Putting readers first can be credited for the strong financial growth of Dow Jones in 2024, Sheryn Weiss, chief marketing officer for Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, told INMA members on Thursday.

“The whole organisation has rallied around putting our readers at the heart of everything that we do,” she said during the second installment of the Subscription Master Series. “And that’s obviously core in [Editor-in-Chief] Emma Tucker’s strategy in the newsroom but also in marketing and product.”

A changing media landscape demands strategic shifts, and during this week’s Webinar, INMA members learned about the multi-faceted approach Dow Jones is taking to secure growth and sustainability. Greg Piechota, lead of the INMA Readers First Initiative, asked Weiss to go into detail about what drove the 2024 growth. 

While the company benefits from having a storied brand, Weiss said, it must keep looking at the future and ensuring it “meets the needs of our readers and what they need today, not what they needed five years ago. That laser focus across the entire organisation is driving the growth.”

Retargeting audiences

One of the company’s strategic shifts has been a renewed focus on branding.

Last year, Dow Jones launched a major brand campaign to reposition the WSJ as an essential resource for more than just finance professionals. The campaign, titled “It’s Your Business,” was designed to expand the perception of the WSJ beyond Wall Street, reinforcing that business impacts every industry and every individual, whether they realise it or not.

The campaign stemmed from research showing that while WSJ was widely respected, many potential readers believed it “wasn’t for them,” Weiss said. 

The marketing team sought to challenge this notion by emphasising the breadth of WSJ’s coverage — including areas like policy, culture, and technology — and how these topics intersect with business in everyday life.

A significant component of the campaign involved contextual outdoor advertising in major U.S. cities. Billboards featured actual WSJ headlines, strategically placed in locations where they were most relevant.

For instance, an advertisement near a local deli read, “Make Schmear-Flation Your Business,” referencing an article on rising food costs. Another, near an EV charging station, implored: “Make Charger Hacking Your Business.”

These efforts aimed to drive engagement and curiosity, reinforcing WSJ’s relevance to a broader audience. And they worked.

“Not only did it break through from a sense of, ‘Oh, I didn’t realise that the Journal wrote about that topic,’ but there were QR codes at the bottom that drove you to the actual article,” Weiss explained. “So it was a really interesting way to start driving direct traffic to the site.”

Measuring impact

Dow Jones tracked direct organic traffic increases in cities where the campaign ran compared to cities where it did not.

“We saw a statistically significant uplift in Web site visits,” Weiss said. “We also saw a pretty significant uptick on willingness to subscribe.”

Even more exciting was that it gained traction with women in their 30s and 40s — a key growth audience for WSJ:

“We’re going after folks that are mid-career professionals and we have a large, I would say potential population in that kind of 30-to-40 range that perhaps are not reading us regularly and those are the folks we want to tap into.”

Marketing with the news cycle

A critical aspect of Dow Jones’ evolving growth strategy is ensuring marketing efforts align with the news cycle. Historically, there was a disconnect between the newsroom and marketing teams, making it difficult to capitalise on breaking news, Weiss said.

“Not only was the communication limited between news and marketing, but even if it did flow, marketing was not able to respond in a timely fashion to be able to take advantage of the news cycle,” she said.

For example, it could take five days to get a new creative piece designed around a breaking news story.

To address this, Dow Jones established a dedicated newsroom liaison within the marketing team, serving as the main point of contact between editorial and marketing. This role ensures marketing campaigns can be activated within hours, rather than days, allowing for real-time audience engagement.

She offered the recent example of stories that broke a few weeks ago around the tariffs with Canada.

“We were already advertising in Canada, but we were able to change up our creative to very quickly in the moment touch on those articles and bring people to those articles in the template of our brand campaign,” Weiss said. “Two years ago, by the time we were able to get that into market, the news cycle would’ve been over.”

Corporate subscriptions

Beyond individual subscriptions, Dow Jones is expanding its corporate and institutional subscription offerings, including bundling as part of more holistic strategy.

Dow Jones’ brands — including WSJ, Barron’s, MarketWatch, and Investor’s Business Daily — are part of a broader portfolio that subscribers can access, Weiss explained. But the company is also in a unique position to “engage with enterprises across the globe,” which allows it to provide products and offerings tailored to customers’ needs.

She shared the “hot-off-the-press example” of Dow Jones’s partnership with the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), which was announced on Monday. Through this collaboration, Dow Jones developed a customised news app within LSEG’s market data terminal.

“We have dedicated editorial staff on this and, for anybody who’s working on LSEG at this point, they have access to a Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones-customised solution that is updating news in the moment, very specifically curated for that LSEG user.”

Additionally, Dow Jones is working with large corporations to integrate business news and analytics into internal employee platforms. This includes potential Slack integrations, enterprise dashboards, and custom content solutions, allowing professionals to access relevant, high-value insights without leaving their daily workflow.

Building community

Dow Jones also fosters professional communities through exclusive offerings like The Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute, which provides executives with curated insights, networking opportunities, and live events tailored to their industries.

Creating these micro-communities allows WSJ to deepen its relationship with high-value readers while providing a differentiated experience that justifies continued subscriptions, Weiss said.

“We’re really proud of this offering, which we’ve just recently relaunched,” she said. “If you’re a professional, especially if you’re a professional in a leadership position, it’s often very lonely, and you’re all dealing with the same problem sets.”

The idea around the Leadership Institute, she said, is to give these core communities of leaders the information they need to make their jobs easier, less lonely, and become better-informed.

“Who do you talk to when you have a problem at work? I had a mentor tell me years ago as I was moving up in my career that the higher up you get in your career, the more you need to ask for help,” Weiss said.

“Find your folks that you can have those conversations with. Also, just engaging with peers at other organisations that do the same thing that you do helps.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .