Design, tech, marketing, editorial… within media organizations, it's not always easy to bring all the different roles to the table. Yet defining and implementing a strategy requires cohesion and shared foundations to effectively reach your audience. In three words? Product thinking.
In recent years, media organizations have continued their digital transformation and expanded their product teams. From a distance, one might almost believe that traditional media now operates like companies born after the digital revolution, and that digital-native players are virtually indistinguishable from the finest startup nation champions. That would be a misunderstanding of the on-the-ground realities of media companies and the complexity of interactions between editorial and tech teams. Many who have crossed over have learned this the hard way! In this column, we'll discuss product strategy within a media organization, to continue bringing these two worlds a bit closer together, without erasing all the specificities of a media company.
First and foremost, what does the product approach deliver? From my perspective, it's the function that combines research, design, and development to deploy new experiences for your users. It must create added value for them and economic success for your business.
Create "personas" to understand your audience
For any media outlet, regardless of its maturity, it's very easy to talk about readers in quantitative terms: number of visits, people who signed up for free or who have paid subscriptions, etc. These data, collected automatically by relatively simple tools to implement, are often shared regularly with all teams at the media outlet and sometimes even externally. So you've gotten used to reading that daily, weekly, or monthly email report, then you've grown tired of it. Why? Perhaps because, despite their undeniable accuracy, these absolute figures ultimately tell you very little about the people who read you.
Asking yourself who reads your media and, most importantly, why is the essential first step to building a product culture within your media and running it successfully.
To identify what characterizes your readership, you can start very simply by creating rich, qualitative profiles, called "personas":
- Recruit about thirty of your readers for individual interviews lasting 45 minutes to 1 hour. Plan for one to two months at a pace of, for example, one to two interviews per day. Remember to select diverse people to respond to you! Alternatively, you can consider conducting these interviews via an online survey, which is also a very good channel for recruiting your participants.
- Write an interview guide with open-ended questions around 3 main themes :
Who are you? Ask them to describe their socioprofessional situation in their own words, then their relationship with information in general.
Why do you read us? Then ask them about their relationship with your media, their expectations, and what satisfies or dissatisfies them.
How are people reading us? Finally seek to understand the channels through which these people consult you and much more importantly: under what conditions.
- Create personas (2 to 5) by identifying common themes in the respondents’ statements. Give these personas names (e.g., “disillusioned students” or “concerned parents”) based on what you heard and took away from these interviews. Enrich these personas with quotes from your interviews and add attributes specific to your media outlet (time of access, platform used, etc.).
Once you've created these personas, you're halfway there. What's left is to share them as widely as possible within your organization! With all teams and in every space available to you: meetings, shared documents, emails. Make sure your entire organization understands these personas and refers to them when discussing new features, new services to offer. By asking yourself a simple question: does this idea, this feature, this initiative positively serve one of these personas?
Set engagement and retention goals for your audience
What should you do once you have a good understanding of your readers' profiles? Set clear and realistic goals to determine whether your media, your product, truly meets the expectations of your personas. By media, I mean both the content you produce and the platforms and features you deploy.
To set these objectives, it's useful to draw inspiration from the stages of the AARRR model (for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue). This "funnel" model expresses the concept of successive stages through which an increasingly smaller number of people progress in their interaction with your product.
At the top of the funnel is the acquisition stage: the overall volume of people you manage to bring to your media through different channels. As I said at the beginning of this column, and in the first one on Médianes, media already love too many flattering but not very useful data (outside the advertising model) on this acquisition stage: number of visits, page views, people subscribed on social networks, etc. While this stage remains essential to your media's economic success, its execution most often depends on your marketing resources. Let's move directly to the most interesting stages for building a culture and product approach within your media: activation and retention.
Activation is the metric that lets you identify when someone who was simply visiting your media is now expressing genuine interest in your content. This could be signing up for a free newsletter, for example, or creating a free account to access the rest of your content if you've placed it behind a paywall. You define what this activation metric is. It must be binary and measurable without ambiguity (for example: either a person is subscribed to the newsletter or they aren't). Try also to choose an activation metric that correlates with your business model (for example: a high proportion of people subscribed to the free newsletter make an annual donation or later subscribe to a paid account).
Retention is the indicator that lets you confirm whether a person's interest in your media is lasting. It's always better with an example: the person didn't sign up just to finish reading the article behind your paywall—they came back six times over the following two weeks. For a newsletter, this might be the open rate at 30, 60, and 90 days for a new subscriber. For a mature media outlet that combines website, app, and newsletters, you can measure the average number of cumulative weekly visits across these platforms based on how long (in months or years) different people have been with you. This is called "user cohorts."
La recommendation and revenue are the final two stages of your media funnel. They guarantee that your upstream marketing and product efforts (acquiring, activating, and retaining your readership) translate into economic success for your media downstream (e.g., paid subscription, gifting a subscription to a friend). This may well be the subject of a future article!
To set good objectives, after choosing your activation and retention indicators, add a target and a timeframe to them. If your activation indicator is the number of people signing up free to your media (currently 5,000 for example), your objective could be to increase this number by 20% over the next quarter (that's 6,000 signups in 90 days). For your retention indicator you can apply the same method by starting, for example, with the percentage of people who still open your newsletter 90 days after signing up, and aiming to increase this indicator over the next quarter as well. The rule is that your objective should, once again, be easily measurable and ambitious while remaining achievable.
Build a realistic, prioritized, and transparent roadmap
With your personas and objectives in hand, you have everything you need to create a roadmap that clearly sets your priorities, realistically and transparently.
Setting priority initiatives means evaluating each new initiative against your objectives (with rare exceptions: legal requirements, technical constraints, etc.). By initiative, I'm referring once again to both new content ideas that require editorial resources and product-only features that you want to improve or roll out. Will this new interview format help increase your activation or retention metric? Could another initiative—creating a referral program—achieve the same result with less effort?
To establish this ranking of your priority initiatives, I encourage you to create a recurring discussion space with members from different teams across the media organization (editorial, marketing, business, etc). You can, once a month, update your roadmap by discussing new initiatives and also be willing to remove those you believe in less—or no longer at all—if new information has emerged since your last collective discussion (e.g., the technical or editorial effort proves too significant; a survey shows limited interest in the feature).
Please ensure you don't turn this roadmap into a lengthy list of everything all teams want for the media. Make sure to share a realistic roadmap that spans the medium term (six months to a year, broken down quarterly is an ideal format). Also assess initiatives realistically in terms of difficulty, using a simple format initially like clothing sizes (S, M, L) or a simple rating from 1 to 5. In both cases, choosing a size or rating collectively allows everyone to voice their doubts: technical unknowns, lack of resources, dependencies of the initiative across multiple teams. The more care you take to have these discussions collectively, with a good dose of courage because the format can be quite draining to start with: transparency is exhausting at first, but it creates very solid bonds between team members afterwards.
In 2023, do we really still need to hear "it's complicated with the editorial team" or "anyway, product managers always say no to ideas"? I promise you that if all your media organization's employees share and reference common personas and understand the key metrics and objectives that guide your roadmap, these phrases will gradually disappear from hallways and Teams meetings. That's really the key to a good product approach and culture in a media organization: a common language serving a shared vision, that leaves room for questions and suggestions from everyone.
To go further
- The product approach, what is it? The News Product Alliance offers the following definition of a product in its glossary:
- « A good media outlet is born from audience needs, not from journalists' desires »: hear Max Leroy's insights from our podcast Chemins.
- A new media outlet applying product culture? Discover our interview with Léry Jicquel, founder of Concentré Vélo, a newsletter about cycling culture news.
- How to build your roadmap? Médianes is initiating a practical guide to learn the method, best practices and establish your roadmap.
