below..