Episode 20 – Part 1: Creating content that will engage with your target audience with Nigel Lewis, The Negotiator

The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.

Matt Nally  

On this week’s episode, we have Nigel Lewis, who’s the Head of Content at the negotiator. So thanks for coming on today. 

Nigel Lewis  00:42

Pleasure, nice to be with you here digitally.

Matt Nally  00:45

I believe you’re somewhere very nice at the moment

Nigel Lewis  00:47

I am in South of in France. So it’s a bit hot.

Matt Nally  00:51

Do you want to introduce yourself and what your your negotiator is.

Nigel Lewis  00:58

Yeah. So yeah. So as as mentioned, Nigel Lewis, Head of Content at the negotiator. I lead the editorial team that does the news for the website, and I am the editor nominally of the print magazine, AD, so we have a very busy days doing both.

Matt Nally  01:14

Awesome, awesome. And the negotiators focused on sort of sales and lettings predominantly, is that right?

Nigel Lewis  01:21

Yeah. So property management, sales, lettings, some planning, lots of politics. We’ve got it.

Matt Nally  01:30

I’d say I’ve signed up to it myself. So I get the you know, the newsletter each day, and I enjoy going through those. It’s always interesting to see what’s going to keep an eye on what’s going on in the market generally. Yeah, I suppose with, you know, the negotiator and so on. There are obviously a couple of other outlets within I suppose the assays agency world, how do you, I suppose stand out in the market and differentiate yourself.

Nigel Lewis  01:56

So we always set out to be more of a visual feast for readers. So we lead on pictures probably more significantly than our competitors. We try and be less tabloid, I think it’d be fair to say. So we try and be the sort of CEOs material. But nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that we will report on some more Scott scurrilous elements of the industry. And also, we are lucky because we have a background originally as a magazine and print magazine. So that’s the way that website works, which is a differentiator in this market. Yes.

Matt Nally  02:41

I know that you have the magazine coming out regularly. Is that something that you see a very different engagement with in terms of the how people interact with that versus sort of the general day to day online content?

Nigel Lewis  02:55

Yeah, I mean, it is very different. I guess most people who subscribe to the magazine are getting it towards the end of the month, they are probably going to sit down with a cup of tea in a quiet moment. Whereas the very competitive environment for online news is all published at midnight, or very early in the morning. And it’s consumed by probably half 910 o’clock, by most people. Most of the traffic comes in the early time when people are on the train that suspects probably first in the quiet period before they start their daily work as a property industry, sort of person, they’re going to check the news and just see what’s going on, is there anything major happen that’s going to affect their daily job, and that that’s a very different set from a magazine environment where you’re looking for advice, and you’re looking for opinions, and you’re looking for people in the industry being interviewed. So just a very different type of media.

Matt Nally  03:53

Yeah, instinct. And, and he said, you focus on sort of less tabloid ad style writing and and sort of CEO level? How does that affect how you position content, then I suppose there are two different two different ways of writing, I suppose more than two ways, but they’re multiple ways of writing an article that you find gets,

Nigel Lewis  04:16

there are engagement, there are indeed, now there are indeed. And I think, I think it’s, it’s all about the imagining yourself in the role of the reader, particularly the online stuff. So you have to go what your target reader you’re trying to get through your headline and your first paragraph, and you’re going, how do I get to them? How do I get their attention? Get them to read this article. So you’re trying to get into their head and go, What does someone who’s a branch manager, regional manager, CEO, Chief Executive, whatever that sort of level, how do they think and how do they view what’s going on in the industry and then you have to model what you’re writing around that those assumptions and it’s their assumptions born of meeting these People relatively regularly industry bashes. And you ask them what they think your stuff and you can see that they think very differently about the most strategic goings on in the industry then probably a junior negotiator who’s more interested to know if do you negotiate like, like, Can we’ve been caught, you know, string driving, it’s a different sort of setup. But even if you were to cover and cover a story like that, like a young station caught drunk driving, you still you’re writing it from the perspective of the more senior person looking down on that and going, you know, whereas the, you know, some other media we that we compete with, including the nationals to extent you also report on stuff we do, they will also, they tend to be a bit more tabloid about how they approach it, and they’re more appealing. Just they’re just appealing to a slightly different audience, within the industry. So that’s, that’s, you know, you can’t have all of us going for the same readers, we will have to differentiate a little bit.

Matt Nally  05:56

Definitely, definitely. I suppose one thing I’m interested in, you may not want to comment on this. But is timing, quite important, because I noticed sometimes the newsletter when it comes out changes from maybe an earlier time to sort of not, not late morning, but you know, more often at the start of office hours. Does that does that have quite an impact on engagement as well?

Nigel Lewis  06:16

That is notable, it’s perfectly right comment on it. It is quite crucial. I think all of the different media who serve this industry, experimented initially in the early days of digital with different timings. And it was trying lunchtime, she just thought you’re just trying to get the reader when they’re got a spare moment. Yeah. So it was that day’s news so far at lunchtime? Was it an evening wrap up? Was it? Is it an early morning breaking news scenario. And I think we’ve all settled for this fact that that probably the sweet spot is sometime somewhere between sometime between 6am. And around 8:30am is when most agents are either in traffic on trains, sat at their breakfast table in the office sat in a boring meeting, what do you notice is that daily catch up meeting, but also I do know, one of the publishers of you know, the other media and he was you know, we had a chat about it once over a drink. And, you know, and and he was sort of saying that hit for them. It was all about trying to get people who are wanting to look like they’re informed about the industry for the morning catch up. Because if you go to most estate agents, you’ll see it sort of around about eight o’clock 830 Especially if foxtons always remember foxes are famous for their early morning meetings, you they’d all be stood there having a catch up, right, what’s happened today? Where are we with the sales, all that sort of stuff? But also, you know, the manager would like to go by the way, have you just the government’s just announced this. So we need to bear that in mind when you’re talking to potential vendors, you know, that sort of stuff. So, so that that I think we’ve all settled for the fact that after much experimentation, we’ve settled on sort of that time frame.

Matt Nally  07:59

And I’m guessing one other aspect, it’s important to establish your or maintain as well, your position in the market is consistency with with posting, because obviously the newsletters are every day, the the maximum monthly is, do you find whenever that slips or maybe it doesn’t slip, because obviously were very established, but maybe earlier on did that does that have quite an impact on that engagement the next time because because you know, people are expecting something a certain point, or

Nigel Lewis  08:30

that’s really hard to tell not because I’m being evasive. But because Google Analytics is incredibly opaque platform on which to work out where your traffic comes from, you can tell that a percentage of your readers are coming back. But you can’t tell which ones and you can’t tell it. So you could be just you could be having massive churn, but new readers coming back and some of them revisiting you. It’s hard also, because people tend to use their personal mobile phones to read our stuff, but also use the company phone and then also use a PC at work. So it’s very hard to know who what real person is. And whether they’ve returned to see your content or not, is the answer to that one. But But certainly, certainly probably one of the main major performance key performance indicators for me is how many are what percentage of our readers are returning? Because obviously if we’re rubbish, they’re not many of them are returning. So you know, you want to you’re very keen to see that at least 50% of your readers are coming back.

Matt Nally  09:34

Yeah, I think that ties in to a general I suppose KPI point, which is it’s important to look at the right metrics, not the vanity metrics in order to

Nigel Lewis  09:46

Yeah, it’s again, analytics is annoying, or whatever the new the new version of analytics is now called, I can’t remember. But you know, the, the. It’s very, it’s very easy to claim that massive reads, but you really have no idea Do whether they’re your target audience or not. And that that applies to anyone publishing anything, whether it’s an estate agent publishing their own blog, or whether it’s, you know, the negotiator trying to appeal to sales and letting agents it’s very hard because you don’t know, the rule of thumb, I suppose is to get that the highest reads possible, because then you’re hoping that amongst those you have the highest percentage of your target audience within that. But at the moment, Google doesn’t let you know, I suspect, they’ll start charging us a lot of money one day for telling us that but the moment you can’t find out.

Matt Nally  10:34

That’s very interesting. So yeah, make some educated guesses, I suppose within that

Nigel Lewis  10:38

is very much about educated guess. And it’s interesting, because in the old days, you had ABC was print magazines, and you knew exactly how many people read it. And it was qualified and measured. But with online, that’s all gone out the window.

Matt Nally  10:52

That’s interesting is it expects, ironically, I would expect it to be the other way around where it’s easier to track can see why it isn’t actually from what you said.

Nigel Lewis  11:01

Yeah. Because unless you go to a subscription model, like the times telegraph, what have you been? ft. Sorry, you know, they’ve taken a very brave decision to go well, we will call it Rifai it because we can we got 400,000 readers, we can say there all times. But in a very competitive market like ours, where everyone’s free. It’s your brave publisher to go down the route of charging for your content. There’s been lots of discussions about that. I know that all the different platforms, and there’s like, you know, prime content, maybe the charge only for breaking news, all this sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, if your competitors are offering the same more or less same service for the for free, it’s very hard.

Matt Nally  11:43

Yeah. Yeah, that’s very interesting point. And I imagine that’s a whole topic on its own. think one thing I was really interested to discuss with you today is, we live in a world now where it’s very easy for anyone to post content, whether it’s video written, whatever. Ultimately, what makes a good news story. So when when does something become newsworthy, versus just noise?

Nigel Lewis  12:11

I think the certainly what I was taught at college, which is still true today, thankfully, is that you have to publish content, which is the most relevant to the target audience you’re going for. And the generally speaking, you get fewer reads If your stories, and particularly headlines and intros are not appealing to their day to day interests and worries. And this is why the telegraph is very right wing newspaper times this sort of middle ground newspaper Guardian is because they’ve, they have refined that down to a very clever art of appealing to the type of readership they want to attract to their newspaper. And it’s sort of a appeal. It’s a replies rather, to trade magazines like ours, and websites like ours equally, which is you have to sit down and go. If you were a sales agent, or branch manager, you know, you have different interests in life. sales agents are interested in what consumers will be thinking how much therefore how much commission they’ll make every week, whereas a branch manager is much more worried about I don’t know how much he pays his staff and, and talent retention and KPIs around how much their commission is going to be. So they have much wider interest than that. But it’s that sort of thinking through that you have to do. And I certainly the other, the other consideration in this market is to add your own personality, which goes back to what we were saying at the beginning, that each media platform has its own particular feel about it. And that’s how you write the headlines and the editorial line, you take on stuff. So and then you attract people who are interested in that sort of angle that you’re taking. And that’s where headlines, headlines, probably online now the most important thing ever, whereas when I started out on the Daily Mail, they weren’t that important. They’re more interested in you’re getting your intro right. Whereas because the headlines so visit visible online, the whole clickbait thing is very, very important because people will make a snap decision on whether they click on the story based on your headline, none nothing else. Whereas in the old days, you’d open a page and go probably you probably ignore the headlines and then go to the first paragraph and go is this story what I’m interested in or what appeals to my prejudices and then off you go, no one reads first paragraphs any longer. So So that’s interesting.

Matt Nally  14:52

So that must be quite tough because I spent there’s just two things there. Now I suppose one is the grabbing the attention because obviously people are so used to scroll In Germany on different apps, but the other is a lot of people I think, are genuinely because of the amount of stuff they scrolling through quite happy to take the headline as as gospel. And not Yeah, and see whether the clickbait headline actually is backed up by the content behind it. Yeah.

Nigel Lewis  15:17

I agree entirely with you. Therefore, you have to walk this tightrope between being as as, as making the headline as appealing as possible in a crowded market without misleading the reader who will get really annoyed if he or she or they arrive on your website. And it’s not quite what you were promising in the headline. But I mean, but obviously, all the old journalistic rules still apply, which is getting the story first makes will get more clicks, so exclusivity and scoops and that sort of stuff. And also, I’m afraid, despite this is my favourite dinner party conversation with people is that everyone goes, I’m so depressed by journalism, it’s all it is bad things happening to people. And you go because you get four times, five times, six times more clicks on any story. You know, if it’s a story about a biggest agency, having won an award, and get, you know, X 1000 clicks, but if you get if it’s the same as the agency has, it’s been discovered, they have a racism problem within the HR department. You’ll get, you’ll get 10,000 clicks, you know, videos, you’ll see what I mean. And I’m afraid that is true, because although people present at dinner parties as being loving the positive in life, in reality, vast majority people click on stories about other human beings making mistakes.

Matt Nally  16:32

Yeah, I agree with that. And yeah, it’s consistent with every sort of, type of news you read or watch, or Yeah, that’s what drives interest.

Nigel Lewis  16:43

Yeah, yeah. And these rules do apply as you go along.