In 2018, realizing the value our readers have in helping us create a valued and relevant news product, we began focusing more on engagement practices. That year, we launched our membership program, and I created a cross-departmental engagement team that has evolved into what is now a full-blown audience team.
This is when I started to think about the funnel.
I have fully aligned our team’s objectives and workflows to the funnel — from bringing people to our site to engaging with them, giving them reasons to come back, providing value and converting them to paying members and, finally, getting them to stay supporters of our newsroom.
We have also identified existing and desired audience segments as they fall into the funnel framework.
Each quarter, the team comes up with different key results to help achieve their objective and, as a team, we work to engage with a different audience.
What I quickly realized was — in order for this to work — it can’t happen in a silo or vacuum.
It’s essential to embed these practices into the organization and give everyone the tools they need to engage directly with our readers.
We look at the audience team as a sort of engagement engine for our newsroom, but the tools are there for everyone to use to be more audience- and product-focused.
A lot of this is still in the works. It doesn’t happen overnight, but we’re already seeing some great growth as a result of our constant testing and intentional funnel-focused practices.
** Slides from Optimizing the audience funnel: teamwork and workflows for the user journey, presented October 2022 at the Independent News Sustainability Summit in Austin.