Get out of the walled garden: why and how to (re)create a direct connection with your audience

Last updated: April 11, 2024

With social and search traffic becoming less reliable, media operators need to create a direct connection with their audience in order to survive. But after 15 years of depending on outside tools to drive audiences, how can you reconnect with your audience? How can you not only drive website traffic, but create a community that’ll follow you wherever you go?

We’ll get all that and more below:

The risks of a platform-specific strategy

Let’s step back to assess the state of play right now. What are the risks of over indexing on specific platforms? And what do you stand to lose from doing nothing? We’ll get into it next:

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Social traffic has fallen off a cliff

Social platforms have deprioritized news and referral traffic has plummeted in response: Traffic from Facebook and Twitter/X to publisher sites each dropped by more than 60% in 2023, a trend that’s set to continue in 2024 and the tech giants distance themselves from political content.

Media experts have attributed this to a variety of factors, including regulatory pressure, free speech concerns, and lack of ROI. But perhaps the simplest explanation: Platforms are incentivized to keep users within their own ecosystems as long as possible.

And because of that, we see things like Meta pulling news content from Canada after the country passed legislation requiring the platform reimburse publishers for traffic. Or Twitter throttling page load times and overhauling its external link cards to keep users on site (AdExchanger covered this beautifully – check out their article for more).

Even LinkedIn, which has actually invested in news this year, deprioritizes posts with external links in favor of their own articles and more recently, collaborative articles that are essentially a collection of prompts from individual LinkedIn users.

Search traffic is no longer reliable

Search engines have the same incentives as social media platforms — and referral traffic has followed suit: Traffic from Google Search to news sites has decreased year over year.

And AI is set to disrupt this balance further. Google is rolling out a new search interface that would surface an AI-generated answer at the top of the webpage, with additional follow-up questions listed underneath. The user gets the answer they need without clicking any of the external links listed deeper in the search results.

That’s bad news for anyone depending on search traffic: Publishers fear they could lose between 20% and 40% of their Google-generated traffic if the generative AI search tool is rolled out widely, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The common theme here: Relying on platforms for distribution means staking your publication’s livelihood on a platform with mismatched incentives and motivations.

For many publishers, it means you’ll be stuck scrambling to adapt your content for the whims of the algorithm — and likely, you’ll still lose traffic when those whims shift overnight. But in the extreme, it can lead to losing your audience and income overnight: Some smaller Canadian publishers lost half their revenue overnight when Meta blocked news in their country.

Escaping the walled garden: Why (and how) to recreate a direct connection with your audience

Social and search might give you fleeting clicks. But you can’t depend on them to deliver your best-fit audience, much less drive them to your site consistently enough to create community and drive revenue.

Or, as Tom Triscari, founder and CEO of programmatic advisory firm Lemonade Projects, said in AdExchanger, “If you’re reliant on walled gardens, that’s dangerous because everyone who’s ever done that has eventually eaten it.”

So it’s time to get out of the walled garden. Many media companies are seeing this as an existential threat. But where some see a challenge, others see an opportunity to recreate a direct connection with their audience. Among them is Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge.

“It’s pretty easy to get traffic in the world. You can go on TikTok today and get some traffic and get some views. It is really hard to build an audience. And I think a lot of the destruction we see in the media community right now is that no one built an audience. They try to get traffic and then they try to sell that traffic, and they assumed that traffic would last forever.”

But what does a direct connection with your audience look like in the post-platform era? What structures, processes and workflows need to be in place? And not for nothing, how can you make money from it?

Niche down

Mass traffic models benefited broad publishers — your Buzzfeeds and HuffPos of the world. But as platforms fade, the balance of power is shifting from generalists to specialists. Today’s winners are the ones who can identify a niche audience, then speak to what they care about more successfully than anyone else.

We’re seeing this pop up across the media industry, from niche industry-centric newsletters like A Media Operator, The Rebooting, and The Platformer; artisanal independent publishers like 404 Media and Defector; hyper-local community-focused publications like Sahan Journal and the LA Public Press; and enthusiast magazines (disclaimer: We sponsor A Media Operator and The Rebooting.).

This evolution isn’t just a response to platform shifts. Overstimulated by free-for-all feeds, audiences are craving specific places to find tried-and-true advice from people like them: As Ryan Broderick said in the Garbage Day newsletter: “Users aren’t looking for a one-stop shop, a central feed to consume all of their content. They’re using specific platforms to express specific parts of themselves. And though internet engagement is always a toss up, there is one constant we can always count on: People at work are desperate for something to do other than work, and the news can serve as a nice distraction.”

You can also apply these principles to a single brand. The more you can individualize your content and offers, the more likely you’ll resonate with readers and keep them coming back. Some ways to do that:

Consider splitting your mass appeal newsletters into separate newsletters for each vertical or sub-vertical. The hard part is using your audience data to identify the right topics and sub-topics, then get these newsletters off the ground. Use your website browsing data, paywalls, webinar attendance and engagement data, newsletter clicks and event attendance data to identify subtopics of interest within your audience, then consider planning newsletters around those areas. (Using a customer data platform specifically for media makes this a lot easier. In one search, you can see how someone’s engaging with you across every channel, then create relevant segments and newsletters, all in one platform.)
Use your first-party data to create narrower, multi-dimensional audience segments, then use tools like content recommendations, dynamic content, and custom targeted paywalls to deliver the right message to each group at the right time.
Use your newsletter sign up forms to identify and address individual needs more effectively: Of the 200+ media and publishing companies we work with, many of our most successful newsletter operators do a lot of segmentation upfront through sign-up forms with 3+ optional fields and preference pages with 10+ newsletter choices. A long form filters out less committed audiences, which benefits your audience growth goals long term. But there are downside risks to this strategy (“I can’t wait to fill out this 15-field form, said no one ever). Get actionable data from your forms with these best practices:
- Provide transparent opt-out mechanisms: Hopefully it doesn’t need to be said, but it bears repeating: Tell your audience how they can opt out of data collection on your forms.
- Maximize submissions (and give your audience peace of mind) by transparently communicating how you’ll use the data you collect. Tell your readers how you’ll use their information to personalize your content and improve their user experience.
- Monitor your form performance weekly and monthly. If your submissions are down, make some of your fields optional or switch to a progressive profiling model, in which you build someone’s profile over time by using different fields on different forms.
- Connect your form builder with your audience database so submissions are automatically registered in your system of record. For instance, Omeda’s form builder connects to our customer data platform and marketing automation solution. So when Kyla signs up for a webinar about first-party data, she’s automatically added to audience segments for “interested in first-party data” and “first-party webinar registrants.” Now your email and content teams don’t need to wait until they get the registrant list, clean the list, add Kyla to relevant segments, etc., before serving her with relevant content. They can react to her changing needs and interests in real time, show they understand what she wants, and keep her coming back for more.

Make your website great again

Your website is the one place you can reach your audience without interference from platforms, email providers or search engines. There, you can connect with and cultivate your audience on your own terms.

But the rise of platforms has made websites an afterthought (when was the last time you actively searched out a website?). Research bears this out: Northwestern University’s Spiegel Center for Research found that 49% of digital subscribers didn’t go to the websites they had paid for even once a month.

Spiegel’s analysis found that while 49% of overall digital subscribers didn’t visit even once a month, 54% visited the website just one day a month or fewer, 58% visited two days or fewer, 69% visited seven days or fewer, and 79% showed up 15 days or fewer.

“Most subscribers are either complete ‘zombies’ or almost a ‘zombie,’” said Ed Malthouse, Spiegel’s Research Director.

Not exactly a strong foundation to build on. So how can you get rid of the zombies, drive direct site traffic and recultivate your connection with your audience? In the report, Malthouse recommends:

Capitalize on a new subscriber’s interest by engaging them in an active onboarding process. Malthouse recommends reaching out to new subscribers if they’re not visiting the website (one of the most effective ways to do this is through a welcome series).
He also recommends using newsletters to drive site traffic. “If you can succinctly curate the news for me, give me a short newsletter that I come to rely on to stay updated, then you’ve got my loyalty,” he said. “What we’ve shown in our other analyses is, if you subscribe to these newsletters, you’re also less likely to churn.”
He also suggests using recommender systems to notify subscribers about new articles about topics they’ve engaged with in the past. (Pst, On Omeda, you can now deploy personalized content recommendations on your website and your newsletters. Learn more about content recommendations here.)

Get influenced by the influencers

Love them or hate them, influencers are a case study in how to spark a fan following around your personality and, more importantly, monetize it. Influencers are still subject to the same platform anxieties as publishers, but media companies can learn a lot from their ability to create a passionate, active and long-term follower base.

So it’s worth considering what you can steal from their playbook. Andrew Losowsky, Head of Community Product at Vox Media, suggested the following best practices n a recent article for Nieman Lab, most of which center on maximizing usability, collecting and acting on audience feedback and rewarding loyalty. That includes:

“Recognizing and rewarding loyalty on an ongoing basis
Building ongoing, two-way relationships with their audiences through community-led experiences like live Q&As, community Discords, and listening/watching parties
Reacting and adapting to community needs and situations
Making it seamless and easy to sign up as a member/fan at various tiers
Providing real value through engaging content that’s easy to access”

Center your strategy on your audience’s emotions

We’ve heard a lot about the death of the homepage. But this year, The Verge has zigged where everyone else has zagged. They’re investing in creating website content for its direct audience at a time when peer publications have been pushing platform-native content for each channel.

They’ve achieved this — and made money — by investing in their editorial talent and UX. But even more important, they centered their audience development strategy based on a narrow, distinct and emotionally salient value proposition.

“Our mission statement is that The Verge is a website about how technology makes people feel…. We’ve had headier ones,” Patel said. “We’ve had ones that were designed for advertisers. We’ve had ones that are like, ‘We’re about the future.’ And over time, it’s like, ‘Oh no, we’re just about how this makes you feel…’

… If you can ask them the right questions, everyone has a story to tell you about their phone… So I think of our audience as people who want to feel those feelings. They want to love things, they want to dislike things, they want to be passionate about these objects, these screens that literally mediate almost everything else that happens in our lives…. That, to me, is the surest sign that we’ve at least found a group of people that are stable that over time can grow because it’s kind of fun to be smart. So I think people, they latch onto that, and they evangelize how they feel to their friends, and then the audience grows again and again.”

The Verge could’ve just positioned themselves as another straight tech news site. But that would’ve made them virtually indistinguishable from places like TechCrunch. They would’ve been competing against Kara Swisher’s reporting, rather than building a distinct, passionate and engaged community of their own.

They’re not just thinking about who they are or what they’re good at. Instead, they’re thinking about the emotional utility they serve their audience and planning content from that differentiated perspective. That’s how you create an audience that’ll stay with you no matter what the media industry throws at you.

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