Getting To Know You, Getting To Know All About You
Here’s how we moved towards an audience-focused content strategy.
As I mentioned in a previous post, my team produces history articles. I’ve been creating content for the IWM website for several years now, but it’s only recently that my team and I have started producing content for the different audiences that visit our website.
A few years ago, our history content programme for the website was centred around the creation of a series of 200-word articles which provided a general overview to key events in 20th and 21st-century British conflict. We called this series ‘Collections in Context’, and the articles were written in a standard ‘museum voice’ for a general visitor audience. They were meant to be written for everyone.
The trouble with ‘writing for everyone’, though, is that you’re really writing for no one. The Collections in Context series never really took off with our visitors— 200 words on the Blitz (for instance) wasn’t in-depth enough for the history enthusiasts who already knew the basics, but the background wasn’t general enough for the readers who had no knowledge of the Second World War. We needed a change.
That change happened in autumn 2013, when I decided to take a stab at identifying some distinct web audience groups and producing history content tailored to their interests and behaviours. My Head of Department and I used some audience research our Marketing department had done previously on physical museum visitors as a starting point, transferring some of those groups to digital audiences and then hypthosising about other possible web audiences we could reach.
For each audience type, I wrote out profiles for who these people were — what TV shows they watched, what books they read, where they might go online to find out more about a historical event—and in the end we settled on five main audiences that we wanted to reach:
- Historyphobes: don’t identify themselves as interested in ‘history’; little to no knowledge of historical events
- Self-Developers: want a basic understanding of a topic — dates, key players, etc; some historical knowledge
- Empathisers: engage with history content at an emotional level — personal stories, surprising facts; some historical knowledge
- Enthusiasts: passionate about history and are interested in more detailed narratives; strong historical knowledge
- Experts: want in-depth, detailed articles about historical events; very strong historical knowledge — tend to be researchers, academics or amateur historians.
Audiences decided, we then set about fleshing out the type of content we could produce for each audience — for instance, photo ‘listicles’ for Historyphobes, first-hand audio testimony for Empathisers and 1,000+-word ‘long-reads’ for Experts.
And thus, our audience-focused content strategy was born.
Flash-forward to autumn 2015, and my team has produced over 250 articles across our five audience types. Through user testing and analytics, we’ve learnt loads about how users are consuming our history content, and our strategy continues to adapt and evolve. For instance, we’ve starting paying particular attention to the language we use for specific audience groups, making sure certain terms and events are defined/contextualised for Self-Developers and Empathisers, whereas we assume Enthusiasts and Experts already know that contextual background.
We’ve also started to see that different audiences identify with specific IWM social media channels, and that this is starting to shape our social media content plan. For instance, our Facebook audience is primiarly made up of Enthusiasts and Experts, so the bulk of the content we promote via that channel should be tailored to them.
We still have a lot to learn about our audiences, and there’s always more user research we could be doing. Now that we’re almost two years into this process, we next want to do a review of our audience types, making them more defined and perhaps even identifying one or two more that have come on the scene since we started producing this content.
But, the basic groundwork has been done and we are seeing positive results in our analytics. It’s hard work, but for content to succeed online, you must think about your (likely, several) audiences and produce material tailored for them.
Want to talk more about audiences? Tweet me @jesse_a or shoot me an email — jalter@iwm.org.uk.
