{"id":53720,"date":"2022-05-13T08:04:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-13T07:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/?p=53720"},"modified":"2022-05-13T08:11:56","modified_gmt":"2022-05-13T07:11:56","slug":"from-fly-bys-to-super-fans-re-thinking-your-audience-development-and-engagement-strategies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/from-fly-bys-to-super-fans-re-thinking-your-audience-development-and-engagement-strategies\/","title":{"rendered":"From Fly-bys to Super Fans: Re-thinking your audience development and engagement strategies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

At AOP\u2019s first in-person CRUNCH event<\/a> of 2022, Charlotte Tobitt, UK Editor at Press Gazette, spoke with a panel of industry experts about audiences: how to engage with them, how to turn that engagement into value, and how to prove that value to advertisers. With half of publishers<\/a> now seeing opportunity in the post-cookie landscape, what can they do to make sure the grass is greener?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Engagement beats scale for driving both subs and ads<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

To create a resilient, future-proofed business model, publishers must consistently update their approaches to revenue in response to changing audience behaviours and trends. Take The Independent<\/a> for example, which developed a method of aligning calls to action (CTA) with audience segments based upon their level of engagement, with the aim to boost site registrations by two million in twelve months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To identify and appropriately target audience segments, Head of Consumer Marketing, Ross Wilmot and his team developed a bespoke engagement metric to sort site visitors into high, medium, and low engagement segments. A tailored call-to-action was then delivered to maximise conversions for that particular segment. For example, the high engagement segment \u2014 350x more likely to convert than the lowest segment \u2014 received more direct prompts to contribute or subscribe, while medium engagers were given additional premium content previews. A test and learn approach refined these segments and CTAs over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur engagement segments are completely fluid, they update on a daily basis,\u201d said Wilmot. \u201cWe\u2019re not waiting for someone to churn, we\u2019re spotting the signs early and then using the data to understand what levers we have to pull\u2026 suddenly we\u2019re making content recommendations, newsletter recommendations, trying to get them back up through those engagement segments.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result was a 1,000% increase in monthly registration volume, sailing well past the original two million target.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthony Crocker, Head of Campaign Innovations at The Telegraph,<\/a> also recently oversaw a period of transition in how engagement is valued, moving away from a focus on scale and click-through rates (CTR) towards a smaller, more engaged audience attracted to quality, not clickbait. This emphasis shift promised to drive more subscriptions for The Telegraph\u2019s premium service, but could brands be convinced that scale is worth sacrificing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To prove his case, Crocker needed metrics. Oracle measured the quality of editorial content while Brand Metrics tracked post-campaign exposure to demonstrate not merely whether an ad was clicked but whether there was meaningful interaction. Changes were made to ad positioning, too: one per screen in a predefined ad space with no distracting pop-ups so that attention was fixed on one ad at a time. Both the content and the ads were treated like a premium experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe stronger [the audience\u2019s] affinity towards the Telegraph brand was \u2026 the stronger their affinity towards the [advertiser] brand was; their recall levels were higher and the brand impact was much more positive,\u201d said Crocker. \u201cThink about Vogue. It\u2019s a premium magazine \u2026 yet the first half of that magazine is advertising. But that\u2019s fine, people enjoy that as part of their engagement experience because the ads are beautiful and relevant and fit into the values and identity of Vogue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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AOP CRUNCH<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Curated communities retain audiences and create value<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Karien Stroucken, Director of Strategy and Partnerships at community platform Zapnito<\/a>, reminded attendees of the early ambitions of the internet: a limitless space for sharing knowledge. But such ambitions have been diluted by the noise of an internet dominated by social media. Curated communities, on the other hand, provide a calmer signal-to-noise ratio where people can give and receive specialist knowledge without intrusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A curated community can provide more value to specialist audiences than content alone, and audiences are willing to pay to gain access. As the community grows, a positive feedback loop gains momentum: users contribute content, the community gains value, which brings in more users and more subscriptions. Eventually, the community becomes essential to the profession itself, which Stroucken likened to the virtual equivalent of traditional academic societies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research, educational and professional publisher, \u201cSpringer Nature<\/a>, has been running expert communities with us for the last five years,\u201d said Stroucken. \u201cTheir main aim is to create a larger connection with the organisation as well as brand loyalty, all to drive subscriptions. They found that being part of the community and participating in it has increased the likelihood of resubmitting an article to Springer Nature by 60%.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To connect with its diverse, global, engaged community, Refinery29, from VICE Media Group<\/a>, goes where its audience goes, whether that\u2019s the Money Diaries group on Facebook, the Instagram-based R29 Style channel or connecting to the community of female gamers on Twitch. This has meant cultivating collaboration between departments so that the right content finds the right audience on the right platform and attracts the right brands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe feel we are on the forefront of representing the complexities of our audience and doing our best to listen to their needs and where they feel underserved, and being able to pull them into the storytelling so they feel seen and heard on our different platforms,\u201d said Tamar Riley, VP of Audience and Content Strategy at VICE Media Group. \u201cWe\u2019re choosing audience members who are not at the top of their macro-influencer game, it\u2019s very much about celebrating the real audiences that are reading our site every single day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Opening audience data will help publishers get over cookies<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

No discussion of the current media landscape is complete without the demise of the third-party cookie. Lawyer-turned-marketer, self-professed privacy nerd and CEO of ID Ward<\/a> Mattia Fosci recommended that publishers should not wait for a replacement for cookies, but should take control of their audience data and even collaborate with their competitors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf publishers just wait for a tech vendor or for agencies to solve this problem, they might or they might not. And if they do solve this problem, they might not solve it in a way that is in your favour \u2014 because the cookie wasn\u2019t,\u201d said Fosci. \u201cIt\u2019s important that the leading publishers who have the resources and understanding \u2026 are active with a strategic mindset as well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fosci sees beautiful potential in a \u201cweb of open gardens\u201d, where publishers directly share anonymised first party data with other publishers and advertisers, while cutting down on the use of intermediaries. Publishers would retain 100% of their audience data without compromising on scale, while advertisers would be provided an 100% match rate for cross-domain identification and retargeting. Moving to a web of open gardens would not simply be a matter of changing technology, it would be a broad cultural and systemic change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Data was devalued by its ubiquity, but current and upcoming privacy regulations will force publishers to do more with less. By refocusing attention on their own audiences and the insights their data reveals, publishers can create value for readers, content creators, and advertisers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Richard Reeves<\/strong>
Managing Director, AOP<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The UK Association for Online Publishing<\/a>\u00a0(AOP) is an industry body representing digital publishing companies that create original, branded, quality content. AOP champions the interests of media owners from diverse backgrounds including newspaper and magazine publishing, TV and radio broadcasting, and pure online media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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At AOP\u2019s first in-person CRUNCH event of 2022, Charlotte Tobitt, UK Editor at Press Gazette, spoke with a panel of industry experts about audiences: how to engage with them, how to turn that engagement into value, and how to prove that value to advertisers. With half of publishers now seeing opportunity in the post-cookie landscape, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":44381,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17612,871],"tags":[36230,12588,700],"yst_prominent_words":[1243,2237,3329,2163,2792,1396,1476,2807,2754,1236,13710],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53720"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53720"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=53720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}