Smartoctober: Keeping your audience engaged when they're all electioed-out

In the final weeks before an election, the challenge is maintaining reader engagement. How do you keep things fresh when the news cycle feels like it’s been dragging on for decades?

In the UK back in 2013, when rumours started to fly that a royal birth was imminent, journalists decamped outside the hospital where the Duchess of Cornwall was due to give birth.

You may have started to notice your audience flagging. In the United States, you could even describe it as chronic political fatigue. Almost two-thirds of participants in a recent Pew poll said they were mostly or always exhausted by politics, and 55 percent reported feeling often or mostly angry.

A local CBS station asked their Facebook community how the election cycle has affected their mental health. The overwhelming sentiment was negative, and one user summed it up in six short words: "Can't wait til it's all over."

Knowing your audiences’ capacity for politics is as important as understanding what subjects they need or want information on. It’s about reading the room and ensuring that what you are putting out on your channels is nourishing your audience, and not the opposite.

In this, our final blog post for Smartoctober 2024 we’re considering the audience in the context of a long campaign. How can you keep them awake and engaged without you feeling completely overwhelmed as well? What can you do in the final throes of the campaign to get readers the information they need?

There are loads of possibilities. But you’re likely suffering from a bit of fatigue yourself at this point. So let’s keep it simple.

1. Think of the big picture
2. Work with what you have
3. Make little changes where you can

And if you haven't heard yet, we've announced our smartoctober webinar on 'How to create constructive content about elections':

Think of the big picture: consider the story life cycle

Whether you’re aware of it or not, every single thing you publish on your news site is the product of your story life cycle. Everything - from how your brand is defined, right on through to the kind of analytics you use post-publication - feeds into this process. Completing one cycle means that you’ll have more information and knowledge to feed into the next, meaning you’ll be continuously learning, iterating, and improving.

Let’s be realistic. In the context of the election, you’re not going to be able to undertake a massive overhaul of your entire content strategy right now. But you absolutely can make small adjustments - and those may have a huge effect. We know that newsrooms that follow up on smartocto notifications, see an uplift in their most important metrics, for example. Small actions have big consequences.

Even a cursory look at this visualisation of the story life cycle should give you an idea of an area that’s in need of more attention from you. Perhaps you don’t usually consider format that deeply. Maybe there’s a disconnect between the balance of your user needs and the roadmap your editorial team has created. It could even be that you habitually create ‘orphans’ - articles that don’t link or get followed up - because you aren’t monitoring analytics or reporting properly.

Do you understand the story life cycle?

Work with what you have: Where’s the follow up?

Don’t orphan your articles. That is, don’t just publish and move on. The audience may be leaving a trail of election-flavoured breadcrumbs in the comment section, and this is a good indication of the angles and questions they still want answers to. Take this thorough, interactive piece from this week’s Washington Post. At the time of writing, the comments section was already quite lively. Among the messages of support, derision or fatigue, there were also a few comments saying much the same thing:

Maybe these comments are worth following up? Maybe they aren’t. The point is, the comments section is another way to see where readers’ blind spots, interests and confusion lies.

Make little tweaks where you can: in praise of A/B tests

Again, keeping to the theme of making small changes, consider testing elements of your output. The obvious one here is the humble A/B test. These can make a massive difference, so any effort you make to perform them is time well spent. Here’s a quick-start guide:

Keep it simple

Basically, the clue’s in the name (it’s never been a/b/c/d/e/f testing, after all). Your first task is to come up with alternatives to the headline, teaser or image that you already have.

A few more tips about creating better A/B tests (particularly useful when you’re working against the ticker)

• Make use of emotive words. If there’s emotion in the headline, more people are eager to read the story.
• Don’t use question marks too much. It’s better to give the answer. ‘This is what a good A/B test looks like’ works better than ‘what does a good A/B test look like?’
• Use pronouns to speak to your audience. We can improve the example of the previous tip: ‘This is what you should do to make better A/B tests’.
• Be super concrete and detailed. Not: Man dies after car crash, but: ‘Juan (44) died after a bridge collapsed on his car in Madrid’.

See it in action

Doing an A/B test shouldn’t be hard. Smartocto now is able to even let AI help you with suggestions. See how it works in the video below.

It should come as no great surprise that a company like ours just loves the process and mechanics of A/B testing. But it’s not just for data nerds. It’s really interesting to see how response rates differ with a few small changes.

Don’t just take the A/B test at face value. What else is it telling you? Take the above example:

1. The winning headline puts the emphasis on people, not ‘the economy’. Do people reading here find it easier to relate when an article is framed around how something big affects individuals?
2. The second example is specific: it’s talking about a sector. The first is much more general. Is there not enough focus?
3. Does the composition of the image mean something? A straight-to-camera photograph is much more human than a room full of people.

Depending on how your own brand DNA is wired, you will likely extract similar learnings from any A/B tests that you chose to run.

• What trends do they reveal?
• Do any patterns emerge about your winning headlines, teasers or images - or combinations of these elements?

We hope you’ve got all the tools and energy you need to go into those final weeks. To quote legendary journalist, Edward R. Murrow, good night and good luck!