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Our top 10 audience development tips from 2024

Last updated: December 20, 2024

Working on your 2025 audience development strategy? Want to learn how businesses like yours are thinking about data, AI and audience engagement? 

This year, we were lucky enough to learn from some of the smartest people in media, like Jacob Donnelly of A Media Operator and Dan Oshinsky of Inbox Collective, Marissa Zanetti-Crume of Bloomberg Media, Tim Huelskamp of 1440, and many more.  

So as we approach the new year, we summarized some of their best advice on first-party data strategies, email and marketing automation, and media industry trends. Read on for their best advice on how to build your media business in 2025 and beyond: 

Stay ahead and read our Q3 2024 email engagement report to uncover trends & best practices for success:

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1. “Know your audience.” It’s an easy thing to put on a pitch deck, but anyone drowning in their datasets know it’s much harder to put in practice. So how, tactically, how can email senders get the data they need to build and better serve their newsletter audiences? 

In January, we asked Inbox Collective’s Dan Oshinsky about overlooked engagement tactics, the importance of data in understanding your audience, and missed opportunities in the email space. Here are some highlights from that talk: 

“Usually, I tell teams that they’re trying to triangulate the right strategy between three different perspectives,” he said. That includes: 

• Internal team insights: “What does your team know about your audience? What are they seeing from their own experiences?” 
• Audience research: What does your audience say they want? Oshinsky recommends using surveys, direct conversions and other research tools to identify those topics. 
• Audience behavior: There’s a gulf between what people say they want and what they actually engage with and respond to, Oshinsky said. So combine direct audience feedback with empirical engagement data. 

There’s no single formula to create the perfect email strategy. But by combining these three elements, you can identify key topics, develop a voice and engage your audience.  

“We’re trying to pair what we know about what the audience does and what they say with internal insights. Somewhere in the middle is the right place for us to build engagement and launch products.”

2. Many senders are missing easy opportunities to engage and sustain their email audiences. 

We also asked Oshinsky what easy wins are senders are missing. 

Take advantage of your automations. Take a closer look at your automations — your welcome emails, renewal emails, post-purchase emails, etc. They’re a key touchpoint for every organization, but most organizations overlook them in favor of subscription or lead generation campaigns. And they miss out on important engagement, activation opportunities as a result.

“[Organizations] are sending out a great subscription strategy and then the automations are kind of an afterthought,” Oshinsky said. “They’re put together at the last second and we have to send it when someone makes a purchase. But it’s a really important touchpoint for your audience.” 

Run surveys to learn more about your audience. “Every org I talk to could do more to figure out what their audience cares about and build newsletters and products around that,” Oshinsky said. (Pst: That’s why we integrate with CredSpark, a no-code poll and survey builder.) 

Don’t be afraid to have a voice: Oshinsky recommends taking a note from independent newsletter operators, who have been able to build, engage and monetize huge audiences on the strength of their personality.  

“We’re seeing so many newsletters from the independent space where writers are putting their voice right there at the front,” he said. “So many legacy publishers could lean more into adding voice and personality into their newsletters and automations.” 

Double down on personalization. Curate and individualize experiences for your audience, whether it’s creating niched newsletters for specific audiences or target audience members one to one. 

“Launching products at specific audiences is a form of personalization, even if it’s not recommending five products based specifically on something you’ve told us,” he said. “Or you can drill down and say, we want to customize specifically for you. Either approach is OK. But I’d love to see more teams figure out their personalization strategy.” 

If you’ve ever read Inbox Collective, you know Oshinsky’s got a lot more where that came from. Check out our full conversation with him in our Q1 2024 Email Engagement Report and learn more about his services on Inbox Collective. 

3. Most media organizations are prioritizing growth at the expense of engagement — and that’s a missed opportunity. 

Over the last decade, many media operators (and their investors) have chased scale above all else. But that playbook’s obsolete now that referral traffic from search and social has dropped. Instead of chasing new names at all costs, media teams need to focus on engaging and nurturing their core audience. 

As James Capo, our CEO, said in a June webinar with The Rebooting and The Guardian, “We’re seeing a move back from the traffic era to understanding the audience — and that the audience and the data equals revenue. That’s a clear path to us that we see. And some of our more progressive clients have really leaned into the understanding and the activation around their audience.”  

“In our most recent State of Audience Report, 70% of respondents said, ‘I want to grow the audience size,’ but only 25% said that engagement was a top priority. So everyone’s out there trying to get more, more and more more, but a lot of folks, or at least only 25% of them, are actually thinking about engagement and how you are going deep with the audience you have.” 

“The clients that we work with in the industry that are really focused on that I think are the ones that are going to win.” 

4. Organize your audience strategy around one simple, easily measurable North Star metric. 

Everyone knows they need to incorporate data into their decision-making. But for many teams, the problem is choosing which data points to optimize for. 

Ease decision-making and ensure full team buy-in by choosing a simple, easily defined North Star metrics, as Emilie Harkin, SVP of Growth at the Guardian, told us in June (listen to the full session here). 

So what makes a good North Star metric? “Multiple people around the organization need to understand what the metric is — and how they can improve it.” 

For Harkin and her team, that metric was frequency — the number of unique browsers engaging with Guardian content in a 31 day period. With such a clearly defined metric,  each team could easily understand the goal they were shooting for, as well as different ways they could reach it.  

“The area that I play in, where it comes to growth and reader revenue, is deepening things with app downloads and newsletter signups and so forth. But we have this ability to have a centralized objective for the entire company that people can use the tools and expertise that they have to run at and try and effect,” she added. 

“Our team’s not asking, ‘How do I get an engagement score to go from 2.5 to 3.5?’ They’re saying, ‘We know we want to get people to 10 visits or a frequency score of 10 in a 31 day period.’ It’s very clear. And I think that’s essential.” 

5. Choosing the right audience development tools is only the first step. From there, leaders need to intentionally and transparently lead implementation across teams.

Audience development increasingly lives and dies by your tech stack. But the work doesn’t stop once you pick the “right” tools. Implementation requires a lot of time nad labor from multiple tools, and if they’re not bought in, that new tech will turn into a budget black hole fast.

To avoid this, leaders need to pay just as much attention to implementation. 

“You’ve got to contextualize for your teams why you’re buying this technology and what you’re going to do with it,” Robert Dippell, the COO of Morning Brew, said in a webinar with Jacob Donnelly, Sean Griffey and Ariscielle Novicio of New York Post. “A lot of times, we get excited and run at buying new tech or building new things and they’re very exciting.” 

“You get so much more internal support and you also orient your people to have lots of meetings that you’re not a part of where they collectively know what we’re working towards and why all this work they’re doing is so important over the months it takes to do migrations and data cleanups and product roadmap meetings, etc.” 

6. Don’t just collect the same six data points as your competitors. Use your audience needs to decide what data points will be most valuable and predictive for your team. 

If you’re marketing to CFOs, company size or industry is a highly predictive data point. But if you’re marketing to content creators, annual revenue might be more important. So data points need to be specific to each person’s industry, Dippell said in the same June webinar. 

“The hard answer is you should actually look to collect nuanced first-party data points by vertical,” he said. “So if you’re asking the same exact questions to HR versus cybersecurity, you’re missing out on some really important data points.”

Another way to think about it: Imagine the kind of content that’ll continue to engage your core audience. Then think backwards — identify what information will help you create that content, then collect the data points you need to get that information. 

“How would I use certain data points unique to this industry to either provide them content that helps them more? Or be able to speak to an advertiser about drilling down to that level that makes them more excited to work with us?” Dippell said. 

Organizations should agree on some standard data points to inform base-level targeting, then collect more vertical-specific metrics to inform more individual targeting, he added. 

“Then you need to decide what your base level data points are going to be and hopefully have some consistency across the whole portfolio so that you can kind of expand and construct.”

“If you have somebody who wants to go across everything horizontally, you have some common points to do that, but then you can also go deep within a certain vertical and serve them.” 

For Sean Griffey, then the CEO of Industry Dive, the question isn’t what data points you should prioritize. It’s how to maintain your data integrity and quality as you expand into more verticals and generate more hyper-specific data. 

“The real trick isn’t what demographic do you want, but how are we going to structure the data and how are we going to be able to use those structures long term? I would spend as much time on that as I would thinking about the exact field I need.” 

7. There’s no substitute for actually talking to your audience. 

In November, Marissa Zanetti-Crume, Global Head of Product of Bloomberg Media, joined us and A Media Operator to talk about how Bloomberg’s used their audience data to drive more revenue and create more audience-first experiences. (See the full session here.) 

In the session, Zanetti-Crume talked about how she and her team have made several homepage improvements based on their engagement data, she said. 

“We noticed a good percentage of our subscribers are actually spending time on the homepage, which might be a bit of an anomaly for a lot of other sites,” Zanetti-Crume said. “Then it was a question of what they were clicking on our current homepage.”

But none of it would’ve been possible without actually talking to their audience. Once they saw the data, they talked to their customers to see how they could further optimize their homepage experience. 

“That really helped inform our homepage, which was focused on making it easier for people to understand what was breaking news, what was market breaking news, thinking about how we sort of tie together better our coverage across a news story.” 

One example is the US presidential election, she said. Bloomberg readers are really focused on how the election will impact the market, which takes many particular articles involving specific nuances and context.

“How do we show the context of why all those, the coverage helps ’em understand that? And so from that, we started to understand, okay, ‘How is subscriber behavior changing now that we’ve made those updates to our homepage?’ And so this is where data really is a constant.” 

This needs to be a continuous process, she added, using engagement data to inform product changes, then returning to the data to evaluate your process and iterate as needed. 

“We started out with us understanding how people are spending time on our site. We talked to our consumers, and we launched a new homepage. And now, we’ve returned back to the data now that we’ve launched — what are we seeing in this data?” 

Their key discovery this time: A core part of their homepage page was engaging with a newsfeed of all published articles, located below the fold of the site. This told Zanetti-Crume that a sizable part of the audience was willing to scroll down to find everything Bloomberg’s published. 

“We noticed that for this little module that was below the fold that people had to scroll to, people were engaging with that at higher rates,” Zanetti-Crume said. “So again, there’s that data point around engagement, what do we do next? 

From there, their product managers are thinking about the user need that the newsfeed module solves for people and trying to build on it. And they’ve developed the module to make it even more useful. “So now we have the option to click through and you can see everything that’s latest, and you can filter by it.” 

8. Good publishers use data to guide content. But the best ones use it to inform new features and create audience-centric experiences.

Bloomberg’s fortunate to have an audience that engages with them across a variety of channels and content types, Zanetti-Crume said. So the editorial team’s got a strong foundation of engagement data to inform their hunches. 

“Traditionally people are coming when something is happening in the world, and reading about how it’s going to impact technology, it’s going to impact regulation, it’s going to impact politics, it’s going to impact global policies. So we’ve got an organization or a user base that’s really consuming content across the breadth of what we cover.” 

“The analytics around that is really important,” Zanetti-Crume said, “And we want to understand not just what the headline is of a particular story of what’s happening in the world, but the kinds of stories that are resonating with users.” 

That’s informed the work that their newsroom is doing, Zanetti-Crume said. They’re not just reading their reports to see what topics work. They’re also asking themselves what kind of packaging and features make it easier to consume their content overall. 

That’s helped the editorial team experiment with new, interactive content types more strategically. “So how do we think about lists, graphics, or deep dives into wealth that resonate really well with our customer base?” 

“Then we have audiences who are asking more basic questions like, ‘What is the yield curve? What is this thing? Help me understand this.’ And so you start to see we have more content that’s a little bit more in the vein of an explainer.” 

And from there, the editorial team’s begun to combine content types to deliver informative, but more accessible, coverage of their stories. That’s especially important for Bloomberg, which covers economic news requiring a lot of context and nuance. 

“Our newsroom does a great job of thinking about, ‘Here’s a story that happened today — it’s really complex. Here’s the explainer that’s going to help you understand it,’” Zanetti-Crume said. “Data is not just informing how we’re writing stories and how we’re reporting, but also how we’re packaging content together.” 

9. Build data literacy and comfort across your organization by using a crawl-walk-run approach 

Many media teams are modernizing or rethinking their data strategies for 2025. If you’re in this position, start small and optimize for one or two key metrics, Marissa Zanetti-Crume, Global Head of Product of Bloomberg Media, said in a November webinar with us and AMO. Otherwise, you’ll fall victim to analysis by paralysis. 

“Think about one question that you have that you can answer with data. Answer that question — What’s one metric that you want your organization to really rally around?” 

A progressive approach will help you become more comfortable with data, answer your most important questions, and form the infrastructure you need to enable the use of data throughout your organization.

“By starting small, you’re going to start to get more comfortable with your data. You’re going to start to learn what are the tools that you need to enable your organization through that data? And is it training? Is it tooling? What do you actually need to allow people to use that data?” 

“One of the things that is really great about Bloomberg is that we’re using data day in and day out to make decisions, to have discussions about how we should decide to move things forward, even if it’s the smallest feature or if we’re thinking about broader strategies that we want to tackle.” 

That’ll help you advocate for data-driven decision making throughout your organization.  

“Building that muscle of using data in those conversations is going to be really important. Once you start to do that and people get comfortable with it, then you’ll have some tangible examples of, ‘Hey, we had this data, we made this decision and this is what we saw and the numbers, and it was net positive.’ You start to get more people, wanting to engage with data, wanting to inform themselves with the data. And so it just kind of moves it forward, but just starting and figuring it out I think is the most important thing.”

10. Your company might need a Chief Audience Officer 

Right now, most media companies say they’re maintaining or increasing their audience investment. But 65% of them don’t have a formal audience development plan, according to our State of Audience Report. 

There are a lot of reasons for this. But chief among them is that there’s nobody at the top of the organization that’s solely responsible for growing, developing and engaging the audience. 

Intuitively, that makes sense. After all, everyone in media answers to the audience, right? 

But each team is working toward their own goals, operating off their dashboards and optimizing for their own pet metrics. Even if everyone’s got the same data, each team’s coming into the exercise with their own ideas of what works and what doesn’t — and they’re incentivized to work toward different definitions of success.

(Try for yourself: Ask five different people what “engagement” means or, better yet, how they’d measure it. Chances are that you’re getting five very different answers.) 

In this case, hiring a Chief Audience Officer is like addition by subtraction. When one person’s responsible for setting and monitoring audience development goals, they can help the organization settle on a single vision and, more importantly, a single set of metrics that’ll define success or failure in achieving that vision. 

This way, teams aren’t chasing shiny objects that may or may not deliver an audience. Instead, they can find and work toward tactics that ladder up to the organization’s single audience goal. 

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