Media Helping Media

A media business is like a table with four legs. The four legs are the media organisation's target audience, the core editorial proposition that it offers to that audience, the market that sustains the business and the values that the business holds dear. Each leg has to be strong and firm. If one leg is weak, the table wobbles. A wobbly media organisation is not good.

Note: The following is written presuming that your media organisation has already drawn up a business plan based on a commercial strategy that will pave the way for a sustainable media operation. Lars Nielsen, who commented on this piece, (see below) is writing a module for this site covering that area.

Leg one - identifying the target audience

First you need to know the profile and needs of your target audience. You can do this by hiring an expensive market research team, or you can use informed guesswork. My preference is informed guesswork. In my experience this works well and the exercise can be carried out in less than a day.

Gather your senior team from editorial, sales and marketing and business development. Try to get your hands on some existing market data; it's likely that the local audience segments have already been identified. If not it's not difficult to work this out.

You then need to focus on three audience segments and super-serve them. This is easiest done by trying to imagine one character that best represents each group. Download a picture from the internet of someone who fits the character profile you want to superserve. The image below is from a slide created while carrying out this excercise in 2010 with a Vietnamese newspaper that was also publishing online and on mobile.

Notice the three green ticks under the three pictures. This helps the news teams decide whether a story should be covered or not. The story must tick at least one of the boxes and must be written with that person's needs in mind. This system is also useful for the ad sales team. They need to ensure that all the adverts they place match the needs of the target audience.

If there are no green ticks don't do the story and don't place the ads.

Ask the following questions:

• What are their interests and what stories would they read?
• What are their concerns - what keeps them awake at night - and what answers do they require?
• What would turn them off - identify the stories they would probably skip?
• What is their lifestyle, are they married, in a relationship, single, have they got children?
• Are you catering for their personal and lifestyle interests?
• What do they buy and what are they unlikely to buy? Make sure you have the right adverts in your output.

Once you have these profiles, circulate them between the editorial and marketing teams. Make sure all understand who they are writing for and on whose behalf they are signing advertising deals. The image below is from a slide created while carrying out this excercise with a Zimbabwe newspaper in 2010.

When this exercise has been completed, print these three character profiles out and stick them on the newsroom and the sales department walls. Make sure that every story is written for these audience groups and uses the language that your target audience is likely to understand. Make sure that every advert placed is for a product they are likely to buy or would like to buy.

Superserving a target audience doesn't mean forgetting the rest. If you serve your target audience properly the rest of your audience will also be served.

Leg two - set out a unique core editorial proposition

The next leg is the core editorial proposition (CEP). Every news organisation must have one. It defines what you offer that nobody else offers, or the way you research and present material that is different from what your competitors are offering. This is your market differential designed to win over the audience groups you are targeting.

And if you think you already have one, think again; changing audience behaviour demands a regular review of what you offer. A CEP that is more than a year old is a museum piece.

In marketing terms, it can be an important process in defining your news brand. In terms of your online and on-the-move properties, defining your CEP also helps you decide what to include and what to leave out. It helps journalists decide how to ensure the online offering adds value and cross-promotes the broadcast or print editions and, in web terms, it will give you a clear navigational structure and avoid confusion and mess later on.

It will offer your audience clarity and comfort as they begin to get to know how to access and use your news on the various devices on which you are delivering your content. Linked with a multiplatform authoring strategy generated from a converged newsroom it will also offer a consistency of editorial message across all outlets.

Social network strategy

As part of the CEP you need to define your social network strategy. It's important you do this because your audience may already be ahead of you and you don't want to appear out of touch and irrelevant. You will need to decide whether and how you use Twitter, Facebook, You Tube for both newsgathering and news dissemination. Too many media businesses fail to think this through when they should be harnessing social networking for the benefit of both the audience and the media business.

A well thought out CEP can take as little as half a day to figure out, jot down, and begin to implement.

You need to ensure your news is distinctive and find ways to make it more so.

Issue-led journalism

Central to all this is carrying out an exercise to identify the issues, themes and stories your news organisation covers that address the concerns and interests of your audience and, in turn, help inform the public debate.

This will create your issue-led journalism strategy that will deliver a wealth of original stories, planned in advance to save resources, and which will give you a news lead and a clear market differential.  The image below is from a slide presentation created with journalists in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, as they worked out a forward planning, issue-led journalism strategy late 2010.

A core editorial proposition that is more than a year old belongs in a museum.

Leg three - the market

Once you know your target audience and have defined your CEP you can start to plan your revenue-generation strategy. As stated before, the sales and marketing team and the business development team should be in on the process of defining the target audience and the editorial proposition. If they are not they will have one hell of a job monetising the content. If they are involved they will have a head start in thinking through their sales and marketing campaigns.

Once you have circulated the profiles of the characters you are going to superserve sales and marketing can get on with the job of building campaigns around those characters.

Leg four - your media organisation's values

Your audience will return if your content ...

• is compelling, well produced, original and distinctive
• addresses the issues that concern them most
• does so in a way that is easy to understand, accessible on multiple devices
• and can be trusted - the integrity of your news organisation is essential.

The ethics that underpin your editorial and business decisions need to be visible in all you do. It is important to set out a code of ethics and ensure that all those who work for you, whether in the newsroom or out in the market, abide by those rules and apply the code of conduct to all their dealings with the public, clients, stakeholders and suppliers.

Most of all have fun - you are creating something unique with a clear market differential that is designed to inform the public debate AND generate revenue in order to be financially sustainable and editorially independent.