Steve Hinds of TTG Media on how we helped transform their tech stack

The tech stack powering TTG bid to capture 90% of UK travel market

Reader data is key to success of the free travel industry news website.

This article, originally published in Press Gazette, highlights the success of the new tech stack we built for our customer, TTG Media, and details the significant business impact it has generated.

By Freddy Mayhew

Travel trade title TTG Media’s move to a digital-only operation is being powered by a new tech stack that will help it develop a deeper understanding of its readers and achieve its goal of 90% market capture within its industry vertical.

The title, first set up as the weekly Travel Trade Gazette in 1953, will stop both its print magazines this year and focus solely on its website, TTGMedia.com. An early adopter of first-party data, it has been running a free registration paywall since 2018.

The title links travel industry professionals (its readers) and holiday companies (its partners and advertisers), particularly as high-street travel agents have closed and an independent online community of travel advisors has blossomed in its place.

“We’re adding a lot of registrations on a weekly basis. For the last year we’ve seen a real uptick,” said TTG head of digital Steve Hinds.

With more than 19,000 UK travel agents already signed up to TTG Media’s website – out of about 50,000 total registered users – TTG Media is looking to harness data to develop greater insight into its readership, in turn serving its partners and advertisers.

“We can see what’s happening, it’s measurable, and we can deliver that message to our clients… demonstrating that if you invest with us, we can show you who you’re reaching, how they’re engaging, and what your sales are likely to do off the back of that activity.”

Custom website and CMS integrated with Hubspot

With the goal “to grow as big as we can get in this market”, TTG Media’s ambitious target is to capture 90% of the UK travel agent market within the next few years.

Empowering this goal is developer Full Fat Things, to whom the publisher turned after moving away from a holistic software-as-a-service platform. The change partly came about after a competitor joined the same platform, but Hinds said TTG Media had also “reached the boundaries” of the “walled garden”.

Its new tech stack includes a custom website and CMS built by Full Fat Things on Drupal, which Hinds said offered added flexibility and functionality, with a community of other users to learn from.

“We wanted to move towards a more open, integrated stack, where if you need to use some other new technology, or a new process, you can, and you can investigate third-party technologies and plug those in pretty simply,” said Hinds.

He added new data visualisation tools, providing intelligence to the editorial and commercial teams about reader activity, would “be invaluable to us as we go forward” – and free him up from “a lot of data crunching” himself.

Hinds chose Full Fat Things after a number of “really in-depth sessions” where he felt “every need was listened to and addressed and recorded”. Full Fat Things boasts experts in developing high-performance websites with lead tracking, activity mapping, first-party native data collection and bespoke registration walls and paywalls. It also offers CRM integration with Hubspot, managing the platform for TTG Media.

Audience data enables smart decisions

Since switching on its registration wall, TTG Media’s content strategy has been focused by the data and analysis it has been able to capture on its audience. This has resulted in allowing PRs to upload press releases directly onto the website, freeing up journalists from stories covered elsewhere for the “deeper, more analytical stuff that is our strength”.

“That’s where we’re differentiating ourselves; that’s an offshoot of the data that we’re sitting on,” said Hinds. “The focus of this tech stack is trying to get all of that data together and visualise it and make smart decisions off the back of it – not only commercial, but also editorial.

“There’s a big focus [at TTG Media] on partnering with our clients to get them to understand our audience as well as we do. The only way that you can do that is by seeing what they’re reading, seeing what they spend time on, seeing how they’re engaging. All of that stuff is gold dust.

“Again, it’s that message that we are the place to come if you want to know the people you want to reach in order to sell your products.”

And it’s the data that Hinds said is the key to survival for B2B titles in this challenging media landscape, particularly as the death knell for third-party cookies has been well and truly sounded and the industry adjusts to tighter online privacy laws.

“Without being able to measure and demonstrate that this was a successful decision, you’re just floating in the wind,” Hinds said. “Having a framework in place where you can measure whether or not that was worthwhile, that’s super valuable. I can’t oversell that.”

And once you have that information on your audience, it’s about focusing on key metrics “that are important to you” to avoid feeling like you’re “swimming through a cloud of data”.

“Find a few metrics that that can honestly tell you whether or not the decision that you just made on the spur of the moment was the right thing to do,” said Hinds. “Then maybe you can look into some things that are a lot more nuanced, if you’ve got the capacity to do it.”

Display advertising and events drive revenue

TTG Media still relies on display advertising for much of its revenue, with event sponsorship also making up a large part of the business. It puts on annual tentpole events The Travel Industry Awards, TTG Luxury Travel Awards, and Top 50 Travel Agencies, for the industry.

Content marketing is also a growing driver of revenue. And within the last year, it created its own Insights Panel, which invites travel agents to complete surveys in return for a £10 voucher. It’s another piece of the data puzzle, but “still in its nascency,” said Hinds.

“If we can get to a point where we have a data product, where we can produce some stuff that can be visualised and used in some kind of business analysis that would be really useful… but it’s more qualitative than quantitative right now.”

‘You can’t tell who’s reading the magazine’

As for print, the November edition of TTG magazine, which has been monthly since 2020 with a free controlled circulation of around 10,000, will be its last. Quarterly sister title TTG Luxury will end in its current format in December. The decision to stop publishing a physical title after 72 years is one that has, again, been led by the data.

“Over time it becomes so hard – and especially as the data-driven businesses we’ve so obviously become – to make the case that you’re providing measurable value to clients when you can’t tell who’s reading the magazine.

“We know that there are fewer and fewer people reading them. That older cohort in our audience still really like to pick up a magazine, but we just can’t tell how long they’re spending, what precisely they’re reading, what’s floating their boat, or how they’re engaging…

“The overheads were quite high and our editorial team was spending a lot of effort on a monthly basis to get the print product out. And I know they all love that – they’re a lot of newshounds – but the focus has to be on the digital stuff where we can actually get some visibility on what’s working and what’s not.”

He added: “Digital has been a very strong part of the business since the registration project, so it’s just grown in stature, along with the events, and print has gradually been less so… It was sad to see it go, but it’s just a necessity for us at this point.”

Homepage is integrated and dynamic

The focus now has turned to TTG Media’s homepage as a “market store” for its readers. Hinds wants this to become more “integrated” and “dynamic”, with content served up “fluidly” and “in a timely way that you’re not constantly managing”.

“The editorial team has so much on their plate, and so does marketing and partner content, so if you could set it up in such a way that certain priority content passes down the site at a different speed than faster news that doesn’t need to have that much surface time – that’s what I really want to work towards,” he said.

“And if you visit [our website] and you’re one of our super users, if you like, everything feels like it’s set up to help you do your business better. It’s not like, now I have to go to the sponsored area of the site, or, now I have to go to the events bit… It’s all feels of a piece.”

With a shift away from the high street and towards home working for travel agents, many of whom are operating independently, Hinds is also keen to expand TTG Media’s content offering to serve this growing market, while encouraging its own clients to do the same.

“Business building content, advice, these are the products that we should really be looking at. I think that’s going to be the big area of growth for us. It’s really just following what the market is doing… that’s going to be where we focus.