3. How to link engagement to revenue - ONA Table Talks - Jennifer Brandel host
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Fri Sept 14, 2018 - ONA18

Table Talk 3: How to link engagement to revenue

Jennifer Brandel - host

https://ona18.journalists.org/sessions/tabletalksaudience/

#ONA18TableTalks

Ideas to discuss:

Subthemes:

CULTURE

“If you don’t have the culture, you don’t have anything.”

Familiarize everyone on leadership team with the idea of a engagement funnel; goals are set along the engagement funnel.

Multi-functional teams .Institute an audience engagement team in the revenue that is connected at the hip to the revenue-focused teams. (Importance of having a manager with an editorial background.) Think about how to engage readers without dumbing down the journalism. Make sure people on staff know this is not about trying to influence the journalism but how to sell that journalism.

Build trust between journalists and the business side.

Make sure everyone know that this is question of survival. If we’re not doing it with advertising, we need to work together to build a sustainable model.

Journalists appreciate honesty and transparency. Make sure everyone is clear on organization goals. You can approach from position of fear (“look at this plummeting numbers”) or a position of opportunity (“we have a chance to build a community.”)

Lunch and learns can be really valuable. This is marketing 101; editorial teaching business how they do what they do.

Have strategic discussions about goals — and post-mortems on results.

Important to discuss concrete examples. Work with reporters and editors who are already on board with importance of engagement and create success stories.

Try a rotation. Have staff shadow others to get a sense of how they do their job.

Identify “new heroes.” ie an internal newsletter that highlights what’s working.

BUSINESS MODELS

A Kickstarter campaign drew support from large audience that was not previously engaged and may not have known brand. (Appeal is for support for a specific project.) Sponsorships also available.

Think about having different types of membership programs.

A/B testing in newsletters to get people to become members. Incorporate that language used in newsletters into other mediums.

With Facebook, use information you have collected from readers to create targeted audience and build a specific campaign.

Top 3-5 Ideas from Sept 14 session 1

Culture-building

Top 3-5 Ideas from Sept 14 session 2

Questions/ideas:

If you don’t have a culture inside your organization that allows marketing, editorial and product to collaborate, it’s hard to get all of this work.

Successes for the above point:

What is an audience metric vs. an editorial metric?

How do you connect people to other content they would like?

Data can be used to change culture within a newsroom. It starts with creating a shared vocabulary between editorial and business. It can also involve how editorial views the success of content vs. how it actually performed among different audiences.

Collaboration between marketing and editorial about series.

Golden-metric that everyone can agree on?

Engaged time/time spent.

Quality metric: Page views divided by quantity of content

American Press Institute Metrics for News

Who has been successful monetizing engagement?

Is the group comfortable with sponsorship?

Has anyone surveyed audiences to find out how they feel about sponsorships?

Has anyone delved into content that looks like editorial but is, in fact, ads?

The various ways your newsroom may or may not be thinking about revenue. Dot-connector studio:

Vox collects spreadsheets that collect Google Forms and tracks new responses coming in.

So much of doing engagement work is being your own champion and shouting it from the rooftops.


They track everything piece of engagement that tracks it as you go.

It’s really helpful to spell out engagement to people. One example: Write a paragraph that gets sent throughout the newsroom that spells out success.

USA TODAY has had a lot of success with events. At a local level, they thought about what they’re really good at it. Food, drinks, high school sports, and storytelling. Created events around those. Food and wine events around different cities. Tiered systems. Those events bring in a large amount of money.

Storytellers. Surveys.

High school sports. Created a banquet for high school athletes that have become pretty popular. Awards for students and athletes and coaches. Red carpet. Professional athletes that give pep talks etc.

Dedicated staff for that?

Local level. Support for that. Also partner with an events company.

Articles / resources to check out:

Below - a few resources from Hearken (will publish soon)

(Images via Hearken, Jennifer Brandel)