ZEE News' new content strategy makes it a market leader

In keeping with the changes in audience preferences, Zee News has taken steps towards making news on its channel more audience optimised.  The new content strategy is outcome of an on-ground study to understand the audience of today. The study has been conducted by the editorial team itself, who met people from all walks of life to understand the issues that are hitting them.

According to Sudhir Chaudhary, Editor, Zee News, the exercise has facilitated learning that is beneficial in presenting news more relevant to the audience. He explains “This exercise has given us a perspective and we are taking a stand on everything happening around us. Areas where it has helped us improve in a big way are the selection of news, our treatment and also, on occasion, our stand on a particular issue. Secondly, we are going beyond the surface and providing a lot of information that no other channel is providing. All this put together, makes our content unique and different from other channels.”

As an outcome of this strategy the channel has emerged as the market leader in Hindi news genre space (BARC Data: CS 22+, HSM, week 37 to 40, 2015, 06 hs to 24 hrs). Dr Bhaskar Das, Group CEO, Zee Media Corporation is happy with the growth trend. He expresses, “We have seen Zee news’ impressive strides on the programming front and in building unique content that has been gaining viewer stickiness. The brand is poised to dramatically expand the market, and we are thrilled to be part of this journey of Zee news as a team.”

Some of the channel’s specific shows have played a pivotal role in taking the channel to number One position. For instance, ‘DNA’ has been a market leader for a year, which can be attributed to the audience connect with content on the programme.

‘Fast and Fact’ and ‘Taal Thok ke’ are also being well accepted. First one, because it is loaded with relevant information, and the second, because of the channel taking a forthright stand. Talking about the future content strategy, Chaudhary states “We are reinventing the content; we want to give something fresh in a new format. We want to make it more people friendly content. It also includes the simple style of narrating facts and the simplicity of performance.”

An interesting step that Zee News has taken is switching off all the rival channels from the newsroom to remain unaffected by the news broadcast by them.

Changes in new content and its execution have been brought forth keeping in mind the channel’s current and desired target audience. Chowdhary informs, “We are used to being 25+ male phenomenon. Popular belief is that male in the house is the target audience for a news channel. Now we are widening our horizon to include women, youth, senior citizens and even children, hence the content is being designed differently. We are also encouraging family viewing of our content.”

The channel expects exponential growth on the back of the new content strategy. It intends backing it with aggressive marketing and distribution strategy. R.K. Arora, COO, Zee Media Corporation informs, “Along with content, the focus to improve our distribution is now bearing fruits. Going forward, we have a two pronged strategy to work on new content with greater focus and reach more audiences.”

Chaudhary adds, “These new initiatives will act as differentiators and give us a huge lead in the market in near future. We will get a phenomenal jump over other channels once this whole plan is implemented 100%. The partial implementation itself has given us good growth.”

The channel is using social media extensively to engage with the viewers. WhatsApp, Facebook and twitter are being used abundantly for B2C interactions. An interesting activity being undertaken is sharing of videos with viewers on WhatsApp getting their instant feedback. It has also launched a separate id, mynews@zeemedia.esselgroup.com where it invites viewers to send their reviews and feedback about the channel.

With the increased audience engagement and better ratings, Zee News is in the process of reworking its ad rates.  Chaudhary opines, “The channels is really doing well and we are in a great position. We intend to increase our ad rate too. We are actually reworking on it and the revised rates would be higher than before.”