Digital Age: How to use data to better engage users and grow revenue?

In this era of digitalization, it's critical for digital content, news and media companies to make organizational changes to make content universally available and accessible. However, the process is a little bit complex as it involves many obstacles, including technical.

"In partnership with the Google News Initiative, Deloitte interviewed executives from 50 leading news and media companies in 16 countries. The results, published in the Digital transformation through data report, provide a framework to evaluate how advanced your organization is at using data and nine ways to use data to better engage your users and grow your revenue," Alex Shellhammer, Head of Publisher Marketing, Google Ad Manager, wrote in a blog post.

Deloitte activation guide outlines four key foundations of data transformation, namely, culture, skills, technology, and data

• Media organizations typically need to change their internal culture

Business leaders should broadcast their data strategy so that employees at every level understand how the use of data can serve the organization's goals. Collaboration should be encouraged across departments and include talent across editorial, sales and marketing, data, and technology groups.

• Identify skills your organization lacks

To survive in the digital age, organizations need to build skill sets that may not be traditionally found in media environments and build an analytics team who can glean insights from data and act upon them. Organizations should integrate analytics team within every part of their business.

• Acquire the right technology

Choose customized tools that fit your company's needs. The tools should be easily accessible to everyone, not just data specialists, and empower teams to act quickly.

• Develop the ability to quickly and accurately measure how your readers and viewers engage with data

Mature organizations are intimately familiar with the most important metrics for their business, which create the most value, and how to manage them intelligently. They're able to identify specific audience segments and combine different types of data to create holistic views of each.