October 16, 2024
For established publishers, an effective audience development strategy is crucial for attracting new readers and building relationships with existing customers.
While going viral on social media and word of mouth are valuable tactics in the media industry, a much bigger challenge involves adopting a multi-channel approach — and ensuring people online can access your content on all major platforms.
Every news brand has needed to undergo a digital transformation to achieve their business goals. Gaining traction on search engines with carefully written SEO headlines, distributing articles across all social media platforms — as well as pivoting to videos, newsletters and podcasts — have all proven key for engaging audiences.
But there's one strategy for reaching potential audiences that is sometimes overlooked by media companies: Apple News. This is often because they think they lack the resources to do it well, or the technical knowhow to develop a system that delivers valuable content to paying customers.
In this guide, we'll explain:
As you know, audience development is all about enticing potential customers to connect with your brand, while giving the existing audience what they want.
Publishers with a clear understanding of their target audience have a content strategy designed to meet their needs — and actively seek data and insights to inform new strategies that deliver a better service and fuel growth. High levels of engagement from a loyal audience are invaluable for marketing efforts too, and allow businesses to launch targeted advertising campaigns that reach the right consumers.
Key metrics for audience engagement include:
Publishers can benefit from analytics software that offers an at-a-glance insight into the pages that visitors engage with most. This is especially valuable from a content creation perspective. Knowing a customer base is interested in a particular news story can encourage journalists to come up with new angles — and keep audience members coming back for more.
But there can be limitations with these tools. While you may be able to tell where your readers are based, and gauge customer loyalty based on how frequently they come back, there will be little insight into age and gender — and the stories that are most popular among each respective audience segment.
That's where Apple News, which offers rich data on readers that's fully anonymised, can help supercharge audience development strategies.
Done right, Apple News can be a valuable tool for helping your team identify if your content is reaching the right audience. For example, if your brand is positioned to marketers as a publication for men under 35 — but you have the most engagement among women aged 35 to 44 — the insights offered through News Publisher can be crucial for honing a content strategy.
As you build relationships with your target audience on iPhones and iPads, your publication can develop a strategy to drive traffic back to owned-and-operated platforms — including your website and app. Apple News is a form of soft marketing that serves as a shop window for your best content, and fuels customer acquisition by showing would-be subscribers what they can expect.
Audience development can also centre on encouraging readers to follow your Apple News channel for updates, as this prompts the app's algorithms to serve up more of your articles in the future. Joining Apple News+ is another worthwhile strategy. This allows the audience to pay one monthly subscription in exchange for access to hundreds of outlets — including The Times, The Athletic and Vanity Fair — with publications receiving a revenue share based on how much their content is read.
Here are the main advantages of an Apple News audience development plan:
Audience development on Apple News is slightly different to the usual process of reaching consumers through a website. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Although Apple News uses a proprietary format to display articles, it is possible to recreate your brand within this app — complete with your logo, fonts and wider design motif. FlatPlan's expert knowledge of Apple News code means our team can accurately match the look and feel of articles on your website, without draining precious resources away from your team.
Creating a professional, bespoke appearance for your content means you'll make the right first impression with new readers — and set you apart from other leading publishers.
While word of mouth marketing is valuable currency in the media business, the key to building engaged audiences on Apple News lies in encouraging readers to follow your publication.
To eliminate friction, FlatPlan allows companies to create Follow buttons that can be embedded within article copy. This is a great marketing strategy as it means readers who have enjoyed your pieces can opt in to receive more — all in a single tap. Once clicked, your publication's articles will appear more regularly in their personalised feeds.
This is arguably one of the most important elements of an audience development strategy, as it drives article views and increases average active time. Boosting both of these metrics means readers will then be presented with even more of your pieces, resulting in a positive feedback loop for growth.
A great way of measuring an engaged audience is looking at how many articles they're reading on average. Boosting recirculation rates is a crucial part of the process — and FlatPlan's graphical Read More links help create a logical journey for customers to follow.
For example, if someone's reading a breaking news story about the Royal Family, it's the perfect time to recommend a feature about the King — as it allows them to explore the topic in greater depth.
Other great strategies for Read More links include directing audiences to unrelated stories they'll love. Perhaps your publication could promote articles that are trending on social media, or highlight pieces of original journalism you're proud of.
Tools like this are ripe for experimentation — enabling you to get creative (and have a little bit of fun!) with audience development.
Some businesses have eye-watering marketing budgets for their content streams. But one of the best tools for creating a buzz are in-article calls to action — encouraging readers to subscribe to newsletters or take a listen to your latest podcast. This is a natural, native way of driving engagement and developing an audience for new products within your brand.
FlatPlan takes pride in developing a polished appearance for publications from start to finish — and that's where branded footers at the end of an article come in. This is valuable real estate for converting customers and executing your wider audience development strategy. Whether you're looking to drive app downloads or follows on your social media pages, this is the place to do it.
A useful service that publications can offer their audience on Apple News are push notifications to deeply reported features or breaking news stories. Editors can decide which pieces they'd like to send an alert to — increasing engagement and views.
While such tools are valuable for media companies, it's important not to inundate readers with notifications. Doing so means the audience may turn alerts off or even unfollow the publication.
Another tip for audience development involves making sure that you're catering to customers in different time zones.
Apple News allows you to promote your best performing or most editorially significant pieces, meaning they'll appear more prominently in your feed for up to 48 hours. While this process can be pretty manual, FlatPlan enables you to do this automatically.
Once your audience development plans are in action, keeping a close eye on how your strategy is performing is crucial. The analytics dashboard that Apple offers through News Publisher is one of the best in the industry. Here are key metrics to monitor:
This allows you to see how an article is performing, as well as your publication as a whole. FlatPlan also sends email notifications to publications whenever there's a spike in traffic — or your brand is featured in an area curated by Apple News editors.
Reach factors in headline views, which gives you a more accurate impression of whether your articles are being distributed throughout the Apple News app. The Discovery Source tab also breaks down how readers landed on an article — whether that's via your channel, the homepage, or feeds devoted to specific topics. FlatPlan's Smart Content Categorisation makes sure Apple's algorithms understand the topics you're covering and presents it to the right audience.
Other valuable tools for tracking audience development include the Loyalty tab in News Publisher. Two charts are offered here, and they gauge:
Apple doesn't give media outlets a way of seeing how many readers convert from using the News app to visiting their website or app.
But even though outbound clicks from Apple News can't be tracked, FlatPlan has come up with a workaround.
If you want to see how your target audience behaves online, you can create a segment in Google Analytics that helps isolate the traffic coming from Apple News.
When building this segment, set the operating system to iOS, set the browser to 'Safari (in-app), and set the source to 'direct'.
FlatPlan can also help your team use alternative tracking methods such as UTM tags.
With over 145 million monthly active readers in the UK, US, Canada and Australia, Apple News is an indispensable tool for growing your market share.
FlatPlan's no-code solution helps you turn this audience into loyal followers.
Bauer Media Group, ITV and the Premier League are just some of the content-driven companies supercharging their audience development on Apple News with FlatPlan.
Our intuitive tools are compatible with any content management system — and reduce the time it takes to start publishing through this app.
With top-tier support and an extensive knowledge base that's packed with top tips for audience development on Apple News, FlatPlan takes care of the technical side so your publication can focus on what it does best: creating memorable content.
No matter what stage you're at in your discovery of Apple News, we'll help you get the information you need to make the right decision for your media business.
Photo by Tijs van Leur on Unsplash
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