Tag: audience acquisition

Improving the value exchange: How to encourage users to give up their data

The majority of media companies know that having an abundance of user data at their fingertips will allow their businesses to flourish. In fact, publishers need rich user data to understand their audience members, keep people’s attention focused on their brands and grow their subscription and advertising revenue streams.

But recent research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism highlights that news companies are struggling to collect people’s information online. More specifically, the study outlines how 32% of people worldwide don’t trust news media companies to handle their data.

And since user data is critical to the success of your organization, you’ll need to convince them to provide their personal information by becoming registered users.

Luckily, persuading your media company’s audience to hand over their user data doesn’t have to be a complicated process. All you need to do is adjust your data strategy while reinforcing the value of becoming a registered user.

Personalize experiences for registered users with first-party data

With so many competing media brands and online services, publishers need to go beyond their content to convince users that it’s worth taking the time to register on their websites or apps.

One simple way to build up your company’s registration value proposition is to offer personalized user experiences.

Research from McKinsey & Company even reveals that 71% of people actually want companies to personalize their relationships with users.

In the past, media organizations have turned to third-party data to power custom experiences. But since Chrome is now phasing out third-party cookies, media companies need to find other ways to collect data for their personalization tools.

Instead, organizations can persuade users to register and subscribe to their websites in return for personalized experiences using their first-party data.

“[Subscription] services need to employ strategies that build loyalty, provide added value, and offer personalization to compete in the global marketplace,” says Rande Price, VP of research at Digital Content Next.

And offering users personalization — whether that be through notifications, email campaigns or content recommendations — can give them the push they need to hand over their data.

The importance of owning your user data

It feels like tech giants have a new data breachor scandal around irresponsible data handling every year.

For this reason, it’s critical for media companies to operate independently of tech giants. The reality is that Big Tech companies lose the trust of their users with every data scandal — so how can you expect your audience to trust you if you’re relying on a tech giant to gather and access their data?

One of the easiest ways to earn the trust of online audiences is to ensure your organization has complete ownership over its user data. This means moving the focus away from third-party data and toward the first-party data collected directly on your own digital properties.

“Registration from a user means ‘I trust you’ and ‘I also trust you with my data,’” states Jo Holdaway, ESI Media’s chief data and marketing officer. “You have to be very respectful to your audience to get them to come back.”

When your media company owns all of its user data, your organization can reassure audience members that it isn’t associated with data leaks and scandals from other companies. You’ll also be able to communicate that your organization handles data responsibly since it would only collect and store information that users consent to hand over once they register.

Swap engagement opportunities on-site for registration data 

Although personalization and data integrity are effective tools in winning over user data, there’s still another way to persuade anonymous audiences to submit their personal information.

Media organizations can enhance their ability to earn registration data by offering interactive digital experiences just for registered users.

According to Viafoura data, implementing audience engagement tools in even the most basic way can make up 30-50% of user registrations on publisher websites.

The bottom line is that people want to engage with each other, content and authors on your company’s website. Giving users opportunities to interact on-site in return for their data will, therefore, encourage them to become registered, known users.

Ultimately, each of these registration-boosting strategies has the power to encourage users to give up their data. Even so, it’s important to use a combination of all three methods to maximize the value of your registration proposition and earn the best business results. 

How to reclaim your audience from social media and build an engaged community on your owned and operated site

Your audience is a core part of your brand, so when you completely outsource your community to a third-party social media platform, you’re letting big tech take control of your relationship with your audience, you’re also losing access to valuable first-party data you can leverage to better understand their preferences.

However, it’s important to note that media organizations don’t need to get off social media completely. With 4.5 billion social media users around the world, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer widespread opportunities for user acquisition. The key is to have a strategy to reclaim website traffic from social media. 

In this article, we’re going to look at the top three reasons you need to reclaim your audience from social media and how you can build a nurtured and engaged community on your owned and operated sites.

3 reasons to reclaim your audience from social media

When building your audience or your following online, there are three main reasons you should always prioritize engaging your audience on your owned and operated sites over third-party social media platforms. These are as follows:

1. Building a direct relationship with your audience

If all your interactions with your audience take place on social media, you’re implicitly relying on a third party to determine how you can engage with your followers, and you’re making yourself vulnerable to policy changes that impact your community. 

For instance, if your media organization has a Facebook page, Facebook can decide that your content violates its community guidelines and take the page down. Or, if Facebook suddenly changes its algorithm, your community can disappear overnight, wasting all the time you’ve invested into building that audience.  

Making sure that most direct interactions with your audience take place on your site gives you more control over the conversation. It also ensures that your content isn’t subject to abstract community guidelines and social media moderation standards, so you can interact with your audience however you see fit.

2. Get to know your audience with first-party data

Publishers that rely on social media traffic to build their audience not only find themselves beholden to third-party policies but also lose the ability to collect first-party data. If users don’t visit your site, it’s difficult to gather data that could otherwise provide you with insights into their preferences.  

While social media platforms like Twitter offer analytics solutions, these are generalist solutions that won’t necessarily be tailored to generate the insights into your audience that you need to compete against other media organizations and publishers. 

Directing users to your site and collecting first-party data from subscribed members of the audience can help you generate insights into your audience’s preferences, while developing more relevant content and forming a closer relationship with your community over time.

3. Ensuring a civil community

Another challenge is relying on social media companies to moderate conversations, which they don’t do very well, as illustrated during Euro 2020 when England’s soccer team received over 2,000 abusive messages on Twitter. 

If one of your journalists gets harassed on a website like Twitter with death threats, racist attacks, or harassment, you have to report the incidents and then wait for the site to investigate and take action. 

On the other hand, if you move the conversation to your site, you can use an AI-driven community engagement solution to automatically moderate comments according to a customized moderation policy. That means if someone tries to leave a hateful comment, you can instantly block it so it doesn’t negatively impact the experience of other users.

Magnet attracting metal marbles to demonstrate attracting an audience.

How to support user retention and registration once they’re on your site

Once you get your audience from social media onto your site, there are a number of strategies you can use to maximize user retention and registration to ensure they engage with your brand.

1. Incentivize unsubscribed users to register

The best way to support user registration on your site is to provide visitors with an incentive to register. An incentive can be as simple as a gated comment section or user community, which they have to sign up for if they want to leave comments and interact with other users, or a newsletter providing valuable content not available on your surface site.

2. Start collecting first-party data

Once users have registered, you can start to collect first-party data about their preferences and sentiments, which you can use to develop propensity models and better understand the type of content they want to see.

3. Use AI-Driven moderation

Finally, you can help to retain users on your site by keeping the conversation civil with a proactive moderation policy. Rooting out harassment, racism, and spam is critical for making sure that users can have productive and engaging conversations on your site, without being overwhelmed with toxicity or junk content. 

Use social media for acquisitions, not engagement

Building a following on your owned and operated sites and social media aren’t mutually exclusive. Social media traffic is great for user acquisition and for driving referrals, but you should always be looking to drive users to your owned and operated sites so you can have a deeper interaction and establish a long-term relationship with them.

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