Beautyheaven Group shows Bauer ‘how digital can work’ as it revamps website
Beautyheaven Group is showing parent company Bauer Media “how digital can work”, with the group now looking at how best content can be best shared between them.
“Part of the reason why Bauer wanted to acquire us was the digital expertise this business has grown. We’re only digital, we have never had a print background,” publisher Jackie Maxted told Mumbrella.
“We started online and that’s very much were we’re staying. We’re about helping Bauer understanding how digital can work and that’s there interest in acquiring us in the first place.”
The group, which comprises Beautydirectory, BeautyHeaven and Homeheaven, was bought by Bauer Media in February, and has just completed an overhaul of its platforms.
Bauer Media declined to comment on the on how the group fits within Bauer Media’s women’s network, suggesting the long-term plans for the beauty group would be announced within the next quarter.
Currently the only plans are for content sharing, with Maxted saying there is a case for sharing some of the group’s user-generated content, such as reviews, with Bauer Media fashion and beauty titles such as Harper’s Bazaar, Elle Australia and Cleo.
Maxted
“I don’t think you can just merge content across different titles, that doesn’t make sense to me, but there’s a role for using some of the Beautyheaven user generated content in different places, it can appear elsewhere,” she said.
“You do need to have respect for the individual title as well because you can’t just put content across a lot of different places.”
On working with the larger publisher she said: “When it was first acquired our objective was business as usual but let’s look at how Bauer works and how we work and see where there are easy natural synergies. For us at Beautyheaven and Homeheaven that just meant we have an opportunity to get bigger reach.
“If we do want to do a campaign that spreads into numbers we don’t have we can amplify messages through the digital network that Bauer has.
“While we see lots of opportunities in the future we haven’t tested any out as yet.”
Maxted explained since the group’s acquisition by Bauer Media it has been focused on the website relaunch which has seen the group’s three sites streamlined on content management system Drupal, with the aim of offering a cleaner user experience to its audience.
“We started off looking at navigation and the cluttered nature of the site that was the history of us having things on feature-sets over a number of years, so we ended up looking a bit messy and it was difficult to work out what was what,” explained Maxted.
“Our first intention was to be cleaner and simpler and offering the user a better and simpler understanding of what the site was all about.
“The secondary reason for the relaunch was to put all our three sites onto one platform, Drupal, which was the language we’d built Homeheaven in a year or so ago.”
The relaunched sites provide members with a range of benefits including real-time alerts when other members respond to comments, when they have earned loyalty points and when applications for relevant Trial Teams have opened up.
Now the website relaunch is complete Maxted said the group is looking at the “data side of things to be able to start sharing content across networks by audience interests and demographics”.
“There’s some technical work to be done to really understand whay that picture might look like then we can start,” she said.
“The way we will work is to be talking with the businesses that work with us, to work out what their needs are and how that might work if we are to have bigger audiences.
“We are very much at the end of making content for those brands and using our sites at this state to engage audiences with that content, but once we get the bigger picture of the numbers we will start to amplify those numbers out with the Bauer network.”
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