What to expect from a role in audience development
TL:DR We are hiring | Social journalist | SEO journalist | Audience strategist
When starting an audience role, expect your family and friends to give you some puzzled looks. “What does it mean?” will be one of the most frequently asked questions. Throw a few words like “SEO”, “engagement” or “CTR” their way and you’re likely to get some more blank stares.
Some colleagues might not understand what your day-to-day looks like either. The roles of editors, reporters and sub-editors have been in place for yonks so they’re clearly defined. Meanwhile, “growth editor”, “SEO journalist” and “audience strategist” are relatively new additions and can seem rather vague.
Publishing used to be much more straightforward too — finish your pages for the day and let the distributors do the rest. The next day your reader can pick up their paper of choice from the newsagents and you start the whole process again.
Now, media companies are faced with a digital environment that’s constantly changing. New distribution platforms pop up all the time, each with their own readership. Getting your journalism seen — and most importantly read — by a global audience requires a different skillset.
This is where the audience team comes in.
The traditional view that we tell the readers what they should care about no longer rings true. With the internet, readers have the whole world at their fingertips. With that comes choice. Publishers no longer dictate the biggest stories of the day. Instead, we can see what people are interested in, both in real-time and over longer periods, and cater to their needs.
The SEO team plays an important role in communicating those needs to the rest of the newsroom, making sure we cover the most relevant topics at the most opportune moment in order to reach the right audience, as well as providing advice on how to frame stories to increase visibility. For us, this does not mean publishing clickbait articles to appear in search results, but wading through data to identify our readers’ needs. Then we choose the topics in need of expert analysis and give our subscribers and new audiences the answers they’re looking for.
We also need to be where our readers are; whether that’s on stalwarts like Facebook and Twitter, or comparatively newer platforms like Pinterest, Instagram or TikTok. By combining our knowledge of who our followers are with in-house data on what engages particular audience groups, we can make increasingly targeted decisions on who to reach and where.
As well as reaching new people, we need to be smart about how we publish. Our audience strategists spend their time figuring out how our journalism can make the biggest impact. How can we split out a package of stories to satisfy different reader groups, while avoiding fatigue and keeping engagement high? When is the right time to publish, and which platforms are best suited for getting the word out? Are we including the right elements on the page to keep readers informed? The answers to these questions can be complex, but often have data at their heart.
When we gain subscribers we need them to use our product as much as possible in order to build a habit. Our engagement team aims to achieve just that. They cover everything from curating conversation below the line to producing polls for readers to have their say. They also focus on creating content directly targeted to specific groups such as our female or under-40 audiences, giving them a reason to remain a subscriber long into the future.
We also produce a raft of newsletters to build relationships with our readers through their email inbox. They are carefully designed to reach specific groups, ranging from politics buffs and book lovers to fitness fanatics. The audience team works closely with the marketing department to reach subscribers through tailored push notifications too.
Make no mistake: a huge amount of planning and cross-team collaboration goes into making all of this happen. Apart from team-specific skills such as technical SEO know-how or selling a story on different social platforms, there are some broader traits you need to have regardless of audience discipline.
Patience, resilience and optimism are paramount to succeeding within an audience role (Netflix founder Reed Hastings famously said that he only wants to hire “irrational optimists”).
Changing the way newsrooms have worked for hundreds of years is a slow and sometimes painful process, which is why every audience team needs individuals with enthusiasm and a dogged persistence to help digital transformation happen.
