5 lessons in audience development
Levers. Image by Paul Hudson on Flickr. Creative commons.
The Online News Association (ONA) returned to London for its second international conference on Friday, which was themed around audience engagement.
The keynote session was a conversation between the FT’s Renee Kaplan and The Guardian’s Mary Hamilton.
The first part of this post tackles the question of a definition for audience development; the second lists some takeaways from the session.
What should we understand by the term ‘audience engagement’ or ‘audience development’?
Goals
Audience development is about taking the overall goals of the news organisation, whether they be advertising revenue and/or a growth in the number of paying subscribers, and working backwards to develop a strategy to help the news organisation achieve those goals.
For example, if an audience development editor deduces from data that a reader who returns several times a month is more likely to subscribe than a one-time reader, he or she can then work out how to encourage repeat visits and take action.
As Hamilton put it, the audience development team should ask and answer the following questions:
- What are we trying to achieve?
- Who do we want to reach?
- How do we make it happen?
“Know your strategy, prioritise ruthlessly,” Hamilton said when asked to give a key takeaway at the end of the session.
The title of audience development editor is relatively new. As newsrooms have shifted to a reliance on digital audiences, those with the title are now a vital* part of the newsroom. (*I should note here that my title is now audience development editor for Europe, Middle East and Africa at The Wall Street Journal.)
Here are a few more thoughts from Hamilton and Kaplan on the term of audience engagement/development.
Relationships
Audience development is about relationships. There’s nothing new about getting content out to audiences, Kaplan said, but what is new is the idea of a relationship between the news organisation and the reader.
“We want a relationship that is valuable enough to show a propensity to subscribe,” Kaplan said.
Measuring those relationships
Audience development is about putting a metric to those relationships so that everyone in the newsroom can understand that relationship, Kaplan added.
Getting readers to take action
According the Hamilton, audience development is about encouraging readers to react and take action.
Getting the newsroom to take action
Audience development is also about the internal relationships, Kaplan said, and communication within the newsroom.
Here are some lessons from the session:
1. For The Guardian, audience development is about encouraging three types of behaviour
- Reach and optimisation
- Loyalty and habit
- Participation
Participation is something The Guardian is known for, whether soliciting reader photos or listening to comments.
Comments are “valuable almost beyond measure,” Hamilton said, pointing out that “the internet is a conversation”.
2. As The Guardian shifts towards a membership model, it’s thinking a lot about loyalty
The Guardian is on a drive to encourage people to pay a monthly membership fee. Hamilton’s team is therefore working out what motivates a reader to get out a debit card and become a member.
The question to answer, Hamilton said, is “what’s the loyal behaviour that will drive people to become members?”
3. Data needs to be democratised – and translated into newsroom vernacular
Getting data into the hands of every editor has been a major goal at The Guardian.
Before the development of the much-discussed Ophan analytics tool “data was like nuclear waste, people didn’t want to go anywhere near it”, Chris Moran said during a recent discussion (a panel marking the publication of the Reuters Institute report on newsroom analytics).
Data helps journalists understand the different behaviours and that in turn helps guide editors make “data-informed decisions”, Hamilton said.
“Data is not isolated, it’s part of everyone’s job.” she added.
The FT has also developed a new in-house analytics tool. Lantern replaces an earlier analytics tool which was “powerful but it user friendly”, Kaplan said. Lantern is about “translating insights into newsroom vernacular”, showing metrics as an easy-to-understand narrative.
4. Pageviews are important – as they are easy to understand
The news industry has moved beyond the simple measure of pageviews in recent months and years. But “pageviews are super important”, Hamilton said.
An advantage of the pageview metric for Hamilton? Everyone understands pageviews and how they can affect them.
5. But all pageviews are not equal
The FT talks a lot about “quality reach”. As a subscription title, the FT is looking to attract audiences who will pay a monthly fee.
But how to find these quality audiences? Again, this is where a data dive can help, working out who these potential subscribers are, the time of day they read, the type of content they spend time on, for example.
