A prominent media outlet commissioned 181st Street to design and implement a strategy that would double their readership within 12 months.
As an established organisation, the client was able to provide a wealth of analytics data from their website, social media, digital marketing and online presence, which our demographics team used to assess who was currently engaging with the news site and how.
Our researchers analysed the wider news landscape, consumer trust and levels and methods of engagement with news content and media outlets, based on cutting-edge research from Reuters Institute and the University of Oxford.
They combined this with a detailed competitor analysis exploring brand positioning, content, online presence, SEO and digital audience engagement of similar-sized media organisations and several large market leaders, to identify competitor strengths and potential opportunities for growth.
We then used this research to create several micro-targeted audiences based on detailed demographic and psychographic information, which would allow the client to widen the age ranges they were attracting without losing their core existing audience.
This formed the basis of our growth strategy.
Our designers undertook a brand refresh and introduced a new, more modern, vibrant colour palette with on-trend neons, optimised for mobile engagement with news, and specifically designed for maximum cut-through on social media and mobile devices in dark mode.
PEW Research Centre found that more than eight-in-ten US adults (86%) get their news from a digital device, and as 81.9% of people use the dark mode on their phones, this brand refresh was designed to increase engagement by stopping people in their scroll.
Our UX experts restructured the site and recategorised the content based on analysis of the current user journey and the demographic data, which identified specific content categories that were highly likely to garner more engagement from target audience groups.
We facilitated an expansion into lifestyle content to widen the readership base, increase engagement beyond news, meet audience expectations (as determined by the demographic research) and increase both time on site and pages per visit.
With the brand refresh, new content and improved UX in place, we then designed a full social media strategy designed to increase brand recall, engagement and maximise click-through rate.
The organisation already had a strong presence and significant audience on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and we widened this to include YouTube, TikTok and LinkedIn, in line with the new micro-targeted audience groups.
Our creative team produced an extensive library of video content to support ongoing sharing of evergreen lifestyle and business-focused content, with the aim of maximising social engagement and dwell-time in social newsfeed – a key factor in algorithm discoverability.
We implemented a category-based social sharing system, allowing the client to scale up frequency of high-performing content, and quickly pivot to cover key topics during awareness days and key political moments, so they could jump on trending topics and achieve greater cut-through.
Our social team scheduled and ran all social channels for an initial 3 month testing period while we optimised the strategy and content and trained the client’s in-house team for long term channel management and content creation.
Within this 3 month optimisation period, we increased the average number of link clicks received per day on Twitter by 250%, and by creating highly shareable content in a conversational style, we increased mentions by 54.5% and profile views by 37.9%.
Within 6 months, year-on-year visitors were up by a monthly average of 80% and year-on-year page views were up 130%, with the site experiencing a 79% total audience growth quarter-to-quarter.
We were recommissioned by the client in July 2023 to establish their presence on Meta’s Threads, update and optimise their content library and manage their Threads presence while the social platform was too new for scheduling tools.
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