Story Life Cycle

What exactly is the Story Life Cycle that you see us mention here and there?? It’s great that you’ve landed on this page, because this is the place to get a brief overview.

At the core of the newsroom is the story. Your aim is to amplify that story. Our mission is to help you do that.

The Story Life Cycle© is a framework that helps you see the creation, publication and review of content as an ongoing process. It encourages you to think holistically about what, how and why you publish, and the learnings of each cycle feed back into the next. And, because it was developed by us, smartocto, it’s not just a nice idea. These stages are supported by world-class editorial analytics, user needs processes, newsroom-friendly tools and features, and actionable notifications.

It’s an ongoing process that will help you grow relevance, attention, loyalty and all the good things your business strives for.

Phase 1: Define

A question we often ask newsrooms is: what would happen to your audience if you ceased to exist tomorrow? What will they miss? This question should lead your newsroom to identify what makes your specific news site unique. Is there a clear mission statement to guide journalists in selecting stories and choosing a unique angle? Based on these questions, you should be able to identify a distinctive mix and balance of user needs, which the user needs model will help you define.

Phase 2: Discover

Armed with your mission statement in hand or mind, you then search for topics that suit your identity. You also examine how competitors are covering the same subjects. Our solution helps you discover the topics your audience cares about by analysing your historical data. This enables you to identify evergreen content and grow your loyal audience simultaneously.

Phase 3: Create

With the advent of large language models, smartocto is no longer limited to assessing a story’s performance but can also provide insights on the content itself. Smartocto.ai can suggest better headlines, more effective paragraphs, or even new angles for your story. Try it at userneeds.smartocto.com: input your draft and see if the story achieves what you aim for.

Creating a story is more than gathering and elaborating on information. In the Story Life Cycle, as we see it, it’s crucial to think about the impact you want your story to have on your audience during the creation process.

Phase 4: Channel

Do you know when your audience is ready for the story you’ve just created? Smartocto helps with timing and channel strategy. Journalists are used to traditional schedules, the morning paper, the 8:00 PM news bulletin. Similarly, you should consider timing your online publications tactically.

You also need to decide: when should you share on social media, or what content goes into a newsletter and when? Using visitor behaviour analysis, our tools send notifications to guide you in making the right channel decisions.

Phase 5: Publish

From the moment a story goes online, you can track how visitors find and engage with it. What feedback are you receiving? Ensure smartocto dashboards are configured to be as relevant as possible for the people looking at them. Adjust metrics to focus on conversions instead of pageviews, for example, and make sure individual teams see what’s happening in their specific area.

We take an omni-channel view of all your stories and help you maximise impact through seamlessly integrated notifications and alerts - whether it’s about articles, video, or audio.

Phase 6: Optimise

By Phase 6, it should be clear why the Story Life Cycle is so important. A unique feature of the internet is the ability to adjust your website any time. Smartocto notifications can indicate when a story needs to be moved higher on the page, or when tweaking the headline could draw in more visitors.

A/B testing works for introductions or images, too. Within a story, you can analyse where readers tend to drop off, and smartocto.ai can suggest improvements accordingly.

Phase 7: Convert

For some journalists, this might sound too commercial, but a key goal of any media organisation is to convert content into action. You want casual visitors to become loyal fans. Smartocto offers predictive tips and suggestions, such as identifying which article will perform best in a newsletter or when to mix paywalled and free articles on the homepage.

With Smartify, we can answer, at any moment, what a journalist should do to achieve the best result.

Phase 8: Report

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. At smartocto, we can provide tailored reports for any role at any time, offering the insights needed for strategic change. Conduct baseline research using user needs or other methods, implement experiments (growth hacks), and evaluate results after six months. When making internal decisions, well-organised visuals like the Quadrant Model are invaluable.

And there you have it: the Story Life Cycle. This is the foundation on which we’ve built our features. Want to see how it works in practice? Request a demo today!