Rachel Middlewick, founder of The Positive Consultancy and a true visionary in the world of media and content strategy, dives deep into the evolution of audience engagement, breaking down how brands move from simply tracking top-level metrics to truly understanding their audience at a granular level. Rachel points out that trust remains a significant driver in where audiences choose to invest their attention and money. In a world overflowing with brands competing for attention across countless platforms, it’s no longer just about how many people you engage but about the quality of that engagement.
If you are too busy or not a big fan of watching recordings, here is a slightly edited transcript that you can browse through at your convenience:
Francesca
So Rachel, would you mind just starting off by giving us a little bit of an intro, please?
Rachel
No problem at all. So I’m Rachel Middlwick and I’m the founder of The Positive Consultancy. And what I’ve been doing over the last couple of years is working with a variety of media businesses and events businesses in particular, who need support around growth and transformation. And so specifically, my background has been in running media brands, running portfolios. And also I’ve had a stint as Chief Commercial Officer.
So my thoughts around audience engagement really relate much more to the commercial side of audience engagement than probably to a lot of the people that you speak to on the editorial side of the business. So I guess, you know, from my perspective, audience engagement can mean a variety of different things depending on whether it’s a B2B audience or a B2C audience or a B2B to C audience.
And I think, for me, audience engagement is really related to where you are within that customer relationship and that customer journey. So it can range from awareness and just attracting more people to your brand at the beginning through to how you talk to people when you’re in a relationship with them, whether that’s an audience relationship or whether that’s a paying commercial relationship right through to then how you retain that customer and how you keep them plugged into the brand.
So I would look at it, from the sort of, the business perspective of both sides of those coins about audience and then also commercial, both of which are obviously equally important.
Francesca
Has your definition or approach to audience engagement evolved at all in the past few years?
Rachel
I think enormously, we’ve just become so much more sophisticated about how we think and how we track and how we measure audience engagement. I think that only probably five years ago, we weren’t really considering what a proper customer journey looked like, whether it was on the commercial side or whether it was on the audience side. And, of the businesses that I’ve been working with over the last two, three years, all of them have had an absolutely enormous requirement for me to analyse exactly what that customer journey is.
So right from the beginning of you engaging with that brand, how do you continue to create and improve that engagement? And how do you continue to increase the way that they perceive your brand to be? And I think, then there’s also all of the different methodologies around which we would capture that data and analyse that data and react to that data.
So I think, how it’s changed has fundamentally been from one that’s an assumption and is really tracked by very, very raw, hard metrics that are very top level to ones that are fundamentally much more nuanced that you can go into, dig into, understand and react much more to.
Francesca
It’s really interesting seeing it from the user point of view and measuring that user point of view. But I guess part of the question is what would you say the aims that audience engagement, the strategy is meeting? Why should we be doing audience engagement? What’s the point of it?
Rachel
Okay, so there’s so many answers to this question.
Ultimately, we obviously all want to drive revenue, right? Because ultimately, audience engagement, whether you’re looking at it from an audience perspective or a commercial audience perspective, is the fuel to any business.
So there’s no question that everything ladders up into a top line revenue metric. That’s what all audience engagement is really setting out to achieve.
However, there are so many more nuances underneath that, that are facing the customer in this day and age. The Edelman Trust Barometer, which was recently carried out, I think, in 2024, showed that something like 61 % of business leaders aren’t trusted. And yet, as a metric for where customers decide to spend their money, it’s such an enormous factor.
That brand equity and that brand perception has got to be of such good quality that I think that, where audience engagement for me has become an absolutely enormous focus, is because it’s become less about quantity.
That’s the other sort of thing that I would say, where the evolution has been is that, previously audience engagement metrics were always about reach, they were always about volume and it was always, you know, we were trading off the more the merrier basically.
And I think that what we really do understand these days in a world where the customer has got so many different brands all vying for attention and so many different platforms upon which they can consume content and buy from certain brands, it’s not quantity anymore, but it’s the quality.
And so I think that those metrics that we always want to measure, are actually much more subtle, much more nuanced and much more complex than perhaps they were in the past. So ultimately what I’m saying is that whilst audience engagement ultimately leads to top line success, top line revenues, business success and business growth, you really do have to ladder that down into a very clear idea about what all of those different elements are that are actually going to turn into that success at the top level.
Francesca
That’s so interesting. What would you say we’re measuring when you say quality? Like what would you say that is? What’s that measurement?
Rachel
Let me give an example of working with a B2B publisher who was struggling with top line revenue. And the reason that they were struggling with top line revenue was because they were basically trading on reach.
And so this blunt metric around, how many people are you reaching? What’s the CPM upon which I can charge? Just simply wasn’t working because people were asking for data proof points that weren’t easy to extrapolate from the data. And then they were arguing on the wrong metrics. And so I worked with this particular B2B publisher to undertake a research project, which I carried out on both sides of the buying exchange.
This was basically with retail buyers on one side and FMCG brands, brand owners on the other side. And the media brand was the crossover in the middle. And in carrying out this research, I basically asked a load of questions about what exactly it was that the buyers wanted from the brands, how they used it, how they perceived it and what the real messages they were, that they wanted to get from the FMCG brands, were from the media brand.
And then on the FMCG brand side, I was asking them questions around, how they chose where to spend their money, what impact they wanted to have, and what good looked like to them. And it basically turned out that this brand had such an enormous perceived quality, heritage and stature within the buyer’s community.
And the top line engagement stats, audience engagement stats that they were sharing didn’t even cover half the picture because actually the content was being used so fundamentally within conversations that were being had internally, they were being shared on Slack and lots of different ways that weren’t necessarily being picked up.
And then on the FMCG brand side, and the other thing that was absolutely fundamental was that we found out that the messaging that they were getting from the brands just wasn’t quite right. They were basically being talked to as if they were marketeers, where in actual fact, they wanted to get a really particular type of message in a really particular kind of way, because these people aren’t marketeers. They’re not interested in brand stories. What they wanted to hear was real logistical facts that they could then use in the decision making within their organisation.
And so what that enabled to us to find was that in actual fact the audience engagement metrics that had been measured, i .e. reach, were exactly the wrong measurements and that actually the right measurements were much more around a quality, a trust and also for the brand to be able to advise the FMCG brands on how they should be speaking to the retailers.
And in doing that, and in undertaking and understanding that nuance, it basically enabled the brand, the media brand, to position themselves as an absolute expert in the target audience that the brands were trying to reach.
And I know that that generated ROI within a week because it just shifted and changed the conversation that they were able to have.
So audience engagement varies enormously depending on the brand that you’re talking about and depending on the audience that you’re talking about. I don’t think you can summarise it for any one brand in particular or across the universe of brands. I think it’s just massively nuanced depending on who it is you’re talking about.
Francesca
What are the hurdles in your experience? What do you think is stopping news brands from engaging better?
Rachel
Fear of failure.
I think people in the news media industry have got such legacy products and such a competitive market, that I think that shifting away from the business models that work, and doing anything that isn’t incremental feels incredibly risky.
And that’s completely understandable, you know?
I think that having that cost pressure coming down on the top line, as well, means that you’re on news media can feel like it’s on a spiral downwards in a way that other media or content type businesses don’t so much. And so I think that really that’s the main hurdle that stops news from experimenting more.
Francesca
I feel that every day speaking to our clients, that fear of failure, even from the journalist’s point of view – “what if it doesn’t work?”. And what strategies have proven most effective in engaging audiences in your experience?
Rachel
I think we’ve just touched on it on the previous point. It is all about going back and understanding your audience. We can never understand our audiences well enough. We really can’t.
So I think that for me, it’s right at the start, understanding the nuances of your audience, understanding what they think and they believe in their own language, so that when you’re creating your content or your go -to -market positioning, you’re replicating that back to them so that the relationship between the brand and the customer or the brand and the audience is so interlinked that that brand equity rises and that engagement piece rises.
And the thing about where we’ve got to in terms of tech and where we’ve got to in terms of measurement and reporting and personalization means that the power that gives us is in understanding that audience even better and being able to evolve products even better for those particular audience segments that are coming out.
Francesca
Could you share a successful initiative that significantly boosted audience engagement? And what did you think made it so successful?
Rachel
No worries at all. So my example of this, I was thinking about this and I’m going to talk about PA Media where I was Chief Commercial Officer for a while. And I think that what we did there, one of my initiatives that I worked on was a repositioning of the organisation.
So when I joined, they talked about themselves as a business that provided media services and content for news media organisations.
Fine, but it was features and benefits led. It didn’t actually talk about what they fundamentally cared about. And what I felt was, when I walked into that organisation, was that the purpose and passion that they had about being at the heart of the news and supporting all of those incredible organisations, that they support and are fundamental to, was just not being communicated.
So actually, what could have been the hardest initiative or the hardest change programme was actually relatively easy, because all I did was capture all of the passion and all of the purpose that was felt within the organisation. And we shifted the brand position to being one that was about being the news media organisation’s greatest ally in an ever -changing market.
And as soon as we did that, coupled with a very big data project that we rolled out, but as soon as we did that and we actually started talking to all of our big customers and saying, this is what we stand for, you know, we’re with you, we’re one of the people in your newsroom, then it basically completely shifted the dynamic in the relationship that we had with the customers.
And all of a sudden, we went from being over the different side of the table from each other, arguing about a contract to being people together in a fight against changing consumer behaviour and the pressure on the business models.
From a B2B audience engagement perspective, that no doubt had an impact on their audience engagement further down the line was changing that conversation so that we could understand what mattered more to them and adapt our content and our product sets accordingly.
Francesca
It sounds like so much of what you’ve said up until now is so focused on that idea of perception, but also the drive – what is driving us and what’s the perception that we’re creating. And I feel like towards even our audiences, it’s something that happens so much. A lot of people don’t see the difference between what social media is and what the news media is. We’re very clear on what that is, but that’s a kind of a perception piece as well.
They don’t know the difference between the two and we’re not necessarily communicating that in the right way. Has there ever been a piece of audience engagement that’s particularly surprised you?
Rachel
I think back in the day, I was running a media portfolio at Haymarket, which was really unsexy. It was practical caravan and practical motorhome – “Outdoor leisure”, we called it. And I think that what I would talk about there was a sort of two -sided opportunity around perception, around the audience, that was different.
First of all, with the magazines and the websites that were in existence, the perception was very much that that audience wouldn’t really dig social media at all, and they would only consume media in a certain way, i .e. a very traditional manner.
And actually that proved completely false. This audience was a massive iPad using app using social media engaged audience, because I guess they have more time on their hands and also when they were doing the very thing that this subject matter was i .e. caravanning and motorhoming, actually they were engaging with those bits of tech much more frequently than they might have been when they were at home, so you’re creating that sort of ongoing audience engagement with the product at exactly the right time.
And then I think on the other side, the other bit of audience engagement in the same product set, when I was leading that portfolio, was actually understanding and identifying that there was a whole swathe of audience that we weren’t engaging through the brands, because we were talking in exactly the wrong way. I .e. we were talking about caravans and motorhomes rather than talking about what people wanted to get from being in the caravans and motorhomes.
So then I ended up driving a strategy, a much more of a digital led strategy that appealed to audience segments who were families with young children who wanted to get away from digital and get their kids out in nature.
There was a segment that was outdoor sports enthusiasts. So these were people who might want to go paddle boarding or surfing or kayaking, or hiking, and actually just wanted to facilitate that holiday as opposed to it being, I am a caravaner and identifying as such.
So I think, again, audiences always surprise you and it always comes back to you understanding that audience properly rather than sitting in your ivory tower, making assumptions about what your ideal product and channel strategy looks like.
Francesca
I love that example, a digital strategy for people who want to leave digital!
Rachel
I know, exactly. You’re right actually, I’ve never looked at it like that, but yeah, that does sound mad, doesn’t it?
Francesca
At what point are you considering the audiences in this engagement piece? Where do they sit?
Rachel
Always, right from the very beginning. I think you’ve got to think about the audience at the very, very, very beginning. For me, working up a product strategy starts with the strategy, right? It’s strategy, then it’s tech to facilitate the strategy, and then you need to understand the people who are going to run the strategy and the processes they need to follow.
So at the beginning of that is that full strategy around: What are the gaps in the market? What are you competing with? What sort of channels and what sort of content does that audience need? What are they currently getting? How therefore do you pull that strategy together?
I get the whole learn fast, agile thinking, but you’ve got to base it on something in the first place. So audience engagement and your intent for how you want the audience to interact with you. It’s got to be there right from the beginning or you haven’t got a business model. You know, that’s where it all comes from. That’s the fountain.
Francesca
If you had to rate the importance of audience engagement from one being the lowest to 10 being the highest, where would you kind of put that?
Rachel
I don’t even think there’s any answer to that question other than 10, surely, because it literally is. What do you have if you don’t have audience engagement? And I just go back to how I was talking about my answer previously and just saying that not all audience engagement is the same.
So long as you are clear as to the size of the audience that you’re after, the way that you want to engage with them and the rate with which you expect them to engage with you. So long as you understand that and you’ve set it out, then it is the metric.
It is the metric that is the proof point within success or failure. You might be a brand that’s actually a membership model that is looking for daily interaction and engagement with the brand.
You might be a media owner who has got an event that is once a year and you just want it to be the first thing on their diary once a year and not really looking for much interaction in between. The variations between what audience engagement means are so huge.
They are ultimately the indicator of how successful a product is and the opportunities for development in the future. So it’s the thing you should be setting out from the very beginning, monitoring and seeing where the opportunities and the threats come from constantly.
Francesca
And part of all of that monitoring and doing is the technology that helps you to do that. What role do you see technology like AI or data analytics play in that audience, in these audience engagement efforts?
Rachel
It’s massively important. There’s no two ways about it. I’m the wrong person to ask to sort of go through the Rolodex of different types of tech to present it. I’ve luckily worked with some really smart people who can identify the right thing and the right platform to present information to people in the past. So I haven’t had to do it myself, but the key thing for me is using the right platform and serving it to the people, the end users within the organisation in a way that is natural within their daily workflow.
And then the other key thing is making sure it’s actionable by them. Making sure that you are serving those people the right information at the right time in a natural way in a voice and a language they can understand.
So that might be, you know, using a data translation tool on top of the raw data so that you can actually provide an action for your team. Or it might be, you know, how I’ve worked with my commercial teams in the past is creating dashboards that are prominent when people go onto Salesforce, they literally, would be going about their daily sales and marketing business, opening it up and they’d understand how their customers were interacting.
I think that the tech is an enabler. And then what is the most important thing is you putting the processes in place in a daily workflow to make sure that people are engaging with it and actually uniting around it, and that that is a non -negotiable.
For me, that’s more important almost than the complexity around tech.
Francesca
Yeah, I love that definition of tech being an enabler. I’m completely on the same page. Let’s talk a little bit about the common pitfalls, the challenges, the mistakes that happen around. What in your opinion are some of those common pitfalls and challenges when it comes to audience engagement?
Rachel
Lack of clarity, a lack of shared clarity is for me what is always at the root of things, of challenges. I have a real bugbear or I think that matrixed organizations are really challenged because, in this day and age, so many of the senior leaders have been cut from businesses, that there are fewer people to actually connect the dots between all of the different departmental types.
And so you’re generally asking, a senior sales leader or a senior marketing leader or a senior content leader to think beyond their personal daily targets.
And I think that in order to adapt and evolve and respond to audience engagement data, an insight that you’re pulling out from what you’re seeing day to day or month to month… Everybody really needs to come together to actually be able to analyse it properly.
And so I think that, you know, time is one of the key pitfalls and process is one of the key pitfalls because you have to make, it sort of goes back to the question, you know, my answer to the previous question really, which is that the tech is an enabler for process.
And I think the pitfall here is a lack of process and a lack of alignment. To me, that’s the key thing and valuing that audience engagement data as the central information point that actually guides your decision -making process and the actions that you take within an organisation.
Francesca
And do you have any examples of times it hasn’t worked as planned?
Rachel
I hope that I haven’t led a business unit in a way that has failed, but I’ve certainly from a consulting perspective, I’ve observed businesses where they simply haven’t had an agreement.
I think it’s that fundamental agreement. I think it’s that fundamental, what’s our strategy? How do we all contribute to that strategy? So I think it’s almost where there hasn’t been a commonality of goal and an understanding of what that means to you in your department and you as an individual.
And these are all things that can be rectified by good communication, good leadership.
HR being involved in terms of setting goals and having performance reviews that are set around goals and also an expectation around behaviours.
It’s not just hard metrics, but it’s how we expect people within an organisation to interact with each other.
And the other piece, so I think there’s that one piece on the one side, and the other piece where I’ve seen it fall down is just skills where genuinely, with all the best will in the world, you haven’t invested in the right skills to actually analyse data, to serve data in a way that’s digestible to action the data.
It’s where companies haven’t invested correctly in the right people and the right skills.
Francesca
That lack of clarity resonates so much with me. There was a moment you said, no leaders or less leaders. And I would almost argue we’ve gone into a world where brands, instead of being like content brands, media brands, are almost becoming tech companies in their own sense. And I don’t think the leaders understand the tech enough. So it’s almost like the CTOs in some cases have become the CEOs and we all know CTOs aren’t CEOs in the same way and they can’t make the decisions in the same way because they haven’t got the overview.
They understand the tech, but they don’t necessarily always understand the whole aim.
Rachel
And to expand on that even further, I think it’s quite surprising how many organisations don’t have an adequate strategy. I think especially in legacy brands, it’s not being reviewed enough and it’s not being nurtured enough and placed in the centre of an organisation or it’s not being communicated enough. It’s a really common mistake for senior leaders to discuss amongst themselves.
And because they will have discussed it to the nth degree, they’ll assume a level of knowledge within the working body of the business that just doesn’t exist.
And I think that, again, if you come back to that clear vision and that clear strategy, then everything else tends to fall into place. So for me, that’s just the leaders.
The key aim in life is to make sure everybody understands how they move the dial and what the goals are.
Francesca
Their key aim in life, I love that. Their whole life needs to be about communicating these goals. It is true. And speaking the next, what happens next? We’ve got this big future and we’re in this awkward middle phase, I would say.
Where do you see the future of audience engagement heading in the next, I’m gonna say five years because 10 almost feels like too much.
Rachel
I think that acceleration, even faster and faster is all that there is, we can see that with the amount of focus, new experts in AI, application of AI and business, you know, it feels like the tech is running at a faster pace than the human skills are running.
And so I think that creates an enormous challenge and I think that that can create panic within businesses that perhaps is a little bit unnecessary.
I think that all businesses really need to do (it’s not simple, I’m not making it simple or suggesting it is to any degree!), I think so long as you’ve got the clarity about what you want to achieve and you’ve got the underpinning understanding about the audience engagement that is required in order to hit those goals, then you can select tech that enables you to match and deliver that. But I think you’re right in regards to how you were talking about that relationship with the CTO. I think that those skills, the tech skills and the data skills, if businesses don’t already have a very senior data person who is listened to within the organisation and they’re on the back foot.
And I think it’s the pairing of those people along with the head of content and the head of commercial actually putting a proper data strategy in place that allows both an understanding of audience need, audience engagement, and therefore being able to make predictions about the future.
And then I think it’s also from a customer perspective, there’s so much more of an expectation around personalization and that we need as businesses to really embrace understanding what those particular segments are, how they are interacting with products, what other product opportunities there might be. I think from that customer perspective, there’s that expectation of being spoken to in a different way, and that’s only going to evolve and accelerate even further.
And then within the businesses, we just simply need to be prepared with the right skills in place to be able to make very quick agile decisions around the tech, the platform and the way that we serve content to people as those decisions are put in front of us.
Francesca
If you had to give one piece of advice to a brand that was focusing on their engagement strategies at the moment, what would your go -to piece of advice be?
Rachel
Customer research, I think that’s the foundation of everything. I think that understanding what your customer wants, understanding how frequently they want it, and understanding how your brand can give them that is at the bottom of absolutely everything. Because from that, you’re able to set your goals.
you’re able to set your strategy and you’re able to adapt your strategy with clarity.
Francesca
Thank you so much for your time, Rachel. That was fantastic.
Rachel
No problem at all. It’s been a pleasure.