D3: Audience Acquisition �and Retention
How to WIN: Coverage aims to break the bias
Malaysia’s The Star was the driving force behind a collaborative project with other news groups and agencies that put key challenges facing women in Asia on the news agenda throughout 2022, Wan-Ifra reported.
Esther Ng, The Star’s Chief Content Officer, said the initiative was important because “vulnerable voices do not all sound the same”. “If we are to effectively ‘break the bias’, we must first show that a bias exists within the different socio-economic and cultural context of the different countries [across Asia] … And it is crucial that we record this.”
The Star focused its #breakthebias series on four main topics: Women in the workforce; Challenges women face in the workforce; The value of ‘unpaid work’; and a regional comparison of the ‘unpaid work’ women do.
At the end of 2022, stories and data from the different countries will be compiled and analysed to produce a collaborative regional print feature and interactive digital story on woman empowerment amid a pandemic.
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INTRODUCTION: D3: Audience Acquisition and Retention
Image source: The Star, Malaysia
What is covered�in this lesson?
SECTION 1: Acquire
STOP AND THINK: Devise a semi-fictional user. What content ideas can you generate to attract their attention?
SECTION 2: Retain
INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT: Devise your own experiment for a product that could target your user. Write 350 words on why you think this idea would work, using data to support your theory.
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INTRODUCTION: D3: Audience Acquisition and Retention
Section 1: Acquire
How to WIN: Coverage aims to break the bias
In Module A of Digital ABC we looked at the engagement funnel:
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SECTION 1: D3: Audience Acquisition and Retention
How do you acquire new users?
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“Just do good journalism. Deliver�it in a way that’s valuable and you can build a business.”
�NICK JOHNSTON�Publisher of US news start-up Axios
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Quote source: The Sunday Times, August 14 2022
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Why you should know your audience
Throughout this course, the constant is that content that meets your audiences’ needs is likely to get the best results. Remember that by understanding who your users are, you should be able to tailor content to what they want, identifying their problems or challenges and giving them solutions.
You can find out what they want if your users are asked what topics they want to consume when they register on your site.
Your aim as a journalist is get them to take an action along the following lines:
By consuming more content that give context, such as analyses or explainers, you may help users to perform better in their jobs - and give them a reason to subscribe to your product.
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How are you going to get to know your audience
Monitor the comment section:
This can be an effective way to gauge how a story has been received by users. While it should not dictate content strategy, a well-received story could prompt other follow-ups.
Similarly if a story gets an unusually high �number of complaints, you would need to �assess what went wrong and why. You may�even need to take the story off the site.
Some news organisations switch comments off online as a matter of policy on particularly sensitive issues such as court cases and crime stories.
Look at what has worked well:
Look at what has worked well:
There are three key steps you can consider:
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Review your audience analytics data:
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Build a data-driven user
Now you need to define your audience because this will help you to identify who you are writing for or making videos and podcasts for.
You can borrow techniques from marketing strategies to do this by creating personas - ie semi-fictional users - and analyse their needs.
They are semi-fictional because hopefully you are using data from your analytics team to build a persona - so you should have information such as age range, gender, location and even profession and topics they are interested in if this data is gathered at registration stage.
Having a clear image of who you are creating content for will help you address their needs more readily.
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What are your users’ needs?
Once you have an idea of who you are writing for you can think about what topics will interest them.
You will need to build a hypothesis to test appetite for certain types of content. Once you have devised your hypothesis, you will need to set up your short experiment that runs for a few weeks, measure how it does, assess the pros and cons. If it worked, scale it up.
So where do you start?
Look at your data for:
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How to run an experiment
Your experiment doesn’t have to complicated.
It can start with a simple Google spreadsheet.
Or an idea from a reporter and product developer.
But to get to the point of running an experiment, first draw up your hypothesis.
Think about your new audience you worked on in Modules D1 and D2 for your news organisation.
Or break down an audience you already have. Use Slide 13 to do this.
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Draw up your hypotheses
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Criteria | Hypothesis 1: Young female professional | Hypothesis 2 | Hypothesis 3 |
What are your user needs? | Wants work and careers advice | | |
What data can back up your theory? | Young women are reading this content on your site | | |
Which story format or product could serve the user? | Newsletter | | |
What metrics will you use to measure success? | Open rates and click throughs to articles | | |
Who will carry out this project? | Name of person | | |
Plan for success
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By setting out your hypothesis you are putting a structure in place.
You are more likely to succeed if you plan out your experiment.
But don’t spend too much time on this.
Now get going. Because if it takes you six months to get a project off the ground, the focus is likely to have shifted and your idea may be out of date.
Image source: Newsweek
FT case study: Experimenting with games
This type of Minimum Viable Product approach was taken at the FT by the head of digital delivery in the newsroom.
The first of this type of FT interactive storytelling was the Uber game where users would take on the role of a full-time Uber driver.
It accompanies the article Uber: The uncomfortable view from the driving seat in which the FT’s Leslie Hook interviewed real drivers, delving into the realities of the career. And it won a visual digital storytelling award in 2018.
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Read more about the origins of the FT’s Uber game here
Stop & Think
Let’s stop and think for a moment:
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Section 2: Retain
Reminder: Retention is cheaper than acquisition
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Publishers often have little useful information about their subscribers, and spend vastly more money on acquisition than retention
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Reminder: Keeping readers interested
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Build up your communities and loyal fans
How editorial and commercial can collaborate to build communities and audience numbers
Building communities is key to developing new markets and audiences and retaining them. Local news organisations are finding success with hyper-local markets because they tend to have a loyal consumer base.
The business theory behind these sites is that proximity increases the value of news and community identity.
The Press Democrat, for example has developed hyper-local sites for every city in Sonoma County and one of the most successful sites is Petaluma 360, reportedly generating more than 1 million page views a month, and $20,000 in revenue a month.
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Image source: Petaluma website
Case study: Manila Standard, Philippines
Before, we told people what news they wanted to read. Now, they're also telling us, says Joyce Pañares of the Standard, Manila
There are a lot of stories that actually broke first on social media that were carried by mainstream media, says Joyce Pañares, a news editor at the Standard, Manila in the Philippines.
Before the pandemic, news editors at the Standard largely set the agenda but that started to change. Social media started to “democratise” the news process, she says.
During the pandemic, stories on community pantries were not produced by mainstream media. They broke first on social media. “We had to scramble to follow up on that story, because the people were talking about it,” says Ms Pañares.
“Before, we told people what news they wanted to read. Now, they're also telling us,” she says. “And it's a humbling experience, because sometimes there is a mismatch. What we think is important to people can turn out not to be their priority.
They can be more concerned with a school that has no roof, she says. These types of stories may not typically be hard news. But “they are things that our audience consider important than them. So they may not make it to the newspaper, but they will definitely be present in our online platform.”
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Image source: LinkedIn
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YAFM focuses on mining community stories
Local language sites can also capitalise on this type of success too in building communities. For example YAFM, a community radio station in Zimbabwe positioned itself to cover mining and its communities in the Great Dyke region. For further reading on audience-first strategies, go to a former WAN-IFRA programme Table Stakes Europe
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Image source: YAFM
“We aim to give our audience a more community oriented experience and draw more traffic to our platforms”��EMANG BOKHUTLO�Editor, The Voice, Botswana
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Reminder: Don’t forget about good old newsletters ...
This topic was covered in Module A5 as part of Digital ABC.
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How newsletters can help
Email newsletters play a key part in driving engagement and building loyalty. They are versatile, delivering news in bite-size chunks and whetting the appetite for more. This strategy can help to bolster retention in particular.
They can also help to drive monetisation, via sponsorship, event promotion and advertising.
Another key aspect to think about are how the newsletter is written. They should be short, snappy intros with engaging headlines that will entice readers to click through to read more. In 2021, the Washington Post launched The 7, a short daily briefing, across its platforms and products.
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How newsletters can help
It helps to draw up criteria for newsletters in your organisation.
Here are some insights to consider for a launch of a newsletter:
Frontier Myanmar, a news and business magazine and website, also produces a Daily Briefing and Media Monitor newsletters, pictured right.
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Image source: Frontier Myanmar
How to WIN: Women are a key demographic for newsletters
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How to WIN: Financial Times case study (cont.)
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Stop & Think
Let’s stop and think for a moment:
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Tactics for driving engagement and retention
Encourage reporters to build their own personal brand and following on social media to promote their own stories.
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Experiment with moving stories regularly around the homepage to promote a wider variety of content.
Repromote your evergreen articles via newsletters and align social media strategy to promote�breaking news, investigations, campaigns and�so on.
Use key words in headlines for search engine optimisation. Check search patterns on Google Trends. Some newsrooms are using AI tools to help suggest SEO headline ideas
Rewrite headlines post-publication where stories are not performing as well as expected.
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Tactics for retaining eyeballs on content
Story formats: �In-depth investigations, exclusive content, info-graphics, podcasts, and analysis that explains the context and impact of a story on users lives tend to have higher time spent on them.
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Story layout: visual display of copy is important. Break up long-form articles with headings, pictures with captions, and clear recommended links to other relevant material. All of these devices help to keep users engaged.
Breaking news�is key for bringing users back habitually for updates.
Keep the quantity of work under review: too many low value stories on for example petty theft or generic, freely available sports reports can take up.
Quality is key. Assess the lengths of stories and user drop-off patterns. Shorten word counts for news stories and analysis if there is a clear trend that users do not finish regularly, say, 50 per cent of a story.
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Tactics on follow-ups
Events: either in-person or online, these are opportunities for your audience to meet your reporters and editor. This helps to build habit, a relationship with the brand a loyalty to it.
Advisory groups: Ask targeted users to become involved in a forum built around a campaign, such as a local or general election. These users should come from a new audience you want to grow for your news business, such as under-30s or young professional women. Give them the opportunity to do a podcast or edit a special section devoted to their views of the election.
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Share life experience: Ask readers to share their experiences of how a story relates to them. Create a follow-up article, podcast or video. Involve them in the story or require them to interact with the site in some way.
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Case Study: Axios, US news start-up
Niche, high-quality news paid off for Axios in August 2022, The Sunday Times reported, when the US news start-up agreed to sell itself for $525million to US cable company Cox Enterprises.
Axios differentiates itself in three ways:
Short, bullet point stories, mostly under 300 words, that give you the basics of the event and why it is important. Axios calls this “smart brevity”.
Newsletters on specialised areas, such as tech and venture capital, along with a strategy of hiring well-connected journalists.
Niche: local news delivered by newsletters, which give the day’s events mixed with lighter topics such as where to buy a bagel.
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Image source: Axios.com
Quiz Assignment
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Content Strategy
End of Lesson Three