Today’s increasingly dialled in audience faces a barrage of information, whether it be from emails, tweets, Facebook posts, or Snapchat stories or some other digital offering. As a publisher, you need to be cognizant of this reality and make sure that its your message that gets through to audiences and gains that all important engagement.
How?
Data, data, and more data is the key — but it’s not the aggregation of vanity metrics such as page views that you need to look at. To understand how to cultivate and maintain audience interest, you need to analyze data for insights that can inform your entire publishing process.
Here are 5 key components of your strategy that can be influenced by data:
Stories That Matter
If your audience finds your stories interesting and compelling, they are more likely to engage with it. This engagement, in the form of shares and comments, is more valuable than page views alone because it’s more likely to increase traffic to your pages. Of course, a large part of creating interesting stories has to do with the quality of your content, but it’s not the sole influencer. It’s important to keep in mind that in addition to writing good stories that matter, you need to write the stories that matter to your audience. This means mining historical data on which stories have performed well on your page and why those stories have succeeded to understand what content your audience is seeking. A great example of following audience needs rather than pop news was the Daily Post’s decision not to cover the birth of Prince George on the front page or with a live blog, instead featuring a local headline (as we’ve discussed before here). The Texas Tribune’s has also done this, even when breaking news was happening on its very doorstep.
Mobile Friendly
According to the Pew Research Center, 64 per cent of Americans own a smartphone, and 19 per cent rely on smartphones for information and to stay connected to the world around them. In fact approximately 15 per cent of Americans have smartphones but limited ways of getting online otherwise.
68 per cent of these smartphone users also use their phones to follow along with breaking news, with 33 per cent saying they use their phones to do this “frequently.” As of 2015, 39 of the top 50 digital publishers have more traffic to their site through mobile than desktop. These numbers paint a clear picture of the changing world of digital publishing. Audiences are increasingly going online through mobile, and looking at your data can help you better understand which content does better on which device. This allows you to tailor your audience’s’ experience to maximize engagement returns. It’s no longer about just having a mobile site — that is a given — it’s about creating unique and shareable experiences on each device. This can be through mobile-specific content, the option of sharing through chat apps like WhatsApp, or a host of other ways that your data can help inform.
Publishing Cycle
The old print deadlines are a thing of the past or at the least, not useful in a digital setting. With audiences around the world accessing content at all times of day, understanding when to push a story can be key to helping it go the distance. A “digital first” approach to your publishing deadlines, focusing on when your digital audience looks for stories, can make you the go-to source for information. Analytics can once again help you gain this deeper understanding of how and when audiences are consuming your content, so you can maximize their attention. For example, perhaps your Entertainment vertical does best between 6 pm and 8 pm. You can use this to information to modify your writing and publishing schedule. Breaking news coverage has already changed significantly with the advent of technology live streaming, liveblogging, and social media. Informing your other writing with analytics can help you make the most of all your content.
Social Media
65 per cent of adults now use social networking sites in America. Of those, according to the Pew Research Center, 63 per cent of Twitter and Facebook users say the platforms serve as a source of news about events and issues. Clearly, social is a huge contributor to website traffic. But it’s not enough to just understand that social creates traffic, you need to understand how. Which sections do particularly well on social, which articles generate the most shares and retweets, which social channels are better for which stories — these are all questions that audience analytics can answer. For example, breaking news does better on Twitter than Facebook, with double the traffic. A good analytics tool helps you not only understand the impact of social on your content, but the impact of each channel on each story to better inform your full social strategy.
Advertisers Buy Audiences, Not Publications
Gaining access to authorized first-party data is key in today’s publishing world, as advertisers care less about which publisher is serving the ad, and more about whom their ad is reaching. These advertisers are looking for people that match their target audience and if you can provide that sort of detailed information, you have a step up in the race for ad spend. This can not only better your revenue, but also the ad content on your site because it will be relevant to your audience. As a poll by the developer behind iOS ad blocker Crystal indicates, 71 per cent of ad blocker users would consider whitelisting sites that are optimized for performance, maintain transparent policies, and serve ads that meet acceptability criteria. Analytics driven advertising can be a win-win with advertisers reaching the consumers they want, consumers getting relevant content (with a transparent privacy policy) and you increasing your ad revenue.
These are just a few of the myriad ways by which analytics can help you grow your publication (full disclosure: we provide robust analytics tools). A well-rounded strategy will use analytics at every step of the publishing process to ensure that your decisions are always backed by empirical data. This is something that Audience Development Specialists can also provide insight on.
Do you use analytics in your newsroom currently, or are you planning to in the near future? Let’s chat in the comments!
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