NEWS
Audience development tips for small businesses in Sydney
As technology and Internet have taken up more and more time in people’s life, marketers started advertising digitally. New York Times published a 96-page report on online content publishing and marketing early this year and here are 5 learning points to take away in terms of audience development.
1. Home page isn’t everything
Out of all the New York Times readers, only one third of them visit their home page. Last year, the duration in terms of page views and minutes spent by per reader who actually visits their homepage did not only decrease by a single-digit percentage, but double-digit percentage. What is the “remedy” to drive traffic to your home page? It is to motivate content sharing on social media. Sharing is the way to go.
2. If you want audience, you need to find them
In the report, it specifically mentioned that majority of the journalists in the Times have a mindset of that their work will do the speaking for them and they don’t have to promote their work. However, in this competitive world, it is not going to work that way. To be “visible” online from all the clutter, you not only need to promote but promote assertively. You should recommend your work in order to reach more readers and make content promotion part of your daily work task.
3. Communicate directly with emails
Almost everyone can post or upload any content in today’s society, and businesses as well as marketers have to find a way to reach their audiences directly. In the report, email marketing is mentioned to be the most efficient way to cut through the clutter and businesses should put more emphasis on it.
4. “If I need to see something, it will come to me” audience behavior
Audiences are no longer as “proactive” in searching for news and browsing, they expect information to come to them instead. Buzzfeed was able to notice this trend fast and they are achieving 60% of their traffic from social media. While the Times, on the other hand, is only has 10%. Therefore, businesses and marketers should utilize the power of social media and send relevant mobile notifications to their customers. For example, journalists at ProPublica have to submit at least five tweets with each article to promote their content.
5. Promotion tactics
Promotion of your content can be done before and after publication. Use search engines such as Google and Yahoo to boost the article or if you have the connections, find influential users to help spread through social media. Not only to individual users, reach out the organizations that might be interested in your content.
