Franciscan Media, established by the Franciscan Friars in the 1890's, is one of America's oldest Catholic book and magazine publishers. Beginning with St. Anthony Messenger magazine in 1893, they have been a consistent spiritual resource for Catholics and Christians alike for over 110 years. Their mission is to help Christians grow closer to God by creating inspiring and innovative products in the spirit of St. Francis, meeting individuals where they are on their personal faith journeys.
Franciscan Media was an early adopter of the opportunities that the advent of the Internet provided and quickly established a strong online presence with its launch of AmericanCatholic.org which grew to become one of the major Catholic websites worldwide. While Franciscan Media was very strong in the "Internet 1.0" era - they still relied very heavily on traditional marketing and outbound techniques.
To operate their outreach and marketing efforts, Franciscan Media was utilizing what we refer to as the "frankensystem" approach - essentially many disparate systems that don't communicate and share data. On top of this, many platforms were outdated which led to unreliable data and lackluster sales from ecommerce efforts.
Needing to reverse a downward trend in revenue from book and magazine sales and take its marketing/sales capabilities to the next level, Franciscan Media decided to explore new, innovative techniques and sought out NR Media Group to help guide them in this effort.
Beginning with a strategic evaluation of their marketing and sales efforts, NR Media Group began to lay the foundation for a transition into inbound tactics and training. HubSpot Enterprise was implemented and content offers and conversion paths were created to supplement outbound book promotions.
Additionally, the Shopify ecommerce platform was implemented to revamp consumer sales online and this was integrated with HubSpot to allow for new remarketing capabilities such as abandoned cart workflows, product review requests, retargeting, etc.
In concert with these platform implementations the Franciscan Media team began training with NR Media Group on these new inbound marketing philosophies, blogging best practices, purposeful social media strategies, etc.
Over the course of 16 months, NR Media Group helped Franciscan Media achieve the following results: