How Vogue is growing audiences by focussing on readers’ needs

And how it contributed to making Vogue India online readership grow by 129% in one year

Illustration by Freepik

Of all international publishers, few deserve the adjective ‘global’ as much as Condé Nast, especially the Vogue brand. Since 1892, when the first issue was published in the US, the fashion magazine has launched 26 editions all over the world, without taking into account sister publications such as Teen Vogue.

Vogue has a global web audience of 56 million people and aims to double its traffic from 2017 to 2020. But how can you develop a strategy to grow audiences in so many different markets at the same time?

Sarah Marshall, head of audience growth at Condé Nast and a director of Hacks/Hackers London, told the HHLdn community how Vogue interviewed readers from ten editions to better understand the needs and tailor the content they produce to their readership.

You can read a summary of her talk below or watch the full speech from the October meetup on our YouTube channel.

For years the media industry has tried to anticipate readers’ wishes when writing an article or shooting a video. Google Trends, audience metrics and educated guesses are among the tools that journalists use to give the audience what they want, possibly with the help of some good, old SEO.

Sarah Marshall offered to the HHLdn community a different approach to this problem: instead of trying to find out what people are looking for, they asked their readers what they want from Vogue.

The audience research team at Condé Nast surveyed 3000 loyal readers of 11 Vogues (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, India, Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, and Russia) and 2000 people who don’t read Vogue but are interested in fashion. As a result, the audience research team identified six readers’ needs: “inspire me”, “educate me”, “divert me”, “update me”, “make me responsible” and “connect me”. Then, they mapped the most important needs for each market: