The Second Audiencers' Festival in Paris, this November 21st, 2024, brought together the crème de la crème of French media digital marketing directors (and not only).
From identifying user needs and adapting formats, to finding the right price and retention, digital publishing professionals shared their tips on audience acquisition and monetization. To share these wider than the Festival attendees, I've summed them up in 10 commandments! Enjoy!
1. Know your audience
Les Echos, represented by Violaine Degas, created no fewer than 12 personas from their reader surveys on both B2C and B2B audiences.
The very precise personas detail centers of interest, as well as preferred information channels and timeframes.
This allows them to better target sales offers and marketing messages to each reader. For instance, why line up all 50 subscriber benefits on the offers page when only three are relevant to that specific user? Listing them all could even be a deterrent…
As for the newsroom, four or five personas can be used to identify reader needs and priorities to target each article, ensuring all published work has a clear goal.
Les Echos went even further, creating its own panel of 4,000 subscribers (60%) and prospects (40%) via the Alida platform. Young people and women are under-represented, but the group is working on it!
This allows them to regularly send panelists short quizzes, studies or videos, or even to spend a quarter of an hour chatting with them, to better identify reader needs and adapt editorial products (formats, distribution channels, publication timing).
2. Define and measure (your own type of) engagement
Dorothée Fluckiger from Prisma added to “recurrence of visits per month” the “average duration of sessions”.
Romain Lhote of L'Equipe weights this RFV index by the journalistic value of an article or topic. This makes it possible to include value of being associated with a subject (as a brand) or societal value – for instance, few read this article on defending Madagascan women's cause, but we're happy to associate ourselves morally with those who defend it. This is to mitigate the outright deletion of ghost articles.
L'Equipe also tempers the index by measuring article's advertising yield. If advertisers are keen on a subject of little interest, there's no reason not to do it. These revenues will finance other, more popular subjects.
As for Les Echos, they've set up a system for evaluating “quality reads”. This technical device measures how far a user scrolls, and how long they spend on a page. The result is an average efficiency index that enables the team to assess the quality of the attention that an article holds.
This index is combined with quantitative audience performance (number of page views), to determine hot or cold editorial optimization axes.
Hot editorial optimization axes:
These indicators make it possible to adapt production in real time (change the title, caption, add recirculation links, highlight the article on the homepage or social networks, etc.).
Cold editorial optimization axes:
Identify trends in terms of formats or needs served to readers.
3. Don't talk down to readers, especially GenZ
That's the advice from Lisbeth Nizet of MediaHuis. The new generation, our future readers and subscribers, want to be involved in the discussion.
These 12-25 year-olds like content that is embodied, accessible and fun. They like to give their opinion, contradict, protest.
“Don't talk down to me, but make me smarter” and respect the content creators for whom I have affection.
Other recommendations:
- Don't sugarcoat information, but offer solutions (constructive journalism)
- Be sincere, even in your faults and mistakes
- Provide practical services
- Take inspiration from media brands such as Brut, TLDR, Volv & Zetland
4. Build a strong community
After preaching in the wilderness for a long time, it seems that some media outlets are finally proving me right. That community is the prerequisite for a subscription (or any digital revenue) strategy, as I've been saying for a long time.
Médiapart took a considerable lead by launching its own community 15 years ago, and maintaining it. This is in contrast to free media sites, which have gradually shut their comments and interactive spaces down from 2016 onwards.
The advent of the paid model in 2017 should have led to their transformation, not their disappearance. Community building features such as these are a formidable acquisition and loyalty driver.
L'Equipe has understood this, deciding to revitalize its comments with a makeover (below). Better still, the sports site's interactive spaces enable exchanges between subscribers, as well as with the editorial team. It's an attention to detail that readers appreciate.
The same goes for Les Echos, which has redesigned its contributors' area. They've realized that enhancing the value of readers is also a powerful factor in building loyalty, and even acquisition.
5. Establish value exchanges: content for data
Access to quizzes, personality tests, newsletters, white papers, podcasts… you need to offer something valuable to a user in exchange for data collection.
Some marketing tools, such as Actito, offer this kind of editorial functionality to attract registrations (and therefore user data).
6. Test pricing models to optimize ARPU
Le Monde has abandoned its old prices, which were holding the publisher back not only acquisition, but above all on revenue growth.
The old price range:
To reinvent their pricing model, Lou Grasser worked with Le Monde's data-scientists to set up a predictive model based on subscription and churn (attrition) data from its entire base.
The new tariffs had to avoid cannibalizing each other. We remember the New York Times' $8 offer for the Now application, which attracted subscribers who paid much more.
The group analyzed everything: the impact of pricing on subscriber churn, on new subscriber acquisition, on revenue… The results was three tariffs – €9.99 (web), €19.99 (2 accounts) and €29.99 euros (4 accounts) were found to be the most profitable.
What Le Monde has learned from its tests and analysis via predictive models:
- Annual price promotions aren't that smart, because they'll cannibalize fans, without reaching opportunists.
- It's better to offer a monthly discount (with a one-month promotion per year, not two).
- The 5-euro offer (-50%) is not profitable, because while it works well for acquisition, better than the 10-euro offer, it doesn't generate enough subscriptions to compensate for the smaller gain.
- The student offer was not sufficiently promoted, even though it was clicked on 7 times more than the other offers.
Other learnings
- It's important to take care of the offers page to “show more than tell”. Hence the use of a carousel displaying the best-selling content.
- It's also important to diversify prices and payment methods internationally (especially in Africa).
7. Ensure you're effectively monetizing your existing audience before looking to acquire new audiences
Prisma has no shortage of user data. The group has 18 million accounts logged-in via its in-house SSO (Prisma Media Connect), and a third are subscribed to one or more newsletters.
Google one tap on Chrome is the group's primary vector for subscriptions. The trick: Prisma re-targets these users to invite them to sign up for a newsletter (and retrieve an “in-house” login).
But not everyone can be converted into a subscriber. If Prisma converts 0.5 to 1% of its audience via paywalls, it will be a great success says Dorothée Fluckiger.
There are therefore 3 objectives for this data:
- Attract the right reader to the right CRM channel: conversion to subscriber, enhancement through advertising, e-commerce affiliation…
- Increase advertising yield by targeting users who are logged in (+34% average RPM if logged in, according to Prisma calculations)
- Save on paid acquisition campaigns
8. Organize your team according to goals
It needs to be light, via squads (small multi-trade teams with a product manager, a developer, a sales person and an editor, for example), aligned on the same objectives, with the same incentives. And who get on well together!
At Ebra, Morgane Alimi explains that there is a central coordinator who supports the teams, and then a dozen ambassadors in each division.
At Prisma, “lead sponsors” pilot the projects and tests with the various departments (marketing, data-analysts, Ux design, Dev, CRM…).
At Les Echos (inspired by the Wall Street Journal), the organization is matrix-based and cross-functional by business rather than by media brand:
- Platform division (HP sites, app' ) – topic control
- Audience Engagement (distribution, search, RS), editing
- Visual department (photo and video editing)
The same applies at Prisma, where the matrix organization is also based on squads, to ensure agility and proximity to the field.
Dorothée Fluckiger's trick for conducting her tests with peace of mind is to be under the radar in terms of costs, and to highlight the savings achieved. By trying to encourage decision-makers to invest more heavily in digital marketing.
9. Subscription cancellations need to be dealt with, and quick
The first few days of cancellation are the most important, so don't delay!
Romain Lhote tells us that 70% of resubscriptions are made within 7 days of cancellation.
Whilst ex-subscribers are 18 times more likely to re-subscribe than members, and 324 times more likely than anonymous readers!
Hence the crucial role of Customer Service, who must be given the facts: not only the history of each user, but also a maintenance guide. So as not to immediately offer a discount, before knowing what the problem is.
- Is the problem editorial? Is there content or newsletters they don't know about, or is it possible to offer them special promotions?
- Is it the timing of distribution? Focus on configurable alerts, the free app, etc.
10. A different audience often requires a different media and branding entirely
Such is the case with Retronews, which has created a second portal to distinguish the general public from its B2B customers.
It's a valuable lesson for other media. “What's the probability,” asked a member of the audience, ”that a young reader who subscribes to the newspaper's social account, where we broadcast fun short videos, will subscribe to the paper newspaper?” Zero or close to it.
The reality is that the information model proposed for Generation Z or even Millenialls (the generation after) is not adapted to their preferences, neither in content nor in form. We're going to have to reinvent ourselves more radically if we want to attract new readers.
But in the meantime, we have to produce something that – with a few exceptions – supports most press groups. According to APIG CEO Pierre Pétillaut, paper will still account for 80% of average press revenues in 2023.
11. BONUS TRACK. Test and measure progress (derr!)
Whether it's acquisition or retention, success, as in Fame, can only be paid for in one currency: sweat.
You have to test everything: creative direction, visuals, prices, benefits, distribution channels and timing.
For L'Equipe, this represents over 300 subscription promotion messages per year. You know what you have to do. ^^ Test test test.
