WSJ Sees Subscription Growth as Wall Gets a Door

The Wall Street Journal’s “It’s Your Business” tagline and related marketing campaigns were designed to attract readers who may not think the publication is for them. 

The marketing crew at the Journal teamed up with the newsroom to identify stories that showed that business impacts everything and therefore it applies to everyone. 

One example was the story of a sleep divorce, published in April. Elizabeth and Ryan Pearson, featured in the article, recount how they sleep in separate bedrooms and maintain a “great sex life because we’re not pissed off at each other throughout the day for something that is uncontrollable like sleep and snoring.” Apparently, the “snore room” “sleep divorce” is trending.   

The campaign drove incremental site traffic in nine out of the 10 markets where it ran. The “out-of-home” campaigns drove a 19% uplift in people recommending the publication, and over half of those exposed to the campaign would be somewhat or very likely to recommend WSJ to a friend/family member. The campaign also saw an uptick in a user’s likelihood to subscribe.  

A key to the campaign was the participation of the newsroom. Traditionally, there has been a so-called “Chinese Wall” between the business side of news and the newsroom itself to maintain editorial integrity and not allow commercial influences to interfere with reporting. When broken, it has made waves. Case in point: CoinDesk. 

The newsroom’s participation is no accident. Sherry Weiss, the Journal’s chief marketing officer, and Emma Tucker, editor in chief, both joined about two years ago and made a point to reset how the two teams engaged with each other. Today, the relationship between them is strong, while also being very conscious of the need to protect editorial integrity.  

“I feel very fortunate because we have the partners in the newsroom, which are, frankly, what is the key driver of engagement and retention is the reporting and the content that the newsroom puts out,” Weiss told AMO. “We’re just there to help do some surround sound right, to make sure that we’re helping along the way.”

Building Bridges

It’s not just the Journal that’s breaking barriers. At KCRW in Los Angeles, the content and audience teams work very closely together. The content teams are the subject matter experts and the audience teams are experts in the platforms and understand how audiences interact with things like social media, events and newsletters.

Nathalie Hill KCRW’s chief audience officer told AMO last year:

You have people who are looking at the data and then working with the editors to say, like, hey, we have these dashboards set up so that you understand like what’s affecting open rates, what’s affecting click throughs, what are people clicking on? Not to say, I’m going to tell you what subject matter to cover, but I can tell you things that people are interested in, like, do they want guidance on events… We’re trying to bring these teams together so that people get an understanding of why we’re bringing value, or how we’re bringing value to the audience. And what I’ve found is that our content team really likes knowing how audience is responding, because ultimately, [they] don’t want to create something that nobody cares about or that nobody interacts with.

Editorial and marketing at the Journal speak on a daily basis, Taneth Evans, head of digital at the publication, told AMO. 

“Ultimately, we’re all kind of driving towards the same goals, but we do, obviously, approach them very differently,” Evans said. “We have different tactics and tools at our disposal, so we’re really trying to do as much information sharing as we can. We have a lot of insights to share with our marketing colleagues that they don’t get a view on and vice versa.”

Subscriptions to the Journals totaled 4.2 million in the first quarter, up 6.6% from a year earlier, a sign that something is working.  

“It was incredibly important that not only were we launching something that resonated with our audiences, but that resonated with the newsroom, and they felt a strong connection to the brand purpose and to what we were talking about,” Weiss said. 

Recent changes in the newsroom that have helped them better understand has been access to data that is easily digestible. 

Evans said:

“In the past couple of years, honestly, if I was to think about the biggest achievements that I feel we’ve made, one of them is the democratization of data in the newsroom, but also the kind of ready access to high quality data. And what I mean by that is that, a couple of years ago, there were just a few senior editors looking at numbers, and when we arrived, it’s honestly one of the first changes I made was to make sure that everyone in the newsroom has access to performance data, I think is really, really important.” 

Connecting News and Business

When a big story is resonating, the newsroom will alert the marketing teams keeping in mind the audience-first strategy that Tucker put into place, Evans said. Editors are still choosing the most important stories of the day, including those less sexy but necessary stories, for example, about climate change. 

“We really struggle to get readers as engaged with that as we do other topics. But we also think it’s a really important thing to cover, and important to business readers in particular,” Evans said. “And so we talk about, okay, how might we cover this to make it more engaging for readers, to reach a wider audience?”

Tactics include analysis, engaging experts and doing Q&As with reporters to draw readers in and build direct relationships. 

“We’re trying to think of as many things as we can to build that direct relationship, a sense of community, a relationship with the Wall Street Journal that they won’t get if they just are mining links on social media platforms,” Evans said. “And then obviously the big, ultimate reason to come directly to us is because we’re offering something that no one else can.” 

The Journal’s not bending its coverage to suit people, but it is rethinking in which formats it presents the news, including video and podcasts.    

Weiss said the “It’s Your Business” campaigns were an opportunity to reintroduce potential readers to the Journal in ways they’d never thought of the publication before. Because it was linked to actual articles, they could see immediate results in the form of a “statistically significant uptick in direct traffic leading into conversions,” she said. 

And that’s good because the ultimate goal is direct traffic. 

“What’s going to get someone to wake up in the morning and come directly to you, but also figuring out how and where we show up in social media, and what channels, what our video strategy is, how we engage with people via audio, all of that is incredibly important,” Weiss said.      

It seems to be working. 

“We have pretty strong retention with our new growth. That’s why you’re seeing the revenue growth that you’re seeing right now,” Weiss said, referring to the most recently reported subscription figures. “Our growth audiences that we acquired last year, they’re staying with us and moving up the full price.”