How to come up with growth hacks via user needs

The fact that the Reuters Institute has dedicated an entire chapter to the User Needs Model 2.0 in its recently published Digital News Report is confirmation that this is something worth spending time with. And, a great way for publishers to start, is by using the model to run growth hacks.

If you’re being data-driven about your work, the key question is always “what works well - and what doesn't?” But in order to answer that, there’s an even more important question to ask: what is your definition of 'good'?

The answer to this should align with your journalistic mission. Do you aim to provide a certain audience with context on the news, to move people emotionally, or to help readers make choices in their daily lives? In all of these cases, you can start to measure impact by looking at the extent to which these types of stories are widely read (pageviews) and well-read (attention time).

From here, you can assess your strengths and see if you can produce more from the user needs that perform well and less from those that don't resonate with your audience. For a newsroom, this is an excellent way to self-reflect. In the graph below (showing analysis from a client of smartocto), we can see that a significant amount of 'Update me' and 'Educate me' content was produced, but median pageviews were in fact higher for five other user needs.

Additionally, engagement was higher for needs other than the most commonly produced ones.

And so to the growth hacks…

This brings us to the phenomenon of growth hacks (simply adjustments that lead to growth). This was a successful growth hack for this news site. The newsroom took action, and it paid off.

The hack: create more emotion-driven content ('Inspire me') and fewer news updates ('Update me')

The proportion of 'Update me' stories decreased from 33% to 23%. While there was little to no growth in median pageviews, a clear and better balance was achieved. However, as is often the case, pageviews aren't the only metric to consider. The beauty of this project is that attention time notably increased by 29% on average.

Steps to achieve Growth Hacks

The User Needs Model 2.0 offers opportunities to focus on the right growth hacks – the changes journalists implement in their daily work to achieve growth. Here are three steps to develop effective 'hacks':

1. Create a baseline report based on user needs
   
   Recently, smartocto, together with FT Strategies in the 'User Needs Labs' programme, presented baseline reports for nine journalistic titles worldwide. These reports are based on 1,000 articles, and from these you can determine if your goals are being met. If you aren't yet tagging stories at the user need level, artificial intelligence can help categorise historical articles.
   
2. Identify opportunities in the presented data
   
   You might be satisfied with the balance on your website based on the analysis and see that loyal visitors are well-served. But are you attracting enough new visitors? Which user needs offer the most potential to attract new visitors? Look for opportunities to implement improvements. Focusing more on the quality of the type of stories that best achieve your objectives can be a good choice. As shown below, for this particular client action-driven and context-driven content is most read by new visitors.

3. Keep the growth hack small, start with one section

If you want to see significant improvements, you might be tempted to involve the newsroom and aim for overall better performance. Experience shows that this can be a laborious process, and it would be a shame if the user needs method doesn't get enough chance to prove itself.

Start with one section. As shown below, the 'culture' section produces no action-driven content, although it is an ideal subject for service-oriented stories. Which books should I read or which films are worth seeing in the cinema? How can I still get concert tickets for the Bruce Springsteen concert? Try implementing simple growth hacks in that one section to demonstrate to the rest of the editorial teams that they should also adopt this approach.

This story was first published on INMA.org