Empowering Kauppalehti to diversify their audience and grow their female readership

Kauppalehti is the leading finance media organisation in Finland. Like many business news outlets globally, it has a higher readership among men. Through examining its data, its publishers discovered that women readers are interested in particular topics, such as environmental and work-life issues, so they wanted specifically to use content strategies to appeal to more women and, crucially, keep them coming back.

The team at Kauppalehti worked cross-functionally across editorial and commercial, putting together a multidisciplinary team for the Audience Diversity Academy with FT Strategies and the Google News Initiative. The team created new dashboards featuring gender insights to track article engagement, which have become a permanent feature of the newsroom. They increased representation of women among images on their digital platforms, having discovered the impact it has on growing women readers. Climate change and good news emerged as important topics for women readers, so Kauppalehti targeted new newsletters on these topics, which have achieved successful click-through rates, and feedback with a 6 per cent uplift in the proportion of women subscribers, compared with the regular newsletter. Changes to the onboarding journey have been made in direct response to reader survey data on what women want, highlighting podcasts for readers with less time, and increasing exposure for the publication’s female journalists to improve relatability.