A full-stack guide to monetizing your audience

What is monetization?

You’ve got an audience. They trust you, you trust them. The issue is that you’ve not quite worked out how to (literally) capitalize on that following. The opportunity to monetize your community is there, but how should you approach doing it? 

Before exploring some of the common challenges faced by community managers looking to turn an audience into revenue, it’s worth briefly exploring what monetization is and why it’s become increasingly significant as more and more of us spend more and more of our days online. 

Monetizing your community means tapping into its value to create revenue streams. Whether you have a social media group or other form of thriving online platform populated by active and engaged members, there’s scope to generate income from that audience. In fact, by offering others the opportunity to make some extra cash, you can create a mutually beneficial environment where both you and your community can monetize your time. 

Why monetize your community?

Deciding to monetize your audience goes beyond simply looking for financial gain. The benefits of doing so include:

How to monetize your audience

There’s no one ‘best’ way to monetize your community. What works for one audience may run the risk of alienating another. Some options, though, include affiliate marketing opportunities, moving into the subscription-model space, or looking to build mutually beneficial relationships with brands seeking sponsorship deals. 

Then there are rewarded surveys. Incorporating surveys of this kind into your existing community can be a suitable approach for you and your community. Companies like Cint offer survey solutions allowing your community to participate in surveys and earn rewards. Rewarded surveys engage your community while generating additional revenue through market research partnerships. This model leverages your community to provide valuable insights to companies and researchers alike.

After all, insights gleaned from surveys can help you make better strategic decisions, evaluate performance, gather new ideas, increase user retention, and make money. 

Let’s say that you’ve done your research and your findings indicate that the best route to take for your established community is to monetize that audience through surveys. What are some of the common challenges that you might encounter? 

Attracting and retaining engaged respondents

One of the issues facing anyone looking to monetize a community is ensuring that whoever you partner with is able to effectively work with any audience, however big — or small — and however niche. 

“Community managers have numerous tools to attract new engaged respondents to their communities,” says Alex Smeeden, VP Member Products at Cint. “For example, they can create and promote social media content, create a digital newsletter, organise events, or co-create with digital content creators to reach wider audiences. They can easily retain and reward members through access to regular paid survey opportunities that are carefully matched to them using Cint’s proprietary technology.” 

Managing diverse demographics

Monetizing effectively means engaging with specific audience segments. By allowing individuals to provide information about themselves, you simplify the process of connecting them with the most relevant surveys, making the whole experience more efficient and valuable.

“Researchers look for insights from niche and audiences alike. At Cint, we can help you monetize your audience by effectively matching members to relevant paid survey opportunities based on the information we have about them or the information they share during the survey itself,” explains Kristen Kaufherr, Product Manager (Supply) at Cint. 

“We understand that increasing the likelihood of a survey being completed is key to revenue generation and our solutions optimize the member’s experience to increase engagement and conversion at every interaction.This takes the heavy lifting of survey-participant matching away from community managers and frees them up to focus on growing their community even further.”

Mitigating potential poor data quality

“It is important to build a healthy and fair ecosystem that ensures supply partners can safeguard long-term profitability and that researchers receive accurate data,” says Jimmy Snyder, Cint’s VP, Trust and Safety.

“At Cint, we are able to detect and remove fraudulent activity throughout the sample workflow by deploying our proprietary Trust Score model, automated quality checks, and by collaborating with our dedicated trust and safety team to verify that real people are connected to real surveys.”

As Snyder says, “Ensuring that supply partners only reward real participants, and doing so at scale, is key to helping them achieve their audience monetization goals.”

Integration challenges

Incorporating additional tech elements to your process can, in the wrong hands, cause inefficiencies, which can delay insights and hinder decision-making processes.

“Community managers across the world use a variety of technologies to manage and engage with their audiences which can create integration challenges,” says Vicky Rzepecki, Director Partner Success at Cint. 

“We have built solutions that are suited to the business goals, technical requirements, and different levels of experience in audience monetization. Supply partners can rest assured in the knowledge that our integration specialists are able to effectively and efficiently connect them to our paid survey marketplace, enabling them to generate revenue, reward their members, and access detailed performance data to fuel their audience monetization strategy.”

Conclusion

Cint plays a pivotal role in connecting survey buyers with respondents from your community. We facilitate seamless interactions and community monetization through survey opportunities for your members. This partnership lets you focus on nurturing your community while we oversee the survey ecosystem. It’s a win-win.

Want to know more? Get in touch with Cint today.