Building Trust and Retention in Digital News Media: Key Strategies for Success
Succeeding in the digital news business requires not only acquiring new subscribers but also retaining them. Trust in the product and brand is a major factor in building a long-term relationship between the company and the customer.
Why is trust important? Trust is essential for any relationship, including those between a customer and a brand. Without trust, there is no relationship, loyalty, or sustainable business model.
According to the Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer is five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Research by Bain & Company, the inventor of the Net Promoter Score (NPS), suggests that in financial services a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit.
Unfortunately, media institutions are currently ranked as the least trusted globally, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2022, even lower than governments in 27 countries worldwide. The Digital News Report 2022 by the Reuters Institute confirms a similar trend, with only Finland showing an increase in trust.
News media must also tackle declining interest in news and active news avoidance, especially among younger generations. The reasons for declining interest in news are multiple. One is an overabundance of coverage on the same topic, such as COVID-19 or the war in Ukraine. Moreover, news can have a negative impact on people’s mood, and there is a general overload of news.
Some people feel that they cannot use the news for anything. Younger audiences are less interested in directly connecting with news media, have a different attitude towards journalism, and heavily rely on social media platforms. They may also find news difficult to follow or understand, which can lead to a lack of trust.
These points mainly address content-related issues in journalism. When discussing trust, the conversation often starts with journalistic quality. However, quality can be a difficult term in journalism, aside from quality criteria based on fundamental ‘laws’ of journalism, such as accuracy, objectivity, truthfulness, and source transparency. The last point will be challenged with the increasing use of large language models and other AI tools in journalism.
When discussing topics, writing styles, design, layout, storytelling, and formats, it becomes more complicated. The ‘best’ story about a highly relevant topic, using the most innovative storytelling format, can still fail to meet the audience’s expectations on different levels, such as usability and ease of use, leading to a lack of interest and engagement.
Quality can therefore be defined as fulfilling customers’ expectations, rather than creating a ‘perfect product’ in the eyes of the producer. These expectations differ from news brand to news brand and also between audience segments within a brand. A Wall Street Journal audience and its segments have different expectations and perceptions of ‘quality’ than audiences of the Daily Mail, New York Times, or Guardian.
To understand how to build trust, apart from meeting journalistic standards and expectations, we need to look further.
Key Drivers of Brand Trust
Product Quality
The physical or digital product quality is a tangible factor. This includes availability, stability, and speed of digital products, ease of use, and the use of state-of-the-art functionality.
Ensure your product meets customer expectations, including aspects such as usability, design, or the right storytelling format. Especially for younger generations, the traditional website and mobile apps with text as the main storytelling format are not always the right way to interact with them.
Additional Services
Every additional service provided around the core product must also meet customer expectations. This includes the newsletter sign-up process, the subscription ordering and payment process, the quality of customer hotlines, and home delivery reliability in markets where this remains an important part of the service offering. Subscription cancellation should also be simple. Any hurdles or deliberate complications can cause customers to lose trust.
Value for Money
Value for money is crucial for building brand trust. Media organisations must set appropriate prices for their products and services. Customers must perceive pricing as fair and receive clearly understandable intellectual, monetary, emotional, social, or personal value.
Innovation
Innovation demonstrates a company’s competence and expertise in its field. Outdated apps or websites that do not match current standards in functionality, usability, and design can damage a company’s trustworthiness.
Personalisation
Personalisation helps customers feel that a company understands their needs and expectations. Offering personalised content and recommendations can build trust, but it should be implemented intelligently and provide additional value. At the same time, personalisation should be balanced with the serendipity factor that exposes readers to unexpected content.
Transparency
Transparency is crucial for any company, particularly those with an important role in society such as news media. Organisations must be transparent about their values, goals, and practices, especially when it comes to AI, machine learning, and native advertising.
Data Privacy and Protection
Data privacy and protection are increasingly sensitive topics. Companies must clearly explain how they collect, use, and protect customer data. They must also provide users with control over their data and educate them about protecting their personal information.
Shared Values
Shared values extend beyond financial performance. They include environmental responsibility, community involvement, employee treatment, and diversity. According to research conducted by Deloitte, 87% of Millennials believe businesses should be assessed on factors beyond financial performance. Authenticity and genuine motivation are essential for building trust. Greenwashing or hypocrisy will not be well received by audiences who are attentive to these issues.
Conclusion
Building and maintaining brand trust is a crucial component of any business model, especially in the digital environment. Understanding the meaning of quality and trust — and extending this understanding beyond the core product — is essential for building a sustainable business and a loyal customer base that is willing to pay for products and services both now and in the future.
This article was also published on the INMA Media Leaders blog.