Funnel discipline: What success looks and feels like
Douglas K. Smith, Quentin Hope, Tim Griggs, Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative,Each Table Stake requires a fundamental internal organizational shift in orientation. Success manifests itself both internally in skills, attitudes, behaviors and ways of working with one another and externally in how audiences, advertisers, partners, etc., perceive and, then, put a value on your efforts.
This shift can be expressed in a series of “From-To” statements that contrast the current “as is” state with the desired “Table Stakes” state. (These From > To’s depict typical metro newsrooms circa 2016 and convey the dimensions of change required. You and your colleagues can develop your own “from/to’s” to more accurately describe your situation – which, by the way, is a good way to engage folks in identifying paths through transformation.)
Systematically moving users through an audience funnel requires different skills and mindsets. Success looks and feels like the “to” side of the following:
FROM > TO view of success for funneling occasional users to loyalists
| From | To |
| We don’t align business and journalistic goals | Everyone in our enterprise shares common measures of success including, for example, digital subscriptions and maximizing digital ad revenue via such things as higher average eCPMs |
| We do not use any funnel approach at all | We have and use multiple variations on funnel approaches reflecting differing contexts and objectives |
| We use little or no data, or listen to the wrong data | Our newsroom is focused on useful, actionable performance indicators and we track progress over time
We collect, utilize and routinely gain actionable insights about audiences: who they are, what they want/need, what makes them come back, what makes them tick (and click), and how to serve them best |
| We don’t listen to users or use design thinking | Our newsroom embraces user feedback through usability testing, qualitative research (like focus groups and informal listening posts), and quantitative feedback like survey results
Our newsroom understands and uses design thinking – an approach that puts the customer at the center in order to identify and solve customer problems |
| We have a “build it and they will come” mindset | Our newsroom is constantly building, tweaking, revising our product offerings, distribution models, outreach efforts, and how best to reach our target audiences |
| We don’t test | Our newsroom has a rigorous and efficient test-and-learn mentality in everything we create |
| We don’t integrate digital marketing and ecommerce thinking into the design, user experience and functionality of our products | Our enterprise functions less like Newspaper.com and more like Spotify: where programming, product, marketing and design work together in harmony to reach common goals |
| We perform below the minimum threshold required to meet digital audience expectations for such UX things as load times, site navigability and stickiness, etc. | We meet and exceed the minimum threshold required to meet digital audience expectations for such UX things as load times, site navigability and stickiness, etc. |
| We reach too limited a number of news and information hungry members of our community | We reach a significant portion of our prospective audience where they are and when they’re there, including social platforms, other media, and their own products and services |
| We do a lackluster job of encouraging loyalty among our audience(s) | We convert a significant portion of our audience(s) into heavily engaged and loyal users |
| We do a lackluster job of converting loyalists into paying digital subscribers
Rates at which our richly engaged users convert to paying customers fall well below digital standards of 3 to 5% |
Our newsroom successfully converts a significant portion of our heavily engaged users into paying subscribers
Rates at which our richly engaged users convert to paying customers meet or exceed digital standards of 3 to 5% |
| We neither set – nor learn from – objectives for each stage of the funnel | We set goals for each stage of the funnel in order to convert our users to the next stage (and ultimately paying for content) as well as to maximize advertising revenues for each stage
We actively review, draw out lessons and adjust goals based on those lessons for what works and why |