Marketing and Audience Engagement
The print edition being out of the picture due to COVID-19 during my senior year called for a major shift in advertising.
We made the decision to focus less on including traditional ads on our site from local companies or organizations and more on direct self-promotion; because our online content was the only thing we had, we relied completely on self-promotion, mostly via social media, to get the news to our audience.
Below are steps I took and lessons I learned in my time leading our promotional work during my senior year.
Analytics
Improvements
Senior year, we made some considerable improvements in audience engagement, with more sessions, page views, average session duration, average pages per session, number of users, number of new users, and average time on page in just the first semester of the 2020-2021 school year compared to the entirety of the school year before that. For 2019-2020, the best day of the year constituted just over 300 page views. In just one semester of senior year, we had many days that easily surpassed 300 page views and one that got all the way up to 1,400. I found this significant because it showed that our social media promotions were working; we gained many followers on social media in the 2020-2021 year (up to over 1,000 across our Instagram and Twitter platforms) and the analytics on our site were telling us that the gain in social media followers directly contributed to the increase in website traffic.
Challenges
There were still some big problems with our analytics. The first and most glaring was the average session duration. Just over two minutes is not an ideal average for a site that has loads of extensive and detailed stories with newsworthy information. This means that the average visitor is largely not reading through all of any story they click on and is likely not clicking on additional stories. We also had some pretty severe fluctuations in our numbers from day to day; we had great days and then days where barely anyone visited, so establishing consistency was something we could've worked on.
August 2019 - May 2020
August 2020 - January 2021
*Note* the analytics in the top picture represent the entirety of last school year (mid-August 2019 to late May 2020) while the analytics in the bottom picture represent just the first semester of this school year (mid-August 2020 to early January 2021).
Site Promotion
As one of the managers of our Instagram and Twitter, I was always posting to promote all kinds of content. Since it was often more accessible to look at a feature called Instagram stories as they appear on the top of the screen when a user opens the app, we posted promotions of our content there as well.
Click through the slideshow on the right to see the promotions that coordinate with the categories below:
Personal Accounts (Slides 1 and 2)
An unwritten rule that I set for the staff during my senior year was reposting content from our publication's social media sites onto personal social media accounts. Instagram and Twitter made it so easy to take the content from someone else's page and throw it up onto our own pages, instantly and exponentially increasing the total amount of users exposed to the content.
For reference, our publication's Instagram account had about a quarter of the followers that my personal account had at the time of my graduation. Reposting a promotion of an article onto my personal account exposed hundreds more users to the content we created.
Communication with Audience (Slide 3)
Apart from just reposting promotions of articles, I also created and promoted explanations of how our publication was going to be run during my unprecedented senior year. Due to the changes we made in the way we promote content because of COVID-19, I learned that communication about how to access content was crucial.
Staff Helping Staff (Slide 4)
I also made sure to promote other staff members' content on my personal social media as well to give our audience exposure to all the great things everyone on staff was doing. Reposting work that was not my own also helped me build those ever-important relationships with everyone on staff and staff confidence as a whole; sometimes just a simple repost of a classmate's work, saying "go check it out!" can go a long way.
Audience Engagement Badge
April 2020
November 2020
During my senior year, we earned SNO's Audience Engagement badge for the first time ever. The badge required that we accumulate 1,000 followers across two social media platforms and that we post on each one every school day for a month.
I kept track of both requirements, promoting our Instagram and Twitter to everyone I could to achieve the former and making a calendar to keep track of exactly what was posted each day ensuring that we didn't break our streaks for the latter.
Every day, I would consult with the staff to confirm if anyone had posted that day or ask if anyone had something to post. If so, I'd create the post, the caption, and the link to the story for both Instagram and Twitter and make sure they got up by the end of the day.
Keeping up with daily content promotion was a struggle, but it taught me a lesson about how important it is to stay consistent with audience engagement on social media.
The improvements we made were astonishing, especially on Twitter. In April of 2020 as you can see above, we had a total of 141 tweet impressions. That means that posts from our Twitter were seen a total of 141 times. By December 2020, that number was 32,700.
Last school year, most months saw our "new followers" category in the negatives. Last November, it jumped to 29 in one month. In April 2020, our profile was visited eight times. Eight. In November, It was visited over 600 times.
The promotion of our Twitter, which then in turn promotes our website and our content, has worked absolute wonders for our audience engagement.
I can say with 100% confidence that staying disciplined and organized enough to earn the Audience Engagement badge and improve our social media analytics has directly improved our website traffic flow this school year.
There are many things online that can draw someone away from one thing and towards another, leaving the former in the dust forever. Constantly updating our accounts with promotions, articles, information, videos, and more keeps the audience focused and up-to-date on the news they need, and I've learned that that's one of the most crucial elements for marketing a publication that is all-online.
December 2020
Promotional post for our Twitter on Instagram
Reminders for staff about achieving badge
Badge earned!
Brainstorming Sessions
On the left is one page out of a chart that we worked on during class one day, brainstorming all sorts of ideas for increasing the then-low website traffic volume.
On the right is a document I created with the best of those ideas. I stayed up-to-date with the staff on all of these ideas and kept track of all of the things that were followed through with (in green).
With these brainstorming sessions, I found it was crucial to keep track of all the ideas and follow up with those who came up with them so that all those great ideas didn't die out.
Merchandise
Something else I facilitated during my senior year that falls into the realm of marketing was designing and distributing sweatshirts for our staff and advisers.
While we didn't make sweatshirts for the student body to sell, having them just for the staff was just as important. Despite all the work we did in promoting our site, there was always a sizable chunk of the student population who had no idea about who we were.
With that in mind, I designed the sweatshirts to include the names of our social media platforms and website for quick access.
This way, someone in the school or community could see the sweatshirt, understand who we were and what we did based on the description on the back, and then check out our content by looking up the links to our social media and website right under the description.
What I came to understand through this endeavor was that there's nothing more powerful than word-of-mouth advertising. We could do all the social media advertising we wanted, but what's better than a real conversation to tell people about our publication and where to find its content?
