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Episode 20 - Part 1: Creating content that will engage with your target audience
140 Plays2 years ago
Nigel Lewis joins us for episode 20 discussing everything content and how you can better engage your audience.
Nigel is Head of Content at The Negotiator, an industry magazine focused on the estate agency sector. The Negotiator provides a daily newsletter and a monthly magazine.
Nigel writes for a number of other outlets as a freelancer and has an extensive career in creating newsworthy content.
In part 1 we look at:
📝 How to write to suit your audience
📱 Understanding how your content is being consumed
📊 Measuring the success of your content
📣 Standing out in the noise of content
🎨 The importance of personality in your content
📰 Headlines versus your main article
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Transcript
Introduction to Survey Booker Sessions
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Survey Booker Sessions. Tune in to hear from people working in a range of industries and roles to provide you ideas that you can take away and use in your own business. I'm your host Matt Nally, the founder and director of Survey Booker, which is the leading CRM and survey management system for surveyors.
Meet Nigel Lewis
00:00:15
Speaker
So on this week's episode, we have Nigel Lewis, who's the head of content at The Negotiator. So thanks for coming on today. Pleasure. Nice to be with you here digitally.
00:00:24
Speaker
I believe you're somewhere very nice at the moment. I am in France, so it's a bit hot. Robert, it's been raining a lot here.
The Negotiator's Editorial Focus
00:00:35
Speaker
Do you want to introduce yourself and what your role at The Negotiator is? Yeah, so as mentioned, Nigel Lewis, Head of Content at The Negotiator, I lead the editorial team that does the news for the website and I am the editor nominally of The Print Magazine and so we have a very busy day, he's doing both.
00:00:55
Speaker
Awesome, awesome. And the negotiators focused on sort of sales and lettings predominantly, is that right? Yeah, so property management, sales, lettings, some planning, lots of politics, bit of gossip.
Visual Appeal and Professionalism
00:01:10
Speaker
I have to say I'm signed up to it myself. So I get the, you know, the newsletter each day and I enjoy going through those. It's always interesting to see what's going on in the market generally. Yeah, I suppose with
00:01:22
Speaker
You know the negotiator and so on there are obviously a couple of other outlets within I suppose the estate agency world How do you I suppose stand out in the market and differentiate yourself?
00:01:36
Speaker
So we always set out to be more of a visual feast for readers. So we lead on pictures probably more significantly than our competitors. We try and be less tabloid, I think it'd be fair
Print vs. Online Engagement
00:01:54
Speaker
to say. So we try and be the some CEOs material
00:02:00
Speaker
But nevertheless, that doesn't mean that we will report on some more scurrilous elements of the industry. And also we are, you know, because we have a background originally as a magazine, a print magazine. So that's the way that website went, which is a differentiator in this market. Yes, I guess it's interesting because I know that you have the magazine coming out regularly. Is that something that
00:02:25
Speaker
you see a very different engagement with in terms of the, you know, how people interact with that versus sort of the general day-to-day online content. Yeah, I mean, it is very different.
00:02:38
Speaker
I guess most people who subscribe to the magazine are getting it towards the end of the month. They are probably going to sit down with a cup of tea in a quiet moment, whereas the very competitive environment for online news is all published at midnight or very early in the morning and is consumed by probably half nine, ten o'clock by most people.
00:03:01
Speaker
Most of the traffic comes in the early time when people are on the train, I suspect, probably first in the quiet period before they start their daily work as a property industry sort of person. They're going to check the news and just see what's going on. If anything major happens, it's going to affect their daily job. And that's a very different set.
Targeting Audience Demographics
00:03:22
Speaker
from a magazine environment where you're looking for advice and you're looking for opinions and you're looking for people in the industry being interviewed. That's just a very different type of media. Yeah interesting and I know you said you focus on sort of less tabloidy style writing and then sort of you know CEO level. How does that affect how you position content then? I suppose there's two different ways of
00:03:50
Speaker
I suppose more than two ways, but there are multiple ways of writing an article that you find gets engagement. There are indeed. No, there are indeed. And I think it's all about imagining yourself in the role of the reader, particularly the online stuff. So you have to go what your target reader you're trying to get through your headline and your first paragraph,
00:04:15
Speaker
and you're going, how do I get to them? How do I get their attention, get them to read this article? So you're trying to get into their head and go, what does someone who's a branch manager, regional manager, CEO, chief executive, whatever, that sort of level, how do they think and how do they view what's going on in the industry? And then you have to model what you're writing around those assumptions. And their assumption is born of
00:04:39
Speaker
Meeting these people relatively regularly at industry batches and you ask them what they think of stuff and you can see that they think very differently about.
00:04:47
Speaker
the more strategic goings on in the industry than probably a junior negotiator who's more interested to know if junior negotiators like him have been caught, you know, street driving.
Timing Newsletters Effectively
00:04:59
Speaker
It's a different sort of setup. But even if you were to cover a story like that, like a young state agent caught during driving, you still, you're writing it from the perspective of the more senior person looking down on that and going,
00:05:13
Speaker
you know, whereas the, you know, some other media we that we compete with, including the nationals to a certain extent, who also report on stuff we do, they will also, they tend to be a bit more tabloid about how they approach it. And they're more appealing to, they're just appealing to a slightly different audience within the industry. So that's, that's, you know, you can't have all of us going for the same readers, we will have to differentiate a little bit. Definitely, definitely. And I suppose one thing I'm interested in, and you may not want to comment on this, but is
00:05:42
Speaker
timing quite important because I noticed sometimes the newsletter when it comes out changes from maybe an earlier time to sort of not late morning but you know more office at the start of office hours. Does that have quite an impact on engagement as well? That is perfectly right comment on it. It is quite crucial. I think all of the different media who serve this industry experimented initially in the early days of digital
00:06:09
Speaker
with different timings and it was trying lunchtime. So you're just trying to get the reader when they've got a spare moment. So that day's news so far at lunchtime, was it an evening wrap-up? Is it an early morning breaking news scenario? And I think we've all settled from this fact that probably the sweet spot is sometime between 6am and around 8.30am is when most agents are either in traffic
00:06:40
Speaker
on trains, sat at their breakfast table, in the office, sat in a boring meeting. You know what I mean? That's the daily catch-up meeting. But also, I do know one of the publishers of the other media, and he was, you know, we had a chat
Measuring Engagement Consistency
00:06:57
Speaker
about it once over at Drake.
00:06:59
Speaker
and he was sort of saying that for them it was all about trying to get people who want to look like they're informed about the industry for the morning catch up because if you go to most of the stations you'll see it
00:07:12
Speaker
sort of around about 8 o'clock, 8.30, especially at Foxton's. I always remember Foxton's are famous for their early morning meetings. They'd all be stood there having a catch up, like what's happened today? Where are we with these sales? All that sort of stuff. But also, you know, the manager would like to go, by the way, have you just the government's just announced this? So we need to bear that in mind when you're talking to potential vendors, you know, that sort of stuff. So so that I think we've all settled for the fact that after much experimentation, we've settled on sort of that time frame. And I'm guessing one other aspect that's important to
00:07:42
Speaker
establish your or maintain as well your position in the market is consistency with posting because obviously the newsletters are every day, the magazine monthly. Do you find whenever that slips or maybe it doesn't slip because obviously you're very established but maybe earlier on does that have quite an impact on then engagement the next time because people are expecting something at a certain point?
00:08:09
Speaker
That's really hard to tell, not because I'm being evasive, but because Google Analytics is an incredibly opaque platform on which to work out where your traffic comes from. You can tell that a percentage of your readers are coming back, but you can't tell which ones and you can't tell
00:08:29
Speaker
So you could be having massive churn, but new readers coming back and some of them revisiting you. It's hard also because people tend to use their personal mobile phones to read our stuff, but also use the company phone and then also use the PC at work. So it's very hard to know what a real person is and whether they've returned to see your content or not is the answer to that one. But certainly, probably one of the major
00:08:58
Speaker
performance indicators for me is what percentage of our readers are returning because obviously if we're rubbish then not many of them are returning.
Relevancy and Audience Understanding
00:09:08
Speaker
So you're very keen to see that at least 50% of your readers are coming back. Yeah I think that ties into a general I suppose KPI point which is it's important to look at the right metrics not the vanity metrics in order to understand.
00:09:26
Speaker
yeah and it's again analytics is annoying or whatever the new the new version of analytics is now called I can't remember but you know what I mean the um it's very it's very easy to claim massive reads but you really have no idea whether they're your target audience or not and that that applies to anyone publishing anything whether it's a state agent publishing their own blog or whether it's
00:09:48
Speaker
the negotiator trying to appeal to sales and letting agents. It's very hard because you don't know. The rule of thumb, I suppose, is to get the highest reads possible because then you're hoping that amongst those, you have the highest percentage of your target audience within that. But at the moment, Google doesn't let you know. I suspect they'll start charging us a lot of money one day for telling us that. But at the moment, you can't find out.
00:10:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's very interesting. Yeah, it makes them educated guesses, I suppose, within that. It is very much about educated guess. And it's interesting because in the old days you had ABC with print magazines and you knew exactly how many people read it and it was qualified and measured. But with online, that's all gone out the window. That's interesting because you'd expect, ironically, well, I would expect it to be the other way around where it's easier to track. You would. I can see why it isn't actually from what you said.
00:10:41
Speaker
Yeah, except because unless you go to a subscription model like the Times, Telegraph, what have you, no, FT, sorry, you know, they've taken the very brave decision to go, well, we will qualify it because we've got 400,000 readers and we can say they're all timed readers.
00:10:57
Speaker
But in a very competitive market like ours where everyone's free, you're a brave publisher to go down the route of charging for your content. There's been lots of discussions about that. I know all the different platforms. And there's like prime content maybe. They charge only for breaking news, all this sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, if your competitors are offering the same, more or less same service for free, it's very hard.
00:11:23
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That's a very interesting point. And I imagine that's a whole topic on its own. I think one thing I was really interested to discuss with you today is we live in a world now where it's very easy for anyone to post content, whether it's video, written, whatever. Ultimately, what makes a good news story? So when does something become newsworthy versus just noise?
00:11:50
Speaker
I think, certainly when I was taught at college, which is still true today, thankfully, is that you have to publish content which is the most relevant to the target audience you're going
Crafting Newsworthy Stories
00:12:06
Speaker
for.
00:12:06
Speaker
and the generally speaking you get fewer reads if your stories and particularly headlines and intros are not appealing to their day-to-day interests and worries and this is why you know the Telegraph is very right-wing newspaper, Times is sort of middle ground newspaper, Guardian is left because they've
00:12:28
Speaker
they have refined that down to a very clever art of appealing to the type of leadership they want to attract to their newspaper. And it's sort of an appeal, sorry, it's an applies rather to
00:12:41
Speaker
trade magazines like ours and websites like ours equally which is you have to sit down and go if you were a sales agent or branch manager you know you have different interests in life sales agents are interested in what consumers probably think and how much therefore how much commission they'll make every week whereas a branch manager is much more worried about I don't know how much he pays his staff and
00:13:07
Speaker
and talent retention and KPIs around how much their commission is going to be. But they have much wider interest than that. But it's that sort of thinking through that you have to do. And certainly the other
00:13:23
Speaker
The other consideration in this market is to add your own personality, which goes back to what we were saying at the beginning, that each media platform has its own particular feel about it. And that's how you write the headlines and the editorial line you take on stuff. And then you attract people who are interested in that sort of angle that you're taking. And that's where headlines, headlines probably online now the most important thing ever. And whereas when I started out
00:13:53
Speaker
uh you know on the daily mail they weren't that important they were more interested in your getting intro right whereas because the headline is so visible online um the uh the whole clickbait thing is very very important because people will make a snap decision on whether they click on the story based on your headline on nothing else whereas in the old days you'd open a page and go probably you probably ignore the headline to a certain extent go to the first paragraph and go is this story what
00:14:20
Speaker
I'm interested in or what appeals to my prejudice is and then off you go. Whereas no one reads first paragraphs any longer. So that's interesting. Yeah, so that must be quite tough because I suppose there's two things there now. I suppose one is the grabbing the attention because obviously people are so used to scrolling generally on different apps. But the other is a lot of people I think are
00:14:45
Speaker
generally because of the amount of stuff they scrolled in through are quite happy to take the headline as gospel and not go and see whether the clickbait headline actually is backed up by the content behind it.
00:14:56
Speaker
I agree entirely with you, therefore you have to walk this tightrope between making the headline as appealing as possible in a crowded market without misleading the reader who will get really annoyed if he or she or they arrive on your website and it's not quite what you were promising in the headline. But obviously all the old journalistic rules still apply, which is getting the story first will get more clicks, so exclusivity and scoops and that sort of stuff.
00:15:24
Speaker
And also, I'm afraid, despite this is my favourite dinner party conversation with people, is that everyone goes, I'm so depressed by journalism, it's all bad things happening to people. And you go because you get four times, five times, six times more clicks on any story. You know, if it's a story about a big estate agency having won an award, you get, you know, X thousand clicks. But if you get
00:15:49
Speaker
If it's the same estate agency, it's been discovered they have a racism problem within their HR department. You'll get 10,000 clicks. Do you see what I mean? I'm afraid that is true because although people present at dinner parties as being loving, they're positive in life. In reality, vast majority of people click on stories about other human beings making mistakes. End of.
00:16:14
Speaker
I agree with that and it's consistent with every type of news you read or watch. That's what drives interest. Yeah, and these rules you apply as you go along.