The role of the audience engagement manager is becoming increasingly significant in journalistic organisations due to the growing focus on website visitor data and user needs. Tools like smartocto help translate their ideas into actionable strategies for newsrooms.

In this blog, you will learn:

  • Why the role of audience engagement managers is expanding
  • What an audience engagement manager can contribute to a journalistic organisation
  • Which channels and tools audience engagement managers can use to achieve their goals
  • How the combination of tasks and tools can boost media revenue

We will focus on challenges, solutions and results.

Downloadable playbook

Why the role of audience engagement managers is expanding

Let’s take a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come. Fifteen years ago, media professionals had little insight into their audience’s behaviour on their websites. Then along came Google Analytics, which shifted the focus to pageviews. Over time, other metrics, such as visitor engagement, became more important. Today, media content is evaluated based on its impact.

It makes sense to have someone who connects the dots and translates these insights into actionable workflows.

Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024:

"The role of audience engagement managers in media companies, publishers, and online platforms has grown significantly. As digital media has evolved, engaging audiences through interactive, data-driven, and community-focused strategies has become essential. Engagement managers—sometimes called engagement editors or community managers—now play a crucial role in managing reader relationships, analysing audience behaviour, and fostering discussions across platforms like social media, messaging apps, and blogs."

As an Audience person, I think it’s super important to bring a newsroom closer to audiences. To do so, I look at qualitative evidence, direct from the audiences, and also quantitative data. This is where smartocto comes in: it turns quantitative data into insights which help me understand where our journalism is connecting with audiences, and where more can be done, and it helps me act on the insight to be more valuable to audiences and connect the newsroom to the audiences.

Khalil A. Cassimally Consultant & Head of Special Projects at The Conversation

What can an audience engagement manager do for a journalistic organisation?

Audience engagement managers focus on:

  • Analysing audience behaviour
  • Foster reader/newsroom relationships
  • Increase engagement across all the various channels and platforms

Their tasks often include understanding which content resonates with different audience segments, managing distribution strategies across platforms (social media, newsletters, etc.), and collaborating with editorial, marketing, and product teams to align goals.

Key responsibilities:

  1. Strategic planning
  2. Content curation
  3. Community building
  4. Data-driven decision-making
  5. Cross-platform coordination
  6. Collaboration with marketing and sales
  7. Innovation through technology

Which tools help audience engagement managers achieve their goals?

Managing and sustaining audience engagement is complex, requiring deep insights into audience behaviour. Analytics tools like smartocto are instrumental in this process.

Get in touch

Analyse audience behaviour

It’s complicated. Google Analytics was never meant for anyone other than data analysts - and it’s getting trickier and trickier to extract the learnings that matter.

Find our solutions below. By the way... smartocto’s reports and analytics were designed for newsrooms, by people who’ve worked in newsrooms.

Foster reader / newsroom relationships

How do you know if what you’re doing is hitting the right note?

Our solution: through our multiple user needs-centric tools and features, our Story Life Cycle approach, everything we do is designed to help you take an audience-centric view of what you’re producing. Performance is tracked and benchmarked against yourself, so you can see how your output and your audience responds over time.

The User Needs approach in particular is a bit of a paradigm shift, and will help you think differently about how content resonates.

campaign tracking for audience engagement

Increase engagement across all the various channels and platforms

Engagement across the news and media sector is generally poor. A lot of visitors are fly-bys.

Our solution: You can’t, as they say, manage what you don’t measure. Good data is at the heart of it, and from our analytics we’ve developed a series of actionable notifications which will alert you to make the tweaks and adjustments needed to transform your content and boost the engagement of your readership.

How these efforts and tools can boost media revenue

Journalism and content creation start with a great story, but achieving impact requires much more. Understanding audience needs, timing publications, distributing content across channels, and enhancing site usability all play a role in revenue growth.

Subscription Model

Based on data from hundreds of newsrooms:

  • Top-performing articles generate 10x more subscriptions than the average story and drive 66% of total conversions.
  • Smartocto provides actionable tips for 50% of these top stories.
  • When newsrooms act on 42% of these tips, subscription growth can reach up to 39% per month.

Advertisement Model

Newsrooms that follow 30% of smartocto’s notifications and split-test 20% of homepage teasers see an average uplift of 16% in pageviews.

This will result to:

  • Increased daily visitors, boosting ad revenue.
  • Improved audience acquisition through optimised social media tactics and timing strategies.
  • Enhanced engagement and loyalty through split-testing, better homepage layouts, and newsletter optimisations.

Conclusion

The central role of audience engagement managers, supported by the right tools, is essential for media organisations. Combining strategic actions with tools like smartocto not only enhances engagement but also significantly contributes to revenue growth.