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The difference between a vendor and a partner, and how this translates into sustainable audience growth

Many organizations that try to build their own user community run into the same problem; they pick a vendor rather than a trusted partner. It’s a mistake that means they don’t feel valued as a customer, while the vendor doesn’t care about their business outcomes.

If you want to achieve sustainable audience growth, you need a community engagement partner that can help you to optimize engagement and value exchange moments you have with your community.

That means your partner should work alongside you to provide strategic recommendations that directly enhance your business and offer regular workshops, quarterly business reviews (QBRs), technical walkthroughs, and moderation sessions to collaborate with you to fine-tune your product roadmap.

This article will examine the difference between a vendor and a partner, and the strategic advantages the latter can bring.

The key difference between a vendor and partner

When it comes to building your audience, the key difference is that a vendor isn’t directly invested in your business success and merely plays a passive role serving you as a customer, whereas a partner takes an active role in helping to enhance your organization so that your audience can grow.

Unfortunately, most software vendors in this space employ a revenue share model, where they will put ad placements across a digital property and then offer a payout.

The problem with this approach is that it pigeonholes you in terms of how you’re viewed as a partner. Many vendors will treat you as a commercial deal and focus more on commercial ROI, relying on how many ad placements you’re running and your overall viewability.

Revenue share can help you increase revenue over the short-term, but does so at the cost of tying your business into a commercial model and hampering your decision-making so that you don’t have access to the collaboration you need to build an effective long-term audience growth strategy.

A true partner addresses the limitations of the revenue share model by also offering a SaaS payment model you can use to develop an ongoing partnership with a trusted party, whose core business strategy is about helping you drive registrations and acquire unique data you’ve never seen before.

How can a partner impact sustainable audience growth?

A growth-oriented partner can significantly increase your sustainable audience growth by clearly defining organizational Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

These OKRs enable you to set realistic and attainable performance targets to meet, such as doubling conversation rates, subscription rates, or unique visitors across digital properties.

It’s a methodology that isn’t focused on product delivery but instead on how the deployed solutions impact the customer’s business outcomes. The goal isn’t just to sell a product but also to implement it and to help the organization leverage that technology to grow long-term.

One of the benefits of working with a partner is that you can gain access to valuable growth insights you might miss. For instance, they might recommend that you use push notifications on your site to increase click-through rates by up to 27.6%.

It’s worth noting that a partner also helps to support you through the post-implementation process, providing continuous care and support even after the initial deployment of the solution to ensure that you’re in a position to generate consistent returns.

How to know if your vendor isn’t a partner

One of the main signs that your vendor isn’t a partner is if you don’t have a single point of contact for your account. If there’s a waterfall between you and the vendor, then you can’t have an effective two-way dialogue on how to improve your value exchange.

A true partner would review progress periodically with key stakeholders in your organization, every three to six months, depending on your needs to ensure you’re on target to meet your enterprise’s goals.

They would also be willing to answer any questions that you have promptly and provide you with ample opportunities to share your feedback on the overall effectiveness of the service.

You should also watch out to see if your vendor is focusing on celebrating wins rather than recommending potential improvements you could make to enhance your business continuously.

Avoid vendors, seek out partners

A true software partner doesn’t just help with implementation and onboarding; they customize the solution to fit your long-term needs and are there for you every step of the way.

If you and your partner aren’t strategically aligned with your mission and vision, then it’s going to be an uphill battle to achieve your business goals. So if you want the best opportunity for success in 2022, avoid working with vendors and seek out a trusted partner instead.

When you know more about your audience, you pave the way for growth

The more you understand your users, the more opportunity you have to grow your community of followers. And the more you grow your community, the more your business can ultimately generate revenue and brand awareness. But without first-party data about your audience, you’re working from an incomplete picture.

To grow, media brands need to know the profile of their users, their preferences and their behaviours. It won’t just help you improve and personalize your content lineup; obtaining rich first-party data also empowers you to supply advertisers with the crucial targeted audience segments they want.

Building engagement to gain data

Our research has found that engagement leads to loyalty because it creates experiences users will stick around for. The longer they stick around, the more likely they are to register, which will give you access to their real-time data.

So what types of engaging experiences can you provide your users? We’ve identified six Viafoura solutions that can help your content convert users from unknown to known, including: moderated conversations, or safe spaces for registered users to discuss content; follow buttons; live chats around a topic, event or video; social share bars; trending conversations; and live blogs, or real-time interactive content posts.

For example, Viafoura’s personalized newsfeeds are onsite feeds similar to a Facebook feed, aggregating all the interactions that are relevant to a user, including what and who they follow. Our data has found that they generate 3.15 more page views per month among both anonymous and registered users.

How data helps your content strategy

With 64% of consumers willing to give up their data for relevant services, personalization is your key to giving readers what they want. When your newsroom has access to your audience’s data insights, they become empowered to create a personalized experience for the user, which is increases audience retention.

They can do this by extracting audience insights from Viafoura’s engagement solutions. One example is Viafoura’s Community Chat, which allows media companies to host real-time chats around popular content.

“With (Viafoura’s) Community Chat, we’re delivering more value to the fans, while also increasing engagement by 150%,” says Kristian Walsh, head of sports audience engagement strategy at Reach PLC.

So what kind of behaviour and preferences can you track from users, and what can that tell you about them? For starters, look at what types of content are driving people to engage. What are the topics and themes that are capturing interest? Who are the writers of this content? You can then rank an article’s performance based on clicks and audience segments to help determine the topics your readers are most interested in.

By understanding who their readers are, what they’re interested in and how they express that interest, newsrooms can align on a high-conversion content strategy based on a strong relationship with their audience.

How data incentivizes your advertisers

That rich audience data allows you to understand your audience more intimately, but it also better equips you to provide targeted audience segments for advertisers. Advertisers today are looking beyond clicks, and are seeking metrics like time-spent, return visits and number of page views: all signs of an engaged audience. So the more you know about your own audience, the more appealing you can make your site to advertisers.

“Viafoura gives us access to valuable engagement data that helps drive business decisions,” says Philippa Jenkins, the head of registered audience at The Independent. “We know what content topics and formats are resonating most with our users, so we can deliver more of what they want.”

User registrations, direct newsletter sign-ups and a view into audience interactions allow you to understand your users at the engagement level, to inform your sales team, and paint a better picture for advertisers.

In fact, the New York Times is capitalizing on its first-party data, having found that digital ads that used its first-party data accounted for 20% of its core ad revenue, up from 7% the year before. Ad Exchanger reported that subscriptions also soared during the same period, hitting 5.1 million digital news subscribers and 1.6 million subscribers for other products.

Brands that glean actionable insights on their data will be much better positioned to deliver the goods that advertisers want, in an age where advertisers have become much more savvy in the data they demand.

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.

How to build a following around your journalists, your coverage, and your brand

Building a loyal following isn’t a short-term effort. It’s a long-term process that requires you to break down rich first-party data to identify the type of content that engages your audience. Without first-party data, it’s very difficult to know what type of audience a journalist is building.

Implementing a community engagement platform to collect first-party data from registered users is essential for finding out what types of content your users like, planning future content, and developing a strategy to create a following around your journalists and your content.

Below, we’re going to look at some tried and tested ways media organizations can build a following around their journalists, their coverage, and their brand, from driving registrations to personalizing newsfeeds and producing live Q&As.

Drive registrations to capture first-party data

Getting visitors to register to your site is the first step toward building a loyal following because it enables you to start collecting first-party data to analyze users’ preferences, so you can create and recommend content that’s relevant to their interests.

When building a following, the easiest way to encourage your audience to register on your site is to provide them with a gated comment section where they can enter their name and email address to leave their opinions on articles and interact with other users.

It’s worth noting that once a reader subscribes to your site and participates in the comment section, your journalists can start to monitor their feedback to identify what topics they’re interested in, so they can create more engaging content and start to build a bigger following.

Provide users with personalized newsfeeds

Today, consumers expect personalized digital experiences whether they’re shopping online or searching for news. As a result, it’s becoming more important for media organizations to provide their audience with personalized newsfeeds so that they spend more time on-site engaging with relevant content.

The best way to personalize newsfeeds is with an AI-driven community engagement platform that lets you see what types of articles users spend the most time on and their sentiments toward particular topics and journalists, so you can recommend the types of stories they’re most likely to be interested in.

For instance, if someone reacts to an article on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by clicking the “like” button, the AI can infer that the user is interested in left-leaning news coverage and recommend other political topics and authors that a democratic supporter might also be interested in reading or following.

Gain loyal followers by offering live Q&As, AMAs, and interactions with guarded journalists and speakers

If you want to increase your loyal followers, live content like Q&As and Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions can be a powerful tool to build a closer relationship between your journalists and your audience.

Live content like Q&As and AMAs gives your audience an opportunity to interact with journalists they wouldn’t be able to reach normally.

Direct interaction between your journalists and users makes the audience feel like you value their opinions, while also giving them a chance to ask questions, fact-check live content and recommend future topics they’d like to see covered.

Keeping the conversation civil with automated moderation

When building a user community, you need to have a strategy to address toxicity if you want to retain your audience long term. If you don’t have a solution in place to moderate comments and remove hate speech or abuse, then the conversation can quickly spiral out of control and push people away.

For example, on Twitter, toxic messages accounted for 21% of all conversations around the Covid-19 pandemic. The high level of toxicity across social media is a key reason why as little as 18% of Americans believe social media companies are doing an excellent or good job at addressing online harassment.

Automatically moderating comments with an AI-based solution is critical for making sure that abusive content is removed from the conversation, while also ensuring that your audience has a safe space to communicate with each other and with your journalists to form a greater connection.

Give your audience the content they want

Getting to know your audience in real-time with first-party data is the key to building a loyal following around your journalists and your brand. The better you get to know your users through their data, the better you can develop the content they want to see.

How to grow your audience: 5 ways to stimulate subscriptions and registrations

While it’s easy to gauge the growth of your audience, it can be difficult to develop a clear portrait of who they are unless you have the right tools. Building a user community on your site with a community engagement tool is critical for getting to know your audience and what makes them tick.

With more users discussing news and content on and off social media, audience development on your site is now critical for attracting a wider range of readers, accelerating your engaged user strategy, and increasing subscriptions.

Taking simple steps like creating a comments section, using registration as a gateway to participate in the comments, and providing interactive content like live blogs or AMAs can be the push your audience needs to subscribe to your site. These should be a key part of an audience growth strategy for publishers and digital media organizations alike.

So let’s look at five simple ways building a user community can help accelerate your subscription and registration strategy.

Offer users a two-way dialogue

The days of readers passively consuming news are long gone. Today’s users not only want to read the author’s opinions, but they also want to contribute to the conversation in real-time.

You can grow your audience by implementing a comments section that provides them with a space to engage in a two-way dialogue with journalists and other readers, so they can share their perspectives on current events.

This enhanced dialogue can actively attract new users and drive subscriptions among those who want to leave their thoughts or opinions on content. In fact, research shows that 60.9% of commenters or comment readers would like it if journalists clarified factual questions in news comment sections.

Gate your user community and comments

A discussion space can be used to further your audience development strategy. Once you’ve set up a comments section that allows users in the community to have a live two-way dialogue, you can gate it to incentivize people to sign up so they can participate in the conversation.

Gating the comments section can help boost subscriptions and registrations by encouraging your audience to create an account so they can leave feedback on published content.

The signup process should be effortless, with users able to quickly enter their name and email address so they can start engaging with your community about the topics that are related to their interests.

Building a relationship between commenters and journalists

When building an audience, the relationship between the reporter and reader is often overlooked. Building a user community with an active comments section not only provides users with a place to communicate, it also gives journalists and writers a resource they can use to build a closer relationship with their readers, and better understand them.

Journalists can use community feedback to learn what their readers’ interests are, what content readers prefer, and then use that information to inform their future content strategy.

For example, if a journalist produces an article on the Olympics Games, the audience can ask questions about related subtopics and sporting events that might make good subjects for future articles.

As journalists engage with the community to better understand their interests, they can enhance their coverage so that their content becomes more pertinent to readers and more compelling for both subscribed and unsubscribed users. And compelling content leads to higher reader interest and drives audience growth.

Using first-party data to provide more relevant content

Building a user community on your site also provides you with direct access to valuable first-party data that you can use to analyze your audience’s profiles and break down the topics they’re most interested in. Like the comments, this also provides you with valuable insights you can use to produce more relevant content. Leveraging this information should be a priority to build and retain your audience.

For instance, if a user is interested in sports like football or boxing, you can use an AI-driven community engagement solution to recommend articles written by experts on these topics to encourage them to spend more time consuming content on your site.

Using a community engagement solution to offer registered users personalized feeds and content recommendations is the perfect way to entice them to subscribe, so they automatically keep up-to-date with the content they find most compelling.

Live Q&As

Having an active user community provides you with a resource you can use to participate in engaging real-time content like live Q&As, where a journalist or expert in a particular field can host live Q&A sessions with the community, allowing users to ask questions and actively influence the conversation taking place.

One example of this approach is highlighted by The Independent, who recently started running live Q&As and Ask Me Anything sessions (AMAs) to give users an opportunity to ask questions to experts, journalists, and public figures. In one Q&A with a travel correspondent, users could ask questions about Omicron travel restrictions.

It’s also important to note that live Q&As also function as a connection-builder, giving your audience a chance to have a deeper connection with experts and journalists who tend to be guarded from the audience. This opportunity to connect can help you grow your audience naturally while encouraging many users to subscribe.

Building an active user community pays dividends

Giving your audience a place to come together to share their thoughts pays dividends, not just because it helps attract users to register to your site, but also because it helps you create more high-quality audience segments, which you can share with advertisers to encourage them to place ads on your site.

Four Exciting Reasons for Media Leaders To Be Optimistic About the Year Ahead

2020 was disrupted by a deadly virus, shrinking budgets, nonstop work and misinformation, challenging even the most well-established media organizations. Thankfully, change is on the horizon.

Media companies that have powered through this chaotic and unpredictable period are now well-positioned to embrace a brighter future.

“While the pandemic has not changed where the industry was heading, it has cut the time to get there from years to months, with the virus rapidly accelerating trends like a move to digital and working from home,” two writers state on FIPP’s website. “And even though such quick transformation has come as a shock to publishers, it presents plenty of opportunities to bounce back strongly in 2021.”

Industry leaders must now take a step back to identify and take hold of new opportunities to succeed and get excited in this strange, new world.

To get started, here are four reasons why the year ahead will help to revive your sense of optimism in the future of your business.

Benefiting From Larger Audiences

Due to the pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests and U.S. election, media organizations saw their digital audiences climb in size throughout 2020.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center even revealed that digital news consumers now prefer catching up on the news by visiting media websites directly.

Entertainment-focused media companies, like Netflix, also saw their audiences increase last year as more people sought to escape from reality and stay busy at home.

Between the internet users looking for trustworthy news coverage and those seeking entertainment, media organizations have larger audiences to nurture and monetize. And companies that can prove their ongoing value this year will benefit from sustainable reader revenue.

More specifically, the coming months will be an opportunity for media companies to engage and convert their visitors into long-term, profitable brand supporters.

The End of Trump’s Reign

Media companies have a love-hate relationship with Trump. On the one hand, the past four years and the 2020 presidential election were extremely eventful thanks to Trump, which made for excellent news content and led to a boom in news subscriptions. And yet, Trump popularized the belief that media promotes fake news and reduced trust in media.

“The last four years have been marked by a deliberate and systemic attack on the press by the president of the United States,” explains Gabriel Escobar, editor and senior vice president of The Philadelphia Inquirer. “It has — I suspect — contributed to the lack of trust in journalism which was not great to begin with.”

The transition to Biden’s presidency means that news media companies can finally begin rebuilding their relationships with audiences, restoring trust in the news.

The Rise of First-Party Data

Anyone who deals with audience data will know that third-party cookies are crumbling, triggering an industry-wide shift from third-party to first-party data strategies.

However, the elimination of third-party cookie usage isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

First-party cookies allow media companies to learn more about their audience members and personalize experiences directly on their websites or apps.

In fact, Kayleigh Barber, a senior reporter at Digiday, highlights how Future plc “has seen a range of 50-70% better performance on campaigns that use its first-party audience segment data than campaigns that rely on third-party data.”

By refocusing on first-party data, media companies can understand the identities, habits and preferences of their digital community members and serve them better in the future.

Moving Toward Virtual Events

Virtual events have completely replaced in-person events over the last few months. Gradually, media leaders have discovered that virtual events are cheaper and easier to organize, have no attendee limits and lend themselves better to interactive discussion sessions.

“As we enter 2021, the era of virtual events — even in a post-pandemic world — is here to stay, at least as one way for news organizations to hold these gatherings,” says Rick Berke, the co-founder and editor of Stat, a news media company.

It’s clear that even in-person events in the future will need to be supported with virtual elements to maximize attendee engagement.

Although recent months have created a series of hurdles for media companies to jump over, organizations that have survived until this point are stronger than ever. Media leaders can now look forward to forging strong connections to their audiences with their newfound knowledge in the year ahead.