It often feels like the people who have the most industry knowledge – high level execs, employees in highly technical roles, etc. – are the ones least likely to create and share industry content on any public-facing platforms.
Without this inside information employees are missing out on insights and lessons about their industries and careers.
Workweek, a social networking platform for industry professionals, was designed to solve that problem, which CEO and Co-Founder Adam Ryan refers to as “the experience paradox.”
Five professional social networks live within Workweek, each for a different vertical: healthcare, HR, financial services, marketing and ecommerce.
If this just sounds like an industry-specific version of LinkedIn, well, it sort of is – but with one major distinction. Users need to apply and are only accepted once their title and seniority have been verified. Some also need to meet industry-specific criteria; for instance, ecommerce employees are only accepted if their store revenue is above a certain threshold.
When asked how the core idea of the platform differs from LinkedIn, Ryan compared it to the difference between a big, industry-wide happy hour with entry-level employees, high level execs and everyone in between versus a small, invite-only dinner of senior execs.
There’s “a very different type of conversation” happening on a platform that’s limited to a limited number of high-level peers, he said.
On Thursday, Workweek launched a newsletter platform powered by its proprietary ad network. The goal of the launch is to let advertisers reach highly engaged audiences whose engagement can be measured through the Workweek platform.
Extra, extra, read all about it
A few select creators who have been part of Workweek since the early days have been able to develop newsletters through the platform for years and monetized these through Workweek’s ad network. Now, those capabilities will be open to any of the platform’s users.
The ad network’s CPM is roughly $50, said Ryan, and while the newsletter creators don’t get to select exactly which advertisers show up in their newsletter, they can have a blocklist (which is particularly helpful in ensuring that competitors don’t show up against their content).
Most of the brands that want to advertise in the newsletters aren’t part of Workweek, though – and aren’t allowed to be. Workweek’s HR community, for instance, entirely bans marketers, and its fintech community permits a limited number. (All of the brands advertising in the newsletters are B2B, Ryan added, and are primarily software and service vendors.)
The ad network has a separate login from the social platform where advertisers can see publication IDs and the audiences that each newsletter targets, Ryan explained. From there, advertisers can determine which content they want to buy ads in (though they can’t see exactly which newsletter it is, since they’re categorized by ID).
Workweek uses AI to develop the copy for its newsletter ads based on a brief submitted by the advertiser. The brief includes four personas – a decision maker, a product champion, an end user persona and a legal compliance exec – and the advertiser fills out which job roles they’re targeting within each persona (for instance, a CFO is often the decision maker).
From there, Workweek devises four different versions of the ad, with different copy for each persona. The ads targeting a CFO are likely to focus on driving ROI and revenue growth, said Ryan, whereas ads aimed at a head of marketing might focus on generating new leads.
Who’s who
Workweek is able to measure ad performance not just holistically, but down to the individual. It’s able to identify about 81% of its clients’ newsletter subscribers, down to name and place of employment, since most of the subscribers come from its internal customer base.
The remaining 19% that it can’t identify are either people who subscribe externally (like if the creator also shared the post on LinkedIn), or, Ryan quipped, “they’re my mom, a retiree we don’t have data on.”
It’s true – moms will read everything you write, even if it’s about a hyper-niche industry they don’t understand. (Hi, Mom.)
When it comes to measurement, Workweek isn’t interested in what Ryan calls “nameless and faceless engagement” like open rates and click-through rates. Most B2B newsletters are plagued with bot traffic, said Ryan, so Workweek built and open-sourced its own AI model to filter through bot clicks. If someone clicks on an ad in the newsletter, he added, the model can return to Workweek’s CRM and address the “attribution problem that’s existed for so long in email.”
Within the Workweek platform, advertisers can access a multi-touch attribution graph that shows a company’s exposure to a brand’s ads over time – broken down by which employees saw them and when – and when they made a purchase.
The goal behind Workweek’s ads business, said Ryan, is “being able to help tell that story to the marketer.”
