engagement strategy Archives

Fighting for time and attention: A glimpse into The Independent’s successful audience engagement strategy

The Independent has recently experienced quite a lot of success in growing its registered user base and engaging its audience with appealing digital experiences.

At WAN-IFRA’s Virtual World News Media Congress 2021, The Independent’s head of registered audience, Philippa Jenkins, and Viafoura’s president and COO, Mark Zohar, gave attendees a snapshot of the media company’s audience engagement strategy. Here are some highlights.

Why users spent 15x more time on-site after registering to The Independent

As Jenkins mentioned during the conference, audience engagement sparks greater economic value. The Independent, for example, found that its registered website users spent about 15 times more time on-site than anonymous visitors. This additional time that registered users spend exploring and interacting around the brand offers in-depth information about their preferences, opinions and habits.

As a result, The Independent has been able to identify where users are engaging the most to target them with more relevant experiences, content and offers.

But this build-up of engagement and first-party data didn’t happen on its own. To keep registered users from losing interest and encourage them to subscribe, The Independent implemented several Viafoura solutions, including a personalized news feed, browser notifications and a moderated conversations space.

The personalized feed and notifications showcase where the most active users are on the company’s site and point users to the latest interactions with their comments. Both of these tools established a sense of community for The Independent’s users and produced opportunities for re-engagement. In addition, Viafoura’s digital experience tools offered the media company a way to gather critical first-party data as users interact with one another and consume content.

“Without engagement on your site, you have a passive audience that’s just reading your content — and passive experiences no longer meet the needs of today’s audiences,” says Zohar. “Passive visitors can’t connect with your journalists, they won’t leave their opinions and you can’t get their sentiments or useful engagement data.”

Ultimately, Viafoura’s digital experience solutions allowed The Independent to identify and elevate the most relevant spaces on the site to keep users hooked on its brand.

How 'The Independent' is making the most of its engagement tools

Even with effective personalization and social tools, media organizations must put time and energy into experimenting with ways to draw more attention toward on-site engagement opportunities. After all, there are countless other publishers all battling for your audience’s attention.

In The Independent’s case, Jenkins outlines how the organization has achieved positive results hosting Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions through Viafoura’s moderated Conversations solution.

The AMAs give registered users the chance to voice their questions to an expert or journalist around a particular topic, further connecting them to the brand. In fact, there’s a direct correlation between The Independent’s AMAs and the time users spend on-site. These sessions alone earned the publisher one million views on content related to these events.

Zohar also highlights that registered comment readers and writers generate 46 times more page views and spend 168 times more time on-site per month compared to anonymous visitors.

Jenkins explains that the commenting experience can become much richer during an AMA event because users get direct attention from the community host in return for their engagement.

“For journalists, AMAs are a great way to establish a following that will engage directly with them,” Zohar says.

In today’s highly competitive media industry, audience attention, revenue and loyalty all start with engagement. And it’s up to publishers to develop an effective strategy with the right tools and user experiences to consistently earn their audience’s attention.

How Reach PLC Caused Sports Fan Engagement To Skyrocket Online

Due to the pandemic, sports teams and media companies worldwide have an all-too-familiar challenge in common: They’re unable to engage with audiences in person. Organizations that want to grow and retain their now-digital communities of sports fans must pursue new ways to get fans excited for content and sports games online.

By equipping themselves with the right tools and engagement strategies, sports organizations are successfully building thriving, loyal communities — directly on their digital properties.

In fact, after working with Viafoura for just three months, Reach PLC achieved 150% growth in sports fan engagement while reducing the workload for staff.

Interested in finding out how Reach is unlocking meaningful engagement with sports fans online? Learn about Reach’s quest for higher engagement below.

The Growing Need for Powerful Engagement Tools and Moderation Services

Reach had an engaged audience before the pandemic ever started; however, it had yet to perfect a way to boost sports fan loyalty and related engagement metrics online. As soon as COVID-19 began to ban in-person audiences from sports events, it became clear that digital engagement would have to become a priority to fill the void for fans.

In order to deliver highly engaging experiences, Reach’s audience development team knew that the company would have to overcome some significant challenges.

For instance, most of the company’s sports content only consisted of in-depth articles written by journalists. Reach quickly realized that sports fans weren’t being engaged after they finished reading the content. Instead of connecting with each other and participating in online discussions, consumers would leave Reach domains right after reading content without becoming registered users.

The company also realized that its staff members were spending too much of their time moderating comments and trying to encourage positive and meaningful discussions on its properties. The lack of an automated moderation system meant that trolling behavior could easily overtake any productive conversation.

Since 50% of people will leave a situation entirely after experiencing incivility, Reach’s engagement tools needed frequent human intervention to create a safe space to nurture its community.

Ultimately, Reach turned to Viafoura to help engage its sports fans and build loyalty through civil and interactive experiences online.

Benefiting From Rich Engagement With Digital Visitors

Using Viafoura’s conversation-based tools, Reach has been able to interact with sports fans in an extremely engaging way while gaining first-party user data.

At the start of the pandemic, when sports games were all on hold, Reach put these social tools to use by creating a space to discuss milestone anniversaries, gameplay strategies and pandemic predictions in the sports world. That way, fans could satiate their hunger for sports engagement, and Reach could keep its community active and loyal to its brands — even without in-person games.

Keep in mind that sports fans would need to register for an account to participate in these discussions. This gave Reach a steady stream of user behavioral data that helped inform its business decisions and improve the fan experience.

Digital visitors to Reach’s sites continue to participate in live chats with their favorite sports journalists, so they can get excited to discuss teams, games and players.

“Viafoura has helped us tap into new and better ways to keep our audiences engaged and build more loyalty,” says Kristian Walsh, head of sports audience engagement at Reach. “With Community Chat, we’re delivering more value to the fans, while also increasing engagement.”

In general, Reach’s use of Viafoura engagement tools led to a 117% increase in comments across its digital properties.

Building an Active Community Through Civil Conversations

Media organizations that host positive and productive social spaces can access a wealth of audience engagement data and encourage strong relationships to form between users.

To prevent trolls from destroying the benefits of these social spaces, Reach decided to take on Viafoura’s automatic moderation system, which instantly blocks up to 95% of toxic comments. Together, Reach and Viafoura adjusted the moderation algorithm to support the unique community guidelines built around Reach’s audience and understand the nuances of language used by visitors.

The addition of an effective moderation system ended up saving staff 120 hours of work each month. Now, Reach’s sports journalists no longer have to spend their time scouring comments for toxic behavior and can refocus their efforts on higher-value tasks instead.

Because Reach’s digital users have a safe space to voice their opinions and form connections with each other, there’s more reason for users to return and engage with its brand regularly.

Whether sports fans can return to stadiums or not in the near future, Reach PLC will continue to build positive, engaging experiences that captivate sports fans online.

Do You Have What It Takes To Build a Thriving Digital Community?

Every digital audience is flowing with revenue-generating power. Whether that power remains untapped or is harnessed to grow your company depends on how well you can transform your audience into a thriving digital community.

Future plc, for example, grew its online audience by 56% in one year by nurturing its digital communities with worthwhile content and experiences.

But building and sustaining a profitable community online isn’t a simple walk in the park — it requires attention, effort and a carefully-crafted engagement strategy.

If you’re interested in securing loyal brand supporters and additional revenue-generation opportunities, we’ve created a checklist below that outlines everything you need to build a thriving digital community.

1. Social Tools for Your Owned and Operated Properties

2. Re-Engagement and Retention Techniques

3. A Process for Understanding Your Audience

4. Personalized User Experiences Based on First-Party Data

5. Comment Moderation

1. Social Tools for Your Owned and Operated Properties

You can’t form an active digital community if people don’t feel connected to your brand. For this reason, media companies must encourage their audience members to forge strong relationships with one another right on their websites or apps.

Adopting conversation-based engagement tools — like commenting widgets, live chat tools, and live blogs — will allow your company to establish meaningful social connections between your audience members and brand.

A recent analysis of Viafoura data even revealed that people who interact with social tools online have a 20-40% higher retention rate after six months of visiting a site compared to those who do not.

2. Re-Engagement and Retention Techniques

With an abundance of media companies and services competing for your subscriber’s dollar, preventing churn is a constant struggle.

Take video streamers, for example.

According to a survey conducted by Deloitte, consumers paid for around five streaming services in 2020. And yet, nearly half of the consumers surveyed canceled at least one of them that same year.

It’s important to have a strategy in place to re-engage your community members when their engagement levels begin to drop. That way, you can keep people away from your competitors by gently nudging their focus back toward your brand.

Consider working with your engagement tool provider to find out when a user becomes unengaged. Once you identify your inactive subscribers or registrants, you can send out targeted offers and content to re-engage them.

3. A Process for Understanding Your Audience

As is true with any connection in the physical world, the relationship between your company and its community members shouldn’t be one-sided. After all, you can’t expect your audience to give you their loyalty, data or money without getting something valuable in return.

And how could you possibly know what your audience wants if you don’t collect their first-party data, monitor their comments and speak with them to discover their interests?

To fully understand your community members and meet their needs, you’ll also need to turn anonymous visitors into known, registered visitors.

In fact, Piano, a subscription service provider, reports that, on average, registered users are 10x more likely to convert than an anonymous visitor.

Organizations that use a proper identity management system will have a clear, 360-degree view of audience members and their interests.

4. Personalized User Experiences Based on First-Party Data

Once you have a steady stream of first-party audience data coming in, you can draw actionable insights to personalize the on-site experience for your community members.

“This way, audience fragments become super-served niches and loyal viewers become VIP members — who will stick around and pay off in the long term,” explains Rande Price, research director at the Digital Context Next trade organization.

It’s also worth noting that people are hungry for personalized experiences.

According to a research expert on Statista, 90% of U.S. consumers perceive content personalization in marketing to be appealing.

Producing customized experiences around your audience’s behavior will, therefore, keep them coming back to your digital properties for relevant content time and time again.

5. Comment Moderation

Your social tools are critical for forming strong connections between your community members; however, not every internet user will leave positive and productive comments. And unfortunately, toxic comments can damage your digital community.

The Pew Research Center states that one in every ten people will abandon an online service if they see nearby offensive behavior.

Safeguard your brand’s integrity and keep your social spaces inviting by enforcing your community guidelines through an effective moderation system.

We would recommend selecting a moderation system that can immediately detect all 6.5 million variations of each word. It should also be able to evolve alongside your community and understand sentence context for maximum protection.

Whether your end goal is to achieve sustainable revenue growth or simply to serve your audience members better, your success depends on the state of your digital community. The more engaged and connected your community members are, the more valuable they’ll find your membership program or subscription package to be.

The truth is that anyone can create a thriving digital community. All it takes is connecting our business to the right engagement, data-collection and personalization strategies.