A recipe for the perfect audience development team
Hire it, outsource it, or foster it within the existing staff, but there are certain skill sets and areas of oversight that media companies must have to grow their digital footprint. This blog post aims to help you determine if you have that role on your team currently. And if you don't, why you might be sacrificing opportunities for growth and leaving money on the table.
The goal of the media company's audience development department is to understand the entire consumer experience funnel — the path customers take from brand awareness and acquisition to retention and referral — and find opportunities for optimization, growth, and monetization. Additionally, this team creates strategies and plans to attract and engage your audience regularly.
These talents are almost certainly not all held by one person. Audience development efforts run across creative, analytics, and data-heavy tasks. The idea is to build a team that can think with both their left and right brain. A team that can read and interpret data, respond to it, and develop and execute plans to affect it. If all of that sounds intimidating, let's break it down. Here are the areas of responsibility any media company needs covered, broken down by their primary function within the organization.
BRAND AND CONTENT DISCOVERABILITY
Skillset: Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is first because organic search traffic should make up at least 50% of your website traffic. The rules are constantly evolving, and it is not a side-of-the-desk skillset. Understanding and detecting opportunities or issues with search engines can require a deep set of knowledge depending on the website and monetization strategy. Do not sleep on SEO.
There are two very distinct sides of SEO: technical and content-focused. Technical SEO is just that, very technical. It entails tasks like:
Reviewing website crawl data for anomalies and errors
Maintaining website SSL certificates and ensuring they are up-to-date
Optimizing the website speed and staying attuned to the site's Core Web Vitals
It's up-to-speed on Google's requirements and algorithm priorities
Content SEO is focused completely on what search engines read and detect from the content. This determines what appears on the Search Engine Results Page (aka SERP) when a user uses a search engine like Google. Someone on your team focused on content SEO will tackle tasks like:
Creating custom page titles for topic pages, evergreen content, and anywhere the user ends up most often
Tracking page rankings and optimizing toward content with high search volume and quality results
Monitoring top website content for broken links or images
Understands Google's recommendations for content optimization
Skillset: Content Strategy
Content strategy connects your organization's editorial content with its business goals and the end user's needs. A spectacular team member can support you in thinking this through for editorial and client-sponsored content programs. This type of person will also spend their time with tasks like:
Reading reportings on content preferences and audience segments
Creating personas for articulating audience targets
Looking forward based on seasonality, cyclical performance, and planning content updates accordingly
Helping craft marketing messages through various mediums and platforms
Looking for trends in content topics or upcoming topics to build topic pages and an optimization strategy around (for example, the Super Bowl is coming to your city, and you plan to cover it, or you're covering a high-profile or sensational politician in your market.)
Skillset: Organic Social Media
What to say about organic social media these days. If you're starting from scratch, you need a well-thought-out and creative content strategy on social media to get attention. If you're an established brand, you need consistency, voice, and personality. You also need someone who can dive head-first into social analytics, stalk hashtags, seek out local conversations, and connect with conversation starters or influencers in your market. Beyond that, someone with this area of responsibility will:
Maintain a social posting schedule and plan for upcoming features and coverage
Create room and opportunity for spontaneity that connects and engages with the audience
Know what works, where (which platform), and when (time of day, week, year!).
Create videos! They don't have to be perfect or professionally done, but has to be engaging.
AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT AND MONETIZATION
Skillset: Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of your digital toolbox's most important tools. Email is your (at least for now) only direct digital connection to your consumer. You can reach them directly and at a minimal cost. But the inbox real estate has never been hotter, and email marketers should always be testing their way into the right message at the right time. As a key player in your audience development team, this area of responsibility also covers the following:
Managing an email marketing schedule for the organization
Understanding email deliverability and how to maintain a strong sending reputation
A/B testing consistently with creative, copy, and subject lines
Creating audience segments for precise message targeting and personalization
Building automation for welcome email series, re-engagement efforts, and e-commerce offers
Skillset: Database Management
Database management is the less sexy side of email marketing, but the skills genuinely go hand-in-hand. Email marketing is the yin to the database manager's yang. If these are two different people in your organization, they need to work in harmony. This area of responsibility requires getting down and dirty with data hygiene, integrations and APIs, and segmentation. This person will have responsibilities such as:
Maintaining and overseeing the database architecture and data properties to ensure all first-party data is managed, clean, and usable
Building forms and integrations to capture and house any first-party data from other platforms
Knows the database in and out and protects it like a mama bear protects its cubs
Managing preference centers, privacy policies, and marketing permissions for database contacts
Integrates your data into one source of truth
Understands how APIs work
Works to get disparate data you have on our audience into your database.
General understanding of GDPR and privacy laws
Skillset: Paid Media
Like it or not, you will inevitably have to spend money with Google and Facebook. The sooner you realize that the easier it will be. If you're spending much time in paid media, it's a lot like managing dysfunctional family dynamics. The evolving privacy changes, capabilities, and hoops to jump through to comply with the "rules" can be a full-time job between Apple, Facebook, and Google. Beyond that, it might seem easy to run digital advertising, but you must do it well to avoid wasting money. We're all mad qhen we must give money to Facebook and Google; at least be smart about it. So a paid media strategist and executor on your team will keep up with all of that and:
Run paid digital campaigns on various platforms in alignment with the overall marketing strategy
Test audiences, messages, placements, and landing pages and optimize toward conversions.
Create audience targets in-line with the overall marketing strategy
Work in tandem with the design team to test different creative frequently
Understands the nuances and pitfalls of certain choices in digital advertising
Skillset: Circulation
Suppose you are a legacy media brand with a print product. In that case, you cannot escape the need for someone with a solid traditional circulation skillset to oversee the servicing of your print product to subscribers. This includes an array of expertise likely irrelevant in all other marketing and audience development areas. Where else can I use the USPS periodical postage regulations I've memorized? Nowhere. But alas, the following elements have to get done, and they have to get done well:
Print file or external print fulfillment management and oversight
Audits to remain in compliance with USPS and independent auditors
Managing a series and schedule of renewal and retention efforts both by email and physical mail
Coordinate physical product delivery to vendors, distributors, and subscribers, with various guidelines and delivery schedules.
Manage and execute traditional marketing efforts like direct mail or subscription agents
STRATEGY AND PLANNING
Skillset: Analytics and Reporting
Everything you do, you must measure, so reporting and analytics are the backbone of your audience development efforts. But data comes from many different places, and nobody has time to stitch together excel files to understand your marketing ROI. Therefore, you must have a strategy for managing analytics and reporting data for the organization. Ideally, it is automated, and visual, and can source data from multiple sources. And once that part is complete, you still need to dig into what the data tells you. Therefore, this role on your team focuses on:
Understanding signs of loyalty, audience engagement, and disengagement in your email, website, and social media data
Broader business goals and priorities to ensure proper KPI measurement
Providing actionable insights to various members of the team based on data
Enabling reporting and tracking that allows for automated reporting and visualizations
Skillset: Growth Strategy
Finally, the person that puts it all together. That could be the CEO or a department head, but this role is responsible for the big picture, profitability, ROI, and ROAS. This person must understand enough about the areas we've covered thus far to understand the purpose, the KPIs, their place in the marketing funnel, and the overall consumer experience and can align budgets and resources accordingly. Beyond that, your general growth strategist will:
Understand the executive vision for the brand.
Know the total addressable market for the brand and any various niches within
Forecast, model, and budget based on the organizational vision
Of course, I'm talking about something other than nine different people here. Depending on the size of your organization, this might be only two or three people responsible for all of the above; or less with support from outside vendors (like us!) to fill in the gaps.
However you do it, make sure you do it. It is challenging to stand out in the current digital ecosystem, and just because you build something does not mean an audience will come. Audience development is a job that is never done and should be central to everything you do. And, thanks to our evolving digital landscape, it's a job that requires constant education and attention. If you got this far, thanks, and I hope you learned something from this post that you can use that build an even more robust audience development strategy for your organization.✌️
