Topic page

Overview

Tribune Content Agency represents over 200 columnists, comic strips, editorial cartoonists, and games/puzzles. TCA also distributes content from 14 world-class magazines and 80 newspapers.

Challenge

How do you sell this vast array of content on one website? That’s where tribunecontentagency.com comes in.

I designed the UI/UX of this site from the ground up. We had several drivers for this site:

• Make our talent shine like stars. All our talent wants to be appreciated and made bigger than life.
• Help our customers be aware of all the various available content. Often they don’t even know that we offer content in a particular vertical

Analytics

I dug into the analytics from our previous website, focusing on the business customers who use the website. 99% of the traffic to the site is consumer traffic. This site is intended to be a B2B website. (Although I’m glad for the B2C traffic that ultimately helps with our SEO.)

Narrowing down analytics to just our customers

Thanks to our Eloqua implementation, I could narrow down our analytics to just the business customers who visited the site and how they used it. I found that a majority of the traffic wasn’t to the individual columnist web pages. Instead, our customers were going to the topic pages, which makes total sense. If you are a newspaper editor looking for a travel columnist, you will head to the syndicate’s travel section to see what they offer.

Improving the pages our customers visited most frequently

Thus, I wanted to play up our topic pages. Previously, the topic pages were merely a text listing of each of the columnists. Just a list of names. The previous site didn’t spend any time making the topic page interesting.

But seeing now that the topic page gets all the business traffic, I focused on those pages. I had the idea to make these pages like a sports team. Think of MLB.com, NBA.com, or NFL.com. Any professional sport. Each of these organizations has its master site, sure, but more importantly, they have sites for each team.

I thought of each of our topics as a team. Advice as a team. Cartoons as a team. Travel as a team. Get more hype built for topics.

How the topic page is built to increase value

• We have an introductory paragraph that builds up how we strongly cover that particular topic.
• A good call-to-action is included right at the top to get customers to reach out to us about this vertical.
• Then we have the listing of products. Nice-sized visuals to represent each columnist, comic strip, or game/puzzle.
• Since we have constant content added all the time, we should highlight that content by showing the most recent articles.
• Then we display the blog posts that talk about the particular topic.

Product page

As important as the topic pages are, we really a product page that made each of our 200 columnists, comic strips, editorial cartoonists, and games/puzzles shine through.

Remember, one of the site’s goals is to make each talent feel like a star, not just a catalog listing.

We start by having the columnist’s featured image appear nice and large. Bring out the personality behind the content.

A quick 60-word summary is given about each columnist. Editors of media publications want to get to the gist quickly. We include that right at the top.

This summary and visual are wrapped together in a bright orange background to make this pop. This orange is also part of the larger branding of Tribune Content Agency, as each major product grouping has its own assigned color. In this case, Tribune Premium Content boasts a bright orange.

Call-to-action button

This orange functions very well with the call-to-action button. If you can believe it, this site launched without these call-to-action buttons. We relied on our customers using the standard contact form to reach us.

Implementing a call-to-action button right at the top made our form submissions leap 267%. (That’s 267% legit leads. Not general public inquiries).

The benefits of custom contact forms for each vertical

The link to the form wouldn’t go to a generic contact form for various reasons.

1. The user experience would be a bit odd. If I’m on Rick Steves’ and I click the button that says “Ask about Rick Steves’ Europe,” I expect to get to a page that is about asking about this specific column. If it’s just a generic form, the user would feel like their contact form isn’t going anywhere specific.
2. Cross-sales within the vertical. On the contact form is a list of other products within the same vertical. If someone is interested in Rick Steves’ then maybe they would also be interested in our Celebrity Travel column. Might as well offer that right on the form.
3. Having a custom contact form for each product helps our sales team track where the form submission came from.

I did a little PHP programming to make the checkbox on the form be automatically ticked on, based on what page the user was coming from. So if the user were on the Rick Steves’ page, then the contact form would have the Rick Steves’ checkbox already ticked on. Let’s make it easy for our customers! 🙂