Publisher Audience Development: Using Analytics To Drive Engagement
Publishers often strive to create meaningful content, grow their audience, and increase trust/brand awareness, but the ones who succeed are those that develop their audience and use analytics to drive continued engagement.
In this blog post, you’ll learn what audience development is and how to use publisher analytics to ensure you’re driving the right audience to your content and brand.
What is publisher audience development?
Audience development is a content strategy that helps publishers learn about their ideal audience and enables them to create content that builds a relationship with their readers, increases brand awareness and trust, and provides important insights to continue to grow their target audience.
Understanding Your Target Audience
At its core, developing your audience strategy is about both understanding and relating to your readers. To do this, you need to determine your ideal audience and learn who they are, what they need, and how you can help them, then create personalized content that your audience connects with.
The first step is to identify the audience segment you’d like to engage, then research and analyze demographic metrics that will determine your audience development strategy, such as:
- Age, gender, and geographical location.
- Values, interests, pain points, and opinions.
- How and where the audience consumes content and communicates.
Publishers gather this information by tracking content and marketing analytics. Content tools like Google Analytics and SEO analysis platforms often offer insights and metrics so you can learn what type of content is resonating the most with your audience. Uncovering deep insights can be done in a number of ways, but through the use of first-party consented reader data, Invisibly can shed light on what information attracts and retains your audience.
High-volume and even related keywords in Google will indicate what your audience is searching for, and metrics like views, reactions, impressions, and click-through rates (also known as CTR), can reveal whether an audience is interested and engaged in your content from the get-go.
Publishing channels like Invisibly provide this first-party data within their platforms, too, so you can easily access the information you need within the publishing tools you’re using.
Once you gather this information, compare it to who your ideal audience is and determine whether there are additional audiences or further segmentation to consider. Take note of any identifying factors, such as differing age ranges, locations, time of content consumption, and general personalities of the readers that you’re trying to engage. Then, begin creating content catered toward your audience.
Remember: personalization is key for building brand trust and engagement. The goal is to learn both the current issues facing your audience today and how you can share helpful information that prioritizes their needs first. This, in turn, builds brand awareness and eventually deep audience engagement and trust.
How To Driving Authentic Audience Engagement
So, you understand your audience and are consistently creating content – now what?
It’s time to ensure your content is truly resonating with your audience and to drive further engagement, and there are many strategies to take when it comes to deeper engagement with your audience.
1. Create Quality Content
Besides reviewing publisher analytics regularly, you can analyze whether videos or podcasts garner more views than written content, for example, or if there are topical content pieces that resonate with your audience so you can focus your audience development efforts into publishing more meaningful content. You can even perform A/B testing on your site to see what keywords or language resonates more with the audience you want to develop.
2. Optimize For Conversion
To optimize and produce high-quality content, first create it for humans, not robots. This will help you sound authentic and relatable. Beyond that, you’ll need to consider conversion optimization for any piece of content you produce. Your content should be comprehensive, target specific keywords, and follow best SEO practices.
You can improve your conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy by performing A/B testing on your website and measuring the click rates of any newsletter, landing page, paid ad, or Calls-To-Action (CTAs) you implement. Even making minor copy or placement adjustments to call-outs or implementing automated lead flows can have a significant impact on your conversion rates. Combined, these factors help you understand which content pieces, web pages, and channels have the most impact on your audience’s development and engagement.
3. Build Your Brand
Publishing is often about marketing, and, in many cases, you should find ways to tie your brand and/or product to your content. However, don’t market your product too heavily, especially without providing value to your audience, or you risk alienating and losing them. It’s also important to insert yourself into your audience community by joining and publishing content on forums, websites, and channels where you can directly interact with readers. Here, you can keep a pulse on trending topics, make your brand more public, and further connect with your audience.
4. Boost audience engagement
Sometimes, the best way to learn whether your content matters to your audience is to ask them directly. Consider regularly engaging them online, sending out feedback surveys, and connecting with teams in your organization to learn more about what your audience needs. Invivisbly’s platform is an environment where this happens regularly. Surveying your audience is built into the process so you can build an audience and insights to retain readers.
Grow Your Readership & Revenue
Without developing an audience development strategy and the right tools in place, it’s difficult for publishers to learn about their readers, develop a relationship with them, and create meaningful content that drives traffic and delivers results.
Fortunately, the trick in developing your audience is learning who they are, measuring their engagement, and remaining flexible when it comes to adjusting your publishing strategy.
Invisibly
Use your data to access premium content you love.
Subscriptions — without the strings attached.
