Audience, audience, audience - growing the audience, that is, by slicing and dicing it.  The Texas Tribune’s growth hacking pilot, funded last year by a Reynolds Journalism Institute institutional fellowship, is about smart audience development and a search for low cost, innovative alternatives to traditional marketing.

Tim Griggs, publisher and chief operating officer of the Tribute, said the nonprofit news organization is primed for growth but needed to better understand its audience in order to expand it. This is a common issue faced by news entrepreneurs as well traditional media. For the five-year-old Tribune, audience growth is strategically important to its planning for the future. 

So the Tribune embarked on rigorously researching its audience and potential audiences.  Griggs outlines the priorities, and processes in his post. In short, the research involved learning everything about the Tribune’s current audience, creating practical profiles of that audience, sizing the market and developing an audience strategy. 

The result of the research: A decision to move away from treating all readers the same and instead targeting by segment (slice and dice). Griggs writes,  “As a simplistic example, we know we have a portion of readers who obsess over every turn of the screw in a particular legislative committee. Offering real-time notifications (mobile, Web, email, Twitter, text) will have tremendous value. To other segments, however, this level of detail would be unnecessary and uninteresting. Conversely, we know we have a portion of readers who want to be smart when talking to friends and co-workers about, say, a hotly debated proposal on highway funding. For this group, a minute-long video report on the local news and the opportunity to sign up for a weekly email summary on the issue may serve their purpose well.”

Next: Building a smart audience development process. This is where “growth hacking” comes in.  A growth hacker is part engineer and part marketer who can help with ideas for an organization with little or no marketing budget. Griggs said in July that growth hacking is widely used in the start-up world with success (Dropbox, Twitter and Evernote) but is “rarely used in the media space, particularly in news media.”