Want some inspiration on evolving your content strategy to be more audience-centric and data-focused? The recent INMA Newsroom Transformation Master Class had some great insights and case studies. 

Here’s what stuck with me:

Lesson No. 1: Don’t assume your audience has deep knowledge of subjects

This theme came up several times in the master class, with Emma Löfgren, senior digital news editor at The Local and a writer for The Fix, sharing this quote: “Assume that your audience is very intelligent but not very knowledgeable.” 

Too much of our content assumes the reader already has the background and knowledge to understand the topic or event. We must make our content more accessible for our audiences — and bonus if we’re doing it in multimodal storytelling formats. 

What’s an example of what we’re talking about? 

Dmitry Shishkin, CEO of Ringier Media International in Switzerland, previously worked for the BBC and said he talked to younger people who didn’t engage with Middle East coverage because the level of entry into that coverage is very hard.

“We bombard people with news but don’t stop to explain the context,” he said. 

Lesson No. 2: Connect your content strategy to your mission and to your audience

This theme speaks to user needs, the popular concept of better understanding what people want from journalism and responding by tailoring your content to those needs.

Without user needs, Shishkin said, you will be creating the “wrong type of content for the wrong audiences at the wrong volumes.”

Before you determine topics and formats, you must understand what your audience’s needs are, Shishkin said. User needs are nothing but angles to a story, he said.

His advice: Define how the user needs model contributes to KPIs and key traffic metrics and establish expected impacts.

“It’s also really important to discuss mistakes publicly,” he said.

Lesson No. 3: Make sure you have KPIs for your content, not PIs

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of gleaning insights from data — without those actionable insights, all you have is numbers.

Josh Awtry, senior vice president/audience for Newsweek in the United States, recommended having as few metrics as possible to steer you in the right direction. Key performance metrics, not simply performance metrics.

“Too many operations democratize KPIs — and when there are 13 target numbers, there are zero target numbers,” he said.

Awtry also suggested studying the connective tissue in the data, meaning you don’t simply want to look at the performance of one piece of content independently and make decisions based on that. Look for patterns. 

“Most KPIs are lagging indicators or results,” Awtry said. “Create a series of actions that can be taken at each stage to move people to the next stage.”

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