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Listen and Learn: Introduction to B3

For a multimedia introduction to this session, please click on the “play” button on the left or on the audio file above.

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INTRODUCTION: B3 Customer (Existing Audience)

In this session we will be looking at customers again - but this time rather than potential customers (ie your marketplace) we will be looking at your existing audience - be that long-term subscribers, retail customers or anonymous fly-by’s on your website

The Deloitte Digital Maturity pillars focus on customer, and the importance of understanding everything you can about them.

Inevitably this brings us again to the importance of data: how you get to know your audience and become more audience-centric, means you have to be able to track and understand your audiences, and the way that is done is by using data management systems.

What you do with that information will play into your planning - this knowledge about your audience should have an effect on everything you do from content selection to product development, from editorial workflows and schedules to strategic decision making and forward planning

In this session we have a look at customer data, the utose of metrics, using data to understand and connect with your audiences

Your assignment is to think of unifying metrics that would work for your whole business - and we will return to the concept of organisational goals in the strategy module.

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How to WIN: Why representation matters

Top editorial positions in major news outlets matter at both practical and symbolic levels.

This has always been true, and the importance of this is only further underlined by the increasing focus on how news media often struggle with issues raised by social movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo and calls to rethink imperial legacies.

There is a concern that the media can sometimes miss relevant stories related to these issues, in part because top editors experience and see the underlying concerns very differently from those most directly affected by them.

Read the full article here.

INTRODUCTION: B3 Customer (Existing Audience)

According to Reuters Institute’s factsheet only 22% of the 180 top editors across the 240 brands covered are women, despite the fact that, on average, 40% of journalists in the 12 markets are women.

In 11 out of 12 markets, the majority of top editors are men, including countries like Brazil and Finland where women outnumber men among working journalists

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What is covered in this lesson?

SECTION 1: Collecting data: Getting to know your readers

Sources of customer data
Why you need to know your customers
Case Study: the FT’s engagement metric

STOP AND THINK: Your own sources of customer data

SECTION 2: Challenges of data collection

Types of data to collect
A powerful catalyst for change
Improving loyalty through data use

STOP AND THINK: How could you improve data collection in your business?

SECTION 3: User needs and audience

The BBC User Needs Matrix
Tapping into the needs of human interaction for news
Using data effectively in your newsroom
Moving to an audience-centric viewpoint

GROUP WORK: Consider the newsroom production graph and discuss similar results or predicted results in your own newsroom

TIME FOR REFLECTION: Consider possible metrics for your organisation

INTRODUCTION: B3 Customer (Existing Audience)

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Reminder: Focus on the customer

Focusing on the customer will automatically make you a better business
Audience-centricity should be at the centre of your strategy
Your customers are your readers, your subscribers, your marketplace, and your advertising clients.
Do you know enough about your customers?
Have you asked them what they need?
Good customer data is an investment worth making: it helps to make sound business decisions, and not react without facts
Data helps facilitate transitions and big changes

INTRODUCTION: B3 Customer (Existing Audience)

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Section 1: Getting to know your readers

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Where can you find data on your customers?

Subscription/circulation systems: often archaic, used for print management
CRM systems: usually live with circ department, include email databases
Finance systems: payment data as well as personal data can be heavily regulated as there are rules around storing data, but could be useful for de-duplicating records
Website tracking systems: Chartbeat and Google Analytics hold granular information on online audiences. (See Module A for more detail on how audiences are tracked)

SECTION 1: B3 Getting to know your readers

Customer data can be found in your business in a number of places, both “offline” and “online”:

DMPs (data management platforms) used for digital advertising: should have fairly detailed audience “buckets” which could give you insight about your audiences
In-house research: there may be information available through reader groups, reader surveys or market research that your own research or marketing department has
Industry trackers: most countries have website rankings used by advertisers to understand audience sizes, like Alexa, Narrative (Southern Africa), ComCast or others.

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Listen and Learn: Using data effectively

For multimedia on this session, please click on the “play” button on the left or on the audio file above.

SECTION 1: B3 Getting to know your readers

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Data should underpin your decision-making

Data about your customers should form the basis of decision making
Making decisions on a hunch is not good business sense: data will show you where you have problems and what needs to be fixed, but also show opportunities
Using data can help forge useful strategies and pivot a business in the right direction
Investment decisions can be made on good intelligence about customers: convincing boards and management of a strategy plan is easier if you have the data to stand it up and prove the point

SECTION 1: B3 Getting to know your readers

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Why is customer data so important?

Data can be used to build loyalty among customers
Understanding a customer base can help make better products and experiences
Data creates a common language in the business, for example, the FT’s use of engagement as a common unifier metric in the newsroom and throughout the organisation
There are ways to simplify the use of data in your company, and make it more accessible to all
One of these ways is using personas to unify the company around a common marketing language
A persona is a proxy for segments of your target audience – such as “fly-by” or “frequent news junkie” - and they are a valuable way of understanding and marketing content or offers to your audience more effectively

SECTION 1: B3 Getting to know your readers

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Case Study: The FT’s engagement metric

The FT developed a metric to measure customer engagement based on recency, frequency and volume (RFV) and each individual customer is given an RFV score to track their propensity to churn or re-subscribe
When a customer is engaged, they are more likely to renew, share and advocate for you - and hence such a metric applies to every area of the business, and onto the bottom line
To make a common metric work there must be alignment in the business, complete focus on the goal, an understandable metric, and a willingness to experiment to get there
This strategic initiative rests almost completely on good, usable data.

An FT personalisation tool, MyFT, which allows users to mark and save content they are interested in, increased engagement 86% - as tracked by the RFV data metric which underpins company strategy.

SECTION 1: B3 Getting to know your readers

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Case Study: RFV as a KPI for the FT

The key performance index of RFV (recency frequency and volume is actually a well-known index from the retail sector
Recency – when did they last visit?
Frequency – how often do they visit?
Volume – how many articles have they read?
The RFV score is calculated per known user - which is why registration is helpful - and can help predict cancellation probability
The more engaged the readers, the less likely they are to cancel their subscription.
For a slide pack on this see here.

SECTION 1: B3 Getting to know your readers

This is the relationship between the cancellation rate (churn) and the engagement score (the RFV score). As you can see on the graph above the regression is amazingly good.

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Stop & Think

Let’s stop and think for a moment:

Are there any other sources of customer data not recorded in this presentation that you get data from? Could you share these examples with the team?

SECTION 1: B3 Getting to know your readers

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Section 2: The challenges of data collection

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The challenges of collecting data internally

Strategically, your aim organisationally should be to work towards a SINGLE VIEW OF THE CUSTOMER: This means that you have one true customer record that is up to date, and accessible universally by the right people
It also means that you have managed to get rid of data silos in the business and you keep the information in a single place
This is easier said than done - and could prove to be a lengthy, difficult - perhaps expensive - but VERY worthwhile project
Practically, this is best achieved by hiring a data lead, having a good CIO or CTO, and possibly working with a third party vendor or data specialist who can help you with cleaning and centralising data

SECTION 2: B3 The challenges of data collection

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Improve your business intelligence capabilities

The challenges however are that data is seldom “clean”: there are duplicate records, false records, and offline data does not have the same integrity as online data - think of your circ department data vs your online audience data!
Data is also stored in different systems and in different formats, making it difficult to ingest in one place
It is absolutely worth doing work on your internal data to improve your business intelligence capabilities as it leads to efficiencies, better service and revenue, and data transparency which helps with swift decision making

SECTION 2: B3 The challenges of data collection

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What do you need to know about your existing customers?

There are many good reasons to collect data on your customers, but for a digital transformation, some data points are more valuable than others, especially if they help move along the transition.

Demographic data: age, gender and race are all useful markers
Consumption patterns and online activity - most popular time of day online can help you with newsroom re-organisations
Print and digital overlap - a great stat to show how online readers are usually not the same people as newspaper readers
Competitor site overlap audiences - how much are you sharing audience with competitors?
Referrals and dependency on social traffic: it can be a risk to bank on Facebook, for example
Advertising stats - CTRs and ROI will highlight problems with your offering
ARPU - average revenue per user on advertising and on subscribers
Engagement metrics to show loyalty Content consumption preferences

SECTION 2: B3 The challenges of data collection

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Improving loyalty among customers by using data

Data is a crucial foundation to understand customer behaviour and thus also to improve loyalty
A loyal customer, especially a subscriber, is like gold for publishers as they provide annuity (recurring) revenue year after year, and are advocates for your brand, yet are often completely overlooked
Understanding customers by reading their data can help you to:

Improve service
Improve your content and commission more useful content
Personalise the experience for valued readers and subscribers
Tailor offers and deals for loyal customers
Refine your advertising campaigns

Establish new products that cater to loyal customers
Improve acquisition strategies (get new readers or subscribers)
Improve retention strategies (keep current readers and subscribers)
Improve the lifetime value (CLV) of a customer - a valuable metric

SECTION 2: B3 The challenges of data collection

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Retention is cheaper than acquisition

Publishers often have little useful information about their subscribers, and spend vastly more money on acquisition than retention

SECTION 2: B3 The challenges of data collection

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Another way of looking at it is:

SECTION 2: B3 The challenges of data collection

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Stop & Think

Let’s stop and think for a moment:

What is the state of customer data in your business - where do you think it might be improved?

SECTION 1: B3 Getting to know your readers

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Section 3: User needs and audience

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Listen and Learn: The User Needs Matrix

For multimedia on this session, please click on the “play” button on the left or on the audio file above.

SECTION 3: B3 User Needs and Audience

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The BBC User Needs Matrix

The BBC World Service audience research team developed a user needs matrix, which has evolved over the years
They were looking for ways to connect with their audience
“Being a secondary news source in most countries, it was challenging for the BBC digital team to connect with users by just doing ‘agenda’ news, or ‘hard’ news, as we say. Most readers would have seen the headlines of the day already, before seeing BBC content. There was little need to fill the website with those same headlines; a new approach was needed.
The BBC research team listened to how people were talking about news, eventually identifying six reasons for consuming news stories. They are on the right.
These six needs can be divided into three groups: 'what has happened', 'how does this event make me feel or what do I do about it', and 'what more do I need to know about this'."
One of the original pioneers of this way of thinking was Dmitry Shishkin and you can read more about this journey, and watch Dmitry speak about it, here.

SECTION 3: B3 User Needs and Audience

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Tapping into the needs of human interaction for news

Dmitry has gone on to develop a guide to user needs with a company called Smartocto. Read their white paper here
He says: “The user needs fulfil demands that come from a very basic human interaction model: it's all about feeling involved and getting more social currency with your peers. Something that makes readers say: 'oh, this is interesting, oh, I didn't know that, I will tell my friends about this, or this is something I will share with my parents in the evening.
These user needs are six different perspectives or editorial treatments of a news fact - and a great way to differentiate yourself. It's like this: you take a piece of news, then try to cover it in different ways that answer these six user needs. It's a really interesting exercise, which I loved doing. It's almost always possible to do so, even though the circumstances and the user needs might be a little bit different."
For detailed guides on each and how to write to fill the needs, click on these links: Update me / Keep me on trend / Educate me / Give me perspective / Inspire me / Divert me

SECTION 3: B3 User Needs and Audience

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Listen and Learn: Audience and newsroom

For multimedia on this session, please click on the “play” button on the left or on the audio file above.

SECTION 1: B3 Getting to know your readers

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Using data effectively in your newsroom

The graph on the left is a great example of how data can be used to demonstrate the need for change. The shadow peaks in the background of the graph show audience visits (page views) in a 24-hour period for a daily newspaper and website. The reading peak is clearly between 6am and 9am. The bars (look at grey first) show the number of articles published online: showing clearly that most publishing was happening late afternoon and evening (the pull of the newspaper) - the time when the least number of readers was present.

SECTION 3: B3 User Needs and Audience

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Moving to an audience-centric viewpoint

Once this was obvious to the newsroom attempts were made to change shifts and processes, and the orange bars show the progress made. This publisher is now a huge digital publisher, but it is valuable to use such data points when attempting to activate positive newsroom change.

Image: Lisa MacLeod

SECTION 3: B3 User Needs and Audience

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Quiz Assignment

Please complete the short online quiz to test what you have learnt.

You must score at least 80% in order to progress to the next module.

SECTION 3: B3 User Needs and Audience

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