Hitting audience goals in 2024
The signs are increasingly clear that the pipelines for free organic audience growth are going to keep contracting over the next year. That means news organizations need to be savvier about capturing the audience that is out there looking for their reporting and smarter about finding the audience that would love certain reporting if they only knew about it.
More news organizations looking to grow their audience online are hunting for those rare spaces where people gather specifically for news.
INN’s audience team looked across the INN Network to see what common strategies members were employing as the pressure mounts to get an organization’s audience strategy right from the jump.
Understand who comes to your stories and why
Lauren Gustus, executive editor at the Salt Lake Tribune, led a standing room-only session at INN Days in June about how their audience strategy often starts with thinking about who their work is for. Gustus said story meetings always include a section asking “Who is this for?”
Not everything your organization does works for everyone, and news organizations are being more intentional about thinking about the constituencies they serve and what supports those relationships. Finding those constituencies often starts with a survey like INN’s audience survey template. In 2024, more news organizations in the INN Network are banding together through programs like the audience survey bootcamp to understand more deeply why people come to their news stories.
Be active where people are engaging with news
INN members like The 74 and The Texas Tribune were early to develop and share strategies for building an audience online beyond social media and search. Both have thought hard about how to build audiences on Apple News and other platforms and where there are strategies to shift readers there onto their own products.
There are fewer spaces online where people go because of an interest in the news. Traffic from platforms like Microsoft Start, Apple News and SmartNews has held steady while others have declined. More news organizations are looking for spaces online where they can be confident they are reaching an audience that is there primarily for news.
INN has long recognized the value of these spaces and has preferred partnership arrangements for members with many of these platforms so members can get the most from these options.
Be quick to build relationships
Bill Emkow, growth strategy director at Bridge Michigan, shared with other INN members at ONA in 2023 the importance of being upfront with their audience through pop-ups and other notifications about their desire to build a long-term relationship through newsletters or other products.
Bridge uses tools like OptinMonster that allow news organizations to ratchet up the ask for people visiting for the third time in a week or who have read their third story in a sitting. Unlike advertising where the messaging is changing all the time, it’s a portion of the audience acquisition strategy that can be set to chug along in the background.
Make a plan for reaching the people not looking for you
The signs are clearer every day that it’s going to take investment to build an audience going forward. Get to work experimenting and finding what works for your organization.
At a July webinar on paid audience acquisition, Pete Havens director of revenue and business management for Jacksonville Today, shared what worked for an organization with a small marketing budget and limited staff time. Jacksonville Today geared up their lead-gen campaigns on Facebook, A/B testing different messaging and bolstering effective campaigns with additional resources.
Smart organizations are on the hunt for ad credit programs they can use to experiment to find what’s a winning bet to get readers. It then frees an organization to spend its own money on the tactics that are most effective.
Get your data in order
Ariel Zych, director of audience for Science Friday, shared at INN Days the reality for many news organizations now — data about their audience is more diffuse and it takes more cleverness to get real insights. Science Friday went deep into their own data to find the crucial touchpoints for audiences that donated, showed up at events or helped them forward their mission of science education.
For organizations like Science Friday that are working towards getting that better view across the organization’s touchpoints, it often shows that metrics like pageviews aren’t telling the full story. Deeper insights like average readers who take the weekly news quiz are demonstrating deeper knowledge about specific topics or decision makers connect with the organization in very different ways than donors.
In 2024, growth will be harder to come by and it will be harder to justify spending resources on growth just for growth’s sake. INN members are doing more to figure out not only how to grow their audience in 2024, but how to build an audience that allows their organization to do more much farther into the future.
