Audience Development and Engagement
Success in audience strategy is when both readership interest and editorial goals are aligned.
Facts that every publication should accept:
* A data-driven newsroom should not change the editorial mission, but enhance workflows, platform curation, and decisions on coverage.
* If you're witnessing minimal, stagnant, or decreasing traffic over multiple years, it is because your audience strategy depended on brand awareness.
* Avoid mimicking editorial strategy, your audience is only interested in your specialized reporting or writing.
* Your core audience may not be your targeted demographic.
* Knowing the metrics of a digital publication is insufficient without understanding the demographics of your audience across platforms.
* A presence across multiple platforms created several core audience segments.
* Each platform has a unique audience and their interest in coverage should be tailored to each one.
* Non-traditional readership can be identified by high bounce rates and pageviews.
* The majority of your core audience searches for your publication on their phone's internet browser.
* Social media companies have created algorithms to curate user experience by building profiles based on a mass quantity of data to increase engagement. A digital publication should develop their own respective profiles of readership to increase engagement across multiple platforms.
The goal of an audience strategy is to turn observable trends into actionable insights. To accomplish this, certain metrics should be utilized to distill an analysis.
Useful Metrics:
* Pageviews
* Engagement Rate
* Bounce Rate
* Views per session
* Average Session duration
Whether you are attempting to assess the performance of a published work or traffic referral source, these metrics will allow you to identify user behavior patterns.
Less useful metrics:
* Engagement time
* Recirculation
* Quality or Unique Pageviews
To develop an audience or increase engagement, these metrics will only allow you to identify the performance of a singular piece of published work. The goal should be to maximize and support the success of every contributor in the newsroom.
The only trends that have value to a publication are the patterns that provide user engagement habits to inform strategy.
If you're seeking to increase audience, these are some of the questions that you should ask:
* At what hour(s) does audience engagement traditionally peak?
* Where is the location of your audience?
* Can a particular beat that performs well be expanded ?
* Is it possible to start a series of coverage based on a story with a high bounce rate and pageviews?
If you're looking to increase engagement, there are other questions to consider:
* What topics of coverage perform best per traffic referral source and platform?
* Can you send alerts to readership when traffic peaks?
* Can the story be conveyed in multiple mediums?
* Are there social media posts that have bounce rates lower than the traditional average of your publication?
This is not an exhaustive list of questions that can be asked. However, if you answer them and strategize placement and coverage, you are bound to see decent returns.
Actionable Analysis
A set of values ranking metrics from the highest to the lowest has little significance.
An audience strategy built on data should provide:
* Contextualized performance of coverage from an editorial perspective through metrics.
* Demographic research synthesized from multiple data points as well as personal engagement to enhance decisions on news coverage to engage the target audience and expand additional segments.
* Target audience personas built on existing readership trends aligning strategies and fostering collaboration across editorial, marketing, and development.
* An editorial strategy that elevates the editorial mission and identifies the unique coverage of the publication.
* Explanations for traffic referral trends.
* Solutions for the metrics that a publication seeks to improve.
* Observable audience patterns that guide homepage placement and social media strategy.
* The capacity to adapt news coverage and technological trends to continue engagement.