Focus on the “flabby middle” of the audience funnel

Your New Year’s resolution should be to get a fatter middle. You should widen the waistline of the audience funnel, paying more attention to the engaged middle than the fly-by traffic at top.

Build a smart strategy for the full funnel by making 2025 the year of audience journey mapping. And ensure your key performance indicators (KPIs) align and drive lower-funnel engagement.

Acquire

While the middle of the first quarter-century of the millennium allowed news organizations to reap the rewards of the top of the funnel (Facebook firehose, R.I.P.), the past 18 months have been more of a challenge, with many news outlets struggling for scale.

Facebook pivoted away from news in 2023, and in 2024, Google got busy tweaking the algorithms to sort quality from the AI slop. Yes, AI Overviews has impacted traffic (best guess, 1 to 2% for publishers with a dedicated search strategy), but Google’s algorithm shifts have been the bigger story of the past year.

But search behaviors have been changing for some time. While the U.S. Department of Justice is looking at Google’s dominance in search, Google has been slowly losing search share for years. In an ethnographic study, the Next Gen News Report noted the “sophisticated searching” of younger audiences. Indeed, 40% of searches in the beauty space start on social, not Google, and Amazon overtook Google search for product searches years ago.

This past year has seen the rise of Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT Search, all of which aim to provide complete answers rather than requiring people to click. But news SEOs, don’t panic: Google Search will continue to drive audiences to news sites for a long time yet. It favors the helpful, original, and trusted (goodbye and good riddance, parasite SEO), and audience behaviors are slow to change.

And while search has been a bumpy ride for many, Google has increased the flow of Google Discover — presumably to please audiences rather than to placate publishers.

Meanwhile, social teams spent 2024 engaging off-platform, while also squeezing the last of the juice from Facebook, and creating new pathways from Bluesky, Threads, Instagram channels, and WhatsApp.

An audience funnel was once an inverted triangle. It’s now an inverted trapezoid.

Engage and retain

But a top-of-funnel strategy is no longer enough. To drive value to consumers and the revenue that follows (both commercial or consumer), audience teams must focus on engagement. This is the step where we hook, where we drive habituation.

Audiences need to “try before they buy,” and this is a really fun step of the audience role. It’s when we work on a newsletter that becomes a daily reading habit; it’s when we work across teams to delight audiences with familiar and distinctive voices; it’s when we try new formats, such as narrated audio, podcasts, and quizzes. We also have effective ways to get to know our audiences; offer them the right value exchange and people will create an account and login.

And once we know our audience, we can better serve them and welcome them as members and subscribers. To borrow from the marketing language, we can find ways to “surprise and delight,” offering subscriber exclusives in both content and site and app experiences.

Audience journey mapping and engagement

To help you plan your audience funnel strategy, I recommend mapping your audience journey.

Reading about mapping an audience journey on American Press Institute earlier this year, I had an “aha moment.” This framework was created by author Kamila Jambulatova, influenced by her time as a marketeer (I liked the concept so much that I reached out to Kamila and we chatted). At Condé Nast, we’ve been working cross-functionally to do just that: to map our audience journeys so that we can better serve people at each stage.

As I procrastinated knowing I had to write the words to go with the funnel concept and visual, I hopped over to social where I found an “angry” Isabelle Roughol and a “triggered” Adam Tinworth, who were both lamenting the lack of “people” and “engagement” within audience strategies.

As Adam helpfully summarized: “Audience engagement is the skill of taking a reader, and making them more than a subscriber. It’s the art of making an engaged member, and keeping them. And doing it again, and again, and again. Because, without them, we don’t have a business.”