Transforming Editorial and Content Strategy using an Audience user needs data approach
Award winning entry for the 2023 INMA Awards under the category: (National) Best Internal Data Dashboard and Reports
With audiences actively avoiding news and news in general on the decline, how do we as a news provider stay relevant? We undertook a content audit, audience interviews and looked at performance data to determine why the audience was coming to SBS, what we were producing versus how it was performing. Using these results, we transformed our editorial and content strategy and within 5 short months are seeing the results. Overall, we are producing less, yet yielding higher page views. The same approach was applied to video and features, yielding record breaking performance.
Campaign Objectives
Using design thinking, coupled with user needs, we sought to determine
How can we better attract audience on various platforms and increase content performance
What content do we produce broken down by user needs and how it resonates with the audience
We adapted a publicly available user needs model as it applies to news, namely: Update Me, Keep Me On Trend, Inspire Me, Divert Me, Educate Me and Give Me Perspective
Why and what the audience is coming to on SBS by supplementing the performance data with qualitative interviews, and similarly understand what non-audience members needed in order to consume our content, bearing in mind our responsibilities as a public broadcaster
How could our content better perform on social platforms, considering that social platforms are a significant referrer of traffic to site.
How could we be producing better video content. Recognising that 3rd parties prioritise video consumption to keep users on their platforms longer, and that in order to attract new audience to our native platforms, required thinking beyond a text first approach, which also had implications for how video was produced.
By achieving this we expected to
Increase our corporate Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), namely page views on site, app and 3rd party platforms
Increase our video watchtime on 3rd party platforms. Watchtime is a more accurate metric for video consumption than views as it is the actual indication of time consumed versus views which can reflect a second, a repeated moment, or watching the entirety of a clip and thus a less reliable metric.
Increase new and overall audience
Campaign results
Consistent with Reuters Digital News report findings, our audiences are moving away from straight up news updates (Update me) towards ‘Educate Me’ and all other user needs. Thus, we decided to limit our daily ‘Update Me’ content to 60% of overall output.
We balanced the remainder (40%) through the five other user needs. This approach yielded an 24% reduction in articles published with a concurrent 11% increase in page views. This also allowed the team to refocus time and energy - shifting from a breathless news pace to a more considered approach, by doing so allowing the team to be more nimble and responsive to breaking news.
We reduced our Features content by half, resulting in a 404% increase in page views within four months of the new strategy. The trend maintained through December, historically a ‘slow’ news month with a 214% increase against base figures.
Similarly, our video team achieved their highest Facebook watchtime result in at least the past two years, and added a 170% increase of referral traffic to site - demonstrating our reach to new audiences. We’ve also seen our highest referral of traffic from Twitter, shifting from on average 4% to 11% An unexpected result was a month on month increase in excess of 300% referral traffic from Instagram - considering Instagram users and overall experience tend to remain in-app.
The residual effect of this selectivity, as mentioned, allowed the team to be nimble to breaking news, the most recent example of SBS being one of the first media outlets to cover (former) New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s resignation. At writing, this Twitter video alone had accrued over 1.3 million watchtime minutes, reflecting 414% above our total monthly average watchtime.