F.A.Z. targets 25- to 35-year-olds with awareness campaign

By Donika Lilova

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH/FAZ+

Frankfurt, Hessen, Germany

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By Daniela Parr

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH/FAZ+

Frankfurt, Hessen, Germany

Connect      

We launched the campaign to acquire young subscribers because we need more awareness as a relevant news brand among the 25- to 35-year-old audience.

Our hypothesis is that once this target group gets acquainted with our Web site product and content and builds a habit around news consumption as text, audio, or video content, they will remain faithful users throughout their business and private lives.

According to a study we carried out, in the target group of 25- to 35-year-olds, only four out of 10 have heard of us. These young people usually have short timespans to stay informed, which is why there is a greater need for snackable content.

They mostly consume news media on the go: while they are commuting to work or occasionally during their daily breaks and in the evening. The question we,  along with many other publishers, were asking ourselves was how to boost our relevance within this interesting target group without changing our core DNA.

Our mission is to be the medium that illuminates different opinions in a well-founded and unbiased way and thus helps young people to find their own position. We found this claim so universal that we decided to build our marketing activities around it.

Creating the digital campaign

The idea of pluralism, which is at the centre of our very existence as a newspaper, was the basis for the broad-based, multi-channel digital campaign we created.

We present two opposing opinions on a current topic and ask: What do you think? Thus, we encourage young people to form their own unbiased opinions.

The campaign presented two opposing opinions on a current topic and asked young readers what they thought.
The campaign presented two opposing opinions on a current topic and asked young readers what they thought.

We used real-time marketing to tailor the ads to the editorial environment and pick up on the article’s topic. We used topics that were trending among our younger readership: environmental issues, political trends, the war in Ukraine, etc.

We also provided an attractive offer for the younger audience with a discount of 50%. With that, we decided it is more clever to become a small part of somebody’s share of wallet when it comes to consumption of movies, music, media, and news rather than not to be part of it at all.   

How it went

After carrying out our marketing activities, we evaluated the campaign according to the key performance indicators measured. We measured the campaign not only in terms of subscription numbers but also in terms of awareness and reach.

It was vital for us to gain more impressions at the top of the funnel so we could convert more users to a subscription. In the end, it really worked out for us.

We gained many more impressions than initially planned with exposure across paid channels and social media, placement in our owned channels, and on our news Web site, increasing awareness by 263%. We knew that our target group consumes media content mainly on mobile devices. That’s why we concentrated our activities on the mobile Web and increased the mobile conversion rate by 391%.

Real-time marketing allows for ads that are precisely tailored to the editorial environment and pick up on the topic of the article.
Real-time marketing allows for ads that are precisely tailored to the editorial environment and pick up on the topic of the article.

Although many users consume us as snackable content, there are also users checking on news throughout their work routines. That’s why we decided from the very beginning to make relevant placements within the stationary context of our Web site and across other channels.

It surely paid off for us: We increased our stationary conversion rate by 198%.

We decided not only to measure performance indicators but also to ask our readers again in a quantitative study what our brand awareness among the target group was after the campaign.

We were astonished by the results: Seven out of 10 young readers were aware of us after the campaign. Our goal is also to carry out campaigns like this on a regular basis.

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