Reaching a younger audience requires a completely different strategy from new companies, which is why Pulse Africa has retooled the way it engages with these readers.

During the INMA Africa Newsroom Transformation Summit, Kanyinsola Aroyewun, director of media and content growth, explained that Pulse has a presence in Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire. With a mission to keep audiences informed 24/7, Aroyewun said it requires understanding the digital behaviour of younger audiences and approaching them with creativity backed by credibility.

“We want to be the most credible news and entertainment platform,” she explained. “Credibility is key for us.”

With a digital footprint of about 50 million users, Pulse has positioned itself as the go-to platform for delivering content that resonates with a youthful, dynamic demographic. 

Formula for success  

At the heart of this success is the Pulse Formula, a carefully crafted approach that ensures the brand remains relevant, engaging, and impactful. It understands who its users are and what drives their behaviour. It knows the kinds of stories they want and which platforms they are found on.

“They’re young, digital-first, and mobile-driven,” she said, adding they are highly engaged on social media platforms. They consume content on the go, tend to have a short attention span, and are highly connected to their mobile phones.

Knowing how they approach content, Pulse Africa pairs “the right content with the right format and the right platforms,” Aroyewun said. “We go beyond just creating content. We’re very careful about crafting narratives and creating experiences that reflect the vibrant spirit of the African youth.”

By putting itself on the same level with its audience, Pulse Africa is delivering content across topics on multiple formats and creating a community along the way.

“One of the things they’re looking for is a sense of community,” she explained. “So in the content we’re creating, we want it to be authentic and engaging. We want them to be able to share the content with their friends, their families.

“Basically, we want to meet young Africans where they are and help them amplify their voices.”

5 steps to engaging younger audiences 

To systematically implement the Pulse Formula, the company follows a five-step process that ensures maximum impact.

“We start off with ideation and research,” she said. “So for topics that are trending, there are quite a number of platforms to use. So we start off with tracking the trends, looking at our audience interests.”

One way to identify audience interest is by reading the comments sections: “You’ll be surprised at how much information you can get,” Aroyewun said.

Once an idea is chosen, the scripting begins.

“We start outlining the key points. We’re looking at the structure of the article [and] what angle are we coming from — especially if it’s a trending topic or breaking news that everyone has already reported. We definitely would not want to report the same news that somebody else would have already seen from one of our competitors.”

That’s followed by production, which prioritises high-quality visuals, and editing and elements, which is “where the magic happens.” That’s where things like text overlays, trending sounds, and optimisation for mobile viewing ensure the content stands out and connects with the audience.

The final step, publishing and distribution, is both an art and a science. How the content is distributed and what platforms it is on requires careful thought, as content is not distributed the same way on all platforms.

“We have channel-specific strategies,” Aroyewun explained, adding the strategy for TikTok is different from the strategy on Instagram, which is also different from Facebook.

“We’ve grown to understand, one, what the platform requires, and then two, what the audience are also looking for,” she said. “Combining that … helps us to create channel specific strategies.”

This avoids users seeing the same content on different platforms: “We want them to be able to experience various formats on these different platforms while still maintaining our brand voice and our brand value.”

Understanding user needs

To take it a step further, Pulse Africa implemented a user needs framework that has helped it better refine its strategy, helping staff see that “we needed to continue to create tailored content, but we also needed to improve on what we were already doing,” Aroyewun said.

“Adopting the user needs model of refining our strategy helped us to boost engagement and also helps us with a lot of structure when it comes to content creation, article writing direction — it made it a lot easier.”

Pulse’s coverage of lifestyle, entertainment, news, and business are broad categories, so Aroyewun said the process starts by choosing a type of article (i.e., Educate Me) in a certain category (i.e., lifestyle). Then it begins gathering ideas — with some help.

“We use AI to generate some of these ideas,” she said. “It makes the process a bit faster, and then we obviously have human inputs and then they’re able to tweak. We never just copy and paste, but it helps us with idea generation as well.”

Analytics show strong audience engagement, particularly in the “Help Me” and “Educate Me” categories, so Aroyewun said the company focused on developing more content for these categories. Upon implementing user needs, Pulse saw a 66.49% increase in traffic to its lifestyle section.

On social media, Pulse created a video that overlaid on a trending video and included a clear call-to-action for the audience to share their thoughts on it. It received more than 90,000 likes, 7,000 comments, and 3,000 saves, Aroyewun said.

“And the most important one was 30,000 shares, which is one of the highest shares that we’ve seen. That means more people get to see our content, they get to see our platform, they get to see the page, they get to see all the other contents that we’re creating.”

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