News publishers can reach their “missing” audiences with these 3 strategies

By Jodie Hopperton

INMA

Los Angeles, California, United States

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During Media Innovation Week in Helsinki, I gave a presentation on missing audiences. We often talk about reaching young audiences, with good reason, but it’s more than that. 

Just go back to this Webinar on the work IN/LAB in Norway is doing to reach news outsiders (not the same as news avoiders). I brainstormed this with some colleagues at INMA, and we realised we had some good resources at hand, one of which I will go deep on today.

Jodie Hopperton gives her presentation in Helsinki on finding missing audiences.
Jodie Hopperton gives her presentation in Helsinki on finding missing audiences.

To meet new audiences, we can look to Ansoff’s Market Diversification model, which we have adapted for the media industry. If you want to reach new audiences, you can effectively do one of two things: Repurpose exciting products or create new products.

Take a look at the chart below, which gives more information:

 

The second thing we can do is look at the user needs model pioneers by Smartocto. We talk about this a lot so I won’t go into detail. The one thing to note here is that we are often great at “update me” but missing that audiences often have other needs such as “inspire me” and “divert me.” See below for more:

The third thing is to look at the value drivers that bring our audience to our products. And that’s what I want to dive into in more detail here. 

In August at our CEO roundtable, we asked a group of executives to look at the main value drivers for news: Why do readers visit us? The answers were pretty much as you would expect with trust, quality, and unique journalism ranking highly. 

We asked a different group to imagine that they were TikTok executives and asked them why users came to them.

You can see the results plotted on the charts below. Note the value drivers for TikTok (which we are using as a proxy for all social media) are entirely different. At the top are the things I suspect you, assuming you are a product and/or tech person, likely look at: UX, personalisation, and (perhaps leaning more towards the newsroom) personal relevance.

Thoughts on audience behaviour from media CEOs about news brands and TikTok.
Thoughts on audience behaviour from media CEOs about news brands and TikTok.

 

Now if we map traditional news against the social media experience, you’ll note that there are huge gaps. I will take the liberty of suggesting social media is better overall at meeting user needs. Which means that we have some gaps to close — some significant gaps. 

These speak to many of the things I have mentioned above: personalisation, relevance, clear UX.

The gap from CEO responses to traditional news brands vs. social brands.
The gap from CEO responses to traditional news brands vs. social brands.

By focusing on these value drivers, it may just help us bring in audiences we are currently missing.  

One last note, which is related but something we haven’t talked about much in this initiative: creators/influencers. These people are highly successful at engaging audiences on one or more platforms. If you look at stats from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, you’ll see many consumers get their news from these creators. On some platforms and in some age groups, consumers get more of their news from them. 

Maybe it’s time we look at working together. Is there a way we can bring them into our stable, offering frameworks and financial rewards or sharing while giving them creative licence in the same way record labels manage talent?

I would have thought it feasible: Give them freedom to be creative while working behind the scenes to promote them, pair them up with the right people, and provide the right support. It’s certainly something to consider.

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About Jodie Hopperton

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