Marketing project manager Catherine Barry looks for ways to ensure her online publications attract readers in the evolving world of Web 2.0
A self-described, long-time “internet dork,” Catherine Barry, BComm 06, has landed squarely in her element. After graduating from Concordia and dabbling in a family e-commerce business, Barry joined Montreal-based Transcontinental Media in 2008 as a marketing project manager for its Digital Media division.
Catherine Barry is a marketing project manager for Transcontinental Media’s Digital division in Montreal. Barry and her team leverage the internet tools at their disposal to analyze what works best to lure users/readers to the company’s online publications.
She handles marketing for the online alter egos of some of Canada’s top-selling magazines: Elle Canada, Canadian Living and Style at Home , to name a few. But Barry insists that .com publications are more than just bit-based versions of their print counterparts. “It’s a very different world. The deadlines are a lot shorter; you need to respond to things quicker. It’s a different dynamic,” she says.
Barry says she revels in the total paradigm shift that is online marketing: constantly updating content, researching emerging technologies and finding new ways to make and strengthen connections.
She and her fellow marketers at Transcontinental use web analytics technology to track user behaviour on their sites. “You can see which pages are being viewed more, how long they’re spending on a page, what countries and even what cities people come from,” Barry explains. “This industry is still so new and not everyone gets it yet. We don’t even get it ourselves sometimes because it’s constantly changing and evolving.”
Barry adds that understanding users’ surfing behaviours is one of the main challenges to web marketing. “They’re an unruly bunch,” she says. “They may click away from your site just as soon as they find it, and they’re not easily duped. People think that they can just put something up on the internet and visitors will just come. And that’s simply not true. You have to think about your audience, how they’re going to use you and how they’re going to find you.”
Barry is a big user of RSS feeds (condensed updates of news, blogs or other tracked items delivered to your computer), blogs and even microblogs—essentially, any tool that gives her insight into what’s going on in the world beyond her four walls.
And Barry applies her own experience as a user to get into the skin of her target audience. “To keep growing, we have to look at how we’re helping the people who read us, interact with and engage with us,” she says. “It’s the basic question of entrepreneurship: how do you keep them coming back for more?”
