Audience Development Strategy

Grow your target audience, improve reader loyalty, and gain valuable insights into the audience’s needs, preferences, and behavior.

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Audience Strategy Audit

Audience development is a pillar on which publishers ensure relevance, credibility, and loyalty in a competitive landscape. By understanding your new and existing audiences, you can tailor content, drive traffic, adapt to trends, maximize revenue opportunities, and design tailored marketing campaigns.

A strategically-designed audience development plan fosters deeper connections and positions your publishing business for long-term success.

How We’ll Support You

We will audit your audience strategy to check the alignment between the target audience and actual readership, the reader journey and bottlenecks, how the existing audience consumes content and what they prioritize in their engagement with your digital publication. This will give you and your marketing team a clear understanding of gaps, strengths, and opportunities.

Audience Strategy Development

Is there a disconnect between your target audience and the traffic your publication drives? Are your marketing teams struggling to convert visitors into loyal readers and email subscribers? These are just a couple of symptoms of your current strategy not delivering the intended outcomes. Audience development is the foundation for every function – monetization, content strategy, search engine optimization, sales, etc. – so having a skillfully designed audience development strategy is detrimental to the business’s success.

How We’ll Support You

Upon auditing your traffic, understanding your business and marketing priorities and audience profile, and assessing your platform, channels, and tech, we will design an audience growth strategy that perfectly aligns with your short-term and long-term business goals. This will include a roadmap, actionable recommendations, and an action plan for other business units in your organization to ensure business-wide alignment.

Some of the Digital Media and Publishing Clients
We’ve Helped

Our methods have helped dozens of publishers worldwide exponentially grow their audience.

Successful Audience Development Starts Here:
Our Process

Comprehensive Audit

Our team conducts a comprehensive review and analysis of various aspects of marketing strategy related to digital audience engagement, acquisition, and retention strategies. This includes audience demographics, audience behavior, audience segments, content and content marketing analysis, and distribution channels.

Business Analysis

Once we independently gather all the relevant information on your digital audiences and content, we conduct in-depth interviews with relevant stakeholders. The goal is to understand business priorities, audience growth targets, roadblocks, marketing capabilities, and monetization targets. Additionally, we gather qualitative insights on existing customers and potential audiences.

Audience Development Plan

Based on the audience research, the audit, and stakeholder interviews, we present our expert analysis of gaps in the existing strategy, audience development and monetization opportunities, and improvement scenarios.
We include a roadmap for the implementation of the recommended changes.

Capabilities Building

Should the audit reveal capabilities gaps, we will set up a series of training sessions to help you upskill your staff and strengthen your internal capabilities. This will ensure a smooth execution of the roadmap with minimal disruptions and downtimes. It will also enable your marketing and editorial teams to design and update audience development strategies independently in the future.

Why Our Audience Development Strategy Services Deliver Tangible Results

Audience development is a multi-layered, highly connected function that incorporates content strategy, brand partnerships, audience engagement via social media platforms, newsletters, etc. As such, it is detrimental that this foundational function operates based on strategically designed, data-driven strategies.

Our audience development methodology consists of the processes and systems we’ve developed over the years, allowing us to deliver measurable short-term improvements and significant long-term wins.

Each team member has a dedicated area of expertise: Martech optimization, Google News SEO, editorial and content strategy development/execution, information architecture & technical SEO, brand loyalty and digital audience audit, and more. This enables us to execute precise interventions, from tackling organization-wide challenges to diagnosing and remedying insular problem areas.

See how we’ve helped We Are Explorers increase organic traffic by 4x.

We Are Explorers case study on audience development

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the meaning of digital audience development?

Digital audience development is a discipline and set of activities for identifying, attracting, and engaging the ideal audience for your digital publication.

Unlike marketing, which focuses primarily on driving sales results for particular products, audience development is about understanding your brand’s direct connection with your readers:

• how your audience engages with your content,
• what their expectations are, and
• how to optimize their journey to establish deeper relationships.

As such, audience development far exceeds the traditional parameters of marketing.

What is an audience development strategy?

An audience development strategy is a plan of action designed to attract, engage, and retain a digital publication’s target audience. The goal is to improve the experience of existing audience members and attract and convert new readers.

High-performing audience strategies are typically developed with marketing, data, and product teams, with input often sourced from newsrooms and editorial operations leads.

What are the metrics used to measure audience development efforts?

As with any business function, audience development offers various metrics that help understand the impact of various campaigns, tactics, and strategies. Many of these metrics overlap with the standard marketing metrics used by most publishers, e.g.:

• Organic vs paid media traffic growth
• New and returning visitor sessions
• Engagement rate
• Circulation rate
• Brand loyalty
• Social media referrals

However, these are table stakes, and standard marketing metrics should not limit audience development as they often fail to reveal the nuances of the audience’s experience: why certain pieces are considered valuable content, what engaged readers appreciate the most about their user journey, what elements of the brand identity resonate with audience members, etc.

Therefore, metrics should be individually selected for each facet of audience development. For example, analyzing a reader’s subsequent visits helps develop an audience segment, which, in turn, can inform a personalization content marketing strategy. Demographic data can help analyze engagement levels and develop more effective email campaigns for potential customers. The audience’s interaction with various content formats – e.g., evergreen content, seasonal content, and pieces on trending topics – combined with post-click data can help inform your publication’s editorial calendar and editorial strategy.

What is the difference between an engaged audience and a loyal audience?

Engaged audience members are readers who display interest in your offering: they browse multiple pieces of content in a single session, fairly consistently open your emails, etc.

The ability to effectively engage your audience is a stepping stone to building a loyal readership. Here, we are talking about readers who treat your publication as a go-to source for your brand’s primary focus. This behavior is displayed through regularly sharing your content on social media, consistently opening your newsletter and clicking on links and CTAs, leaving comments, renewing their subscription, and so on.

Which should I prioritize: new audiences or my current audience?

We believe that sustainability should be the core value of any major strategy. As such, audience growth tactics will always deliver poor mid- and long-term ROI if there are gaps and bottlenecks in the audience retention strategy.

Therefore, we recommend that you focus on your current audience first. Analyze the behavior of your first-time readers, loyal audience members, engaged readers, and new customers.
Only when you can extract valuable insights from data on your current audience will you have the tools needed to design a high-impact audience growth strategy.

Is an audience strategy the same as a customer strategy?

No. An audience strategy incorporates a customer strategy but is not limited to it. Generally speaking, audience development incorporates three main areas: your current audience, customers, and target audience.

Audience Development Matters! Request Your Free Strategy Audit

Contact us to schedule your meeting and to receive your FREE audience strategy audit. No obligations – just a detailed, expert assessment.

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Audience Development Strategy

Audience Strategy Audit

Audience Strategy Development

Some of the Digital Media and Publishing Clients
We’ve Helped