speaker: Julia Tran

topic: Warum auch Journalisten für den Vertrieb Verantwortung tragen

also have responsibility for sales, and it sounds a little bit contradictory, I know, but, stick with me until the end and then you will see what's our take on this and if you really substitute all our journalists for salespeople.

disclaimer we didn't. We still have journalists.

So at the beginning of this year, Ana Zeitung celebrated 20,000 digital subscriptions, which is for us as a regional newspaper, quite a milestone, because we're in a circulation area of like 1 million inhabitants that are all potential.

And because that was the beginning of the year.

That's an updated figure. We're already at 22,000 digital subscriptions, which

Make me quite proud because I've been at the beginning of our digital journey 6 years ago where we, I think we're trying to get to 10,000 subscriptions back then.

And yeah, this is all due to teamwork, of course. I'm standing here as one representative from Anaerong, but I didn't do it alone, of course, these are my colleagues, very talented, very motivated, yeah, very.

Highly skilled, um.

colleagues, which I'm really proud of working with and just one point on the culture, it's really

I think essential before you, you invest in technology or invest in your

website.

That your culture and, and the mindset.

Ha, yeah, the right status, meaning digital first.

so I can probably skip that slide for all these who have listened to Heaven, my colleague from Maters group, yeah, we're still a small German entity within the Mids Group, but feeling very comfortable in there, um.

And yeah, maybe

Who knows what happens in Germany next.

So, OK, coming to B2C and what we did there.

Looking at this, this is probably familiar to you. It's our take on the sales funnel.

Yourselves find out probably looking alike, maybe shorter, maybe longer, but in the end, we all work in the same manner, I assume.

And I want to use my remaining minutes to talk about two stages and two actions we did.

In the face of conversion and in the face of retention.

because we realised a few years ago that after subscriber converted, we let him do things by himself. So we, we were just happy that someone converted and we just thought, OK, so you go explore the content by yourself. You go, get on our website, you will.

You will probably get along.

And

Our B2C director Neya and her team figured out that that's maybe not the right thing to.

Have a subscriber who is

Probably on in our subscription because of one article he wanted to read, to, to keep this subscriber for a longer time.

So that's why we created something that is called our onboarding flow, looking at the 1st 100 days of the new subscriber, so it's not only important what you do in your 1st 100 days as a German Chancellor or US president, but yeah, it's also important for

Us as

The wants.

trying to get subscribers. I will guide you through that a little bit. it's just an extract, but so you get an idea of.

How we try to on board our new subscribers. So first, of course, you get a welcome meal, warm welcome by our editor in chief, Thomas Tale.

Then on the 3rd day, you get right introduced to our news app because for us it's super important that subscribers download the app to actually consume all news because you might know it. There are studies that reveal that if, if you have an app on your phone that you're more likely to click on it and to, yeah, actually use it. So yeah, we tried to do that on the first.

3 days.

Then, on the 15th day, we introduced the subscriber to our newsletters.

At our newspaper, it's per default that you are subscribed to our daily newsletter and in this introduction that you get, you will, get some familiar with like other newsletters that we have like cultural ones, food and drink ones, one about local soccer because we see that

Our newsletters, especially the daily ones drive 20% of all traffic to our websites, so they're quite important to us.

Then, you will get introduced to our customer loyalty programme for diskies. I will get to that in 2 seconds.

Then after that, after roughly a month, you get introduced to our food content because we see that our food content is a good conversion, do you have good conversion pieces and are also good for engagement for media time and yeah, it's all about what opens, what closes, what kind of recipes can I try out, so.

All that

on day 50 you get introduced to our newsroom colleagues. I think in terms of AI where you get machine built content as a regional newspaper, it's crucial to show the faces of our actual editors to create some kind of proximity and familiarity.

Then, on the 90, we come to our quizzes, which are for e-paper, at least very popular, so people like to play the quizzes on there and to our podcast on day 100. This is just an extract of our podcast, ranging from true crime in our region and update podcast, highlighting one topic, that has

been important for the day, as one podcast about local soccer and one about

books that our editor in chief has read and then they exchange.

Views on that.

Yeah, if you stayed with us,

100 days on day 105, you get a thank you email and a survey.

asking for your feedback and your criticism so that we can improve.

Yeah, and that was our onboarding flow.

And our next question is, we of course want people to stay longer than 100 days. how do we maintain long term reader loyalty. How do we create

Yeah, some kind of brand attachment that is

As

Long and loyal as maybe our print readers. I know it's not going to happen that like our print readers, our digital subscribers will stay with us until they die of 40 years or 20 years, but

Let's try, right? So, we thought about.

How do we, create more brand attachment. How do we make our journalism tangible because normally you will get in touch with the results of our journalism, but the journalistic craft and our like methods behind it. It's not that clear in most cases. So, we wanted to create something like a community.

Something where you as subscribers of ANAT Zeitung feel, that you should trust the source that is reliable, that is trustworthy that you pay attention and your money too, right? So then we came up with

This concept of Ana Zeitung Freundis, meaning circle of friends, because we see our subscribers as fans, friends and fans maybe.

and it's all aiming to build a community with our readers.

And it works like this as a subscriber, no matter if you print or digital subscriber, you can register for free.

And then, um.

You get access to all the yeah, exclusive events that we have I come to that later, right now we have 16,000 registered subscribers, meaning one quarter are already in debt, circle.

And what you see here on the right side is what we're aiming to do a lot, so, this guy on the very left of this photo, he is responsible for doing all the kind of life journalism that we're trying to bring on stage. We have a conference hall in our in our office to do that and we try to bring life journalism closer to the subscribers that we have with discussions that we launched.

around a topic that we that we reported on, and so it's all trying to strengthen and to create even more trust in our brand and to be maybe the Taylor Swifts of Aachen, who knows? Let's see. Um.

So yeah, you get these events, you get this kind of event where we invited readers to plant some trees with us in the local forest. You get behind the scenes with like corporations we have with sports clubs or music festivals and you get ruffles and prize draws just to have some kind of like on top benefit. And the retention rate of one ska is not too bad. We see that it's, yeah, up to 25% better than.

of those who are not members of honours class.

OK, coming to the newsroom.

probably most

Exciting part, um.

Because you're probably questioning what's, what's this thing about journalism and sales.

OK, what did we do there?

We all know content is king, right? Our content is key.

but publishing is also queen. That's a realisation that we and all our editorial board, just

came along with because

It's

It's a no brainer that we have to create good content, right? it's, it's a no brainer that we need relevant trustworthy content.

But it's also a no brainer that we have to publish it strategically, meaning it doesn't serve you anything. It's no good if you have the best investigative piece of content, and it's not distributed in the channels that your potential customers are.

So,

Our editorial board sat together in November 22 and came with this idea, a unit that is separated from content creation, only responsible for content distribution called newsroom management.

And

The task of my colleagues sitting there, is that they do content marketing and content publishing. And that's an idea that came from within the newsroom. That wasn't something that our B2C director or me as COO was forcing on them or telling them to do because I heard it on some conference. Nowaday came with this idea because they really believed that.

Yeah, it's a good way and it's, it's a way to accelerate our digital growth.

So,

Their work is all around publishing and digital channels, meaning our website, our app, our newsletter, our social media accounts, doing SEO to see that yeah, we have

Up to-date content, we have diverse content and, and we also play around with free and paid content on our website.

That's a photo of our newsroom management, um.

And on the right side in the middle you see our deput deputy editor in chief Amini Idris, who has taken up the role as newsroom manager, additionally, next to 3 other newsroom managers, they take turns in like different shifts to do that.

Yeah, and just a summary of, of how they work and what we do there. So we separated content creation and content. Publishing, yeah, meaning we still have editors, of course, who go out find sources, do the interviews, do the analysis, and create the content. And we have this unit sitting there, um.

In charge of publishing.

On all the digital channels I just mentioned.

Then

another very crucial thing is that we have digital first workflows. So, it means that we are not working towards closing time of our printed newspaper because we couldn't have that many up to-date pieces by then, but every time that we have a new refresh slot for the website or a publication time for our newsletter.

pieces are planned for that, so, so our editors write for Digital first and they get published on digital first. We have fixed roles. I come to that in a second and strict quantum planning because if you work like that, we use cordium for that. It's crucial that you put in what kind of format are you planning? Is it only text? Is it video, is it audio? In what kind of channels did you already publish it, um.

at what time is it planned to be published, so that's very important. And then, lastly, of course, our newsroom management works, data-oriented right now, the main central KPI is media time looking at time spent from non-subscribers and subscribers and will soon be replaced by subscriber attention time as have mentioned because what we do for our subscriber and what works well for our subscribers should

also work for our non-subscribers.

yeah, and that's

the organisation structure of our newsroom right now, the green part is the content distribution and newsroom management.

existing, containing a newsroom managers that I just mentioned, so they monitor and they are in charge of the publication schedule. They are also the ones giving topic inspirations to the content creators, if they, yeah, see what's going on in the internet.

then we have a homepage manager, optimising content on the homepage. Um.

Logically, what else doing the newsletters.

On, noon and

afternoon

Then we have two local managers in charge of our local pages because we're regional newspaper, we have different local municipalities that we serve. We have different shifts, and as you can see, there, next to homepage newsletter, we have different slots where we aim to have new content, up to-date content, pieces that are, yeah, very

Exclusive and fresh.

yeah, and that's a little bit of a sneak peek into our journey and how we

Came to so far 22,000 digital subscriptions.

Thank you for your time.