Marketing & Audience Engagement
The print edition being out of the picture this 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 is now the only thing we have, we rely completely on self-promotion, mostly via social media, to get the news to our audience.
Below are many steps I have taken and lessons I have learned in my journey of spearheading our promotional work this year.
Analytics
Analytics are extremely important in my mind because they are the most clear-cut representation of how our audience is digesting our content.
Improvements
This year, we have 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 this school year compared to the entirety of last year. Last year, the best day of the year constituted just over 300 page views. So far this year, we've had many days that easily surpassed 300 page views and one that got all the way up to 1,400. I find this significant because it shows that our social media promotions are working; we have gained many followers on social media this year (up to over 1,000 across our Instagram and Twitter platforms) and the analytics on our site are telling us that the gain in social media followers is directly contributing to the increase in website traffic.
Challenges
There are still some big problems with our analytics. The first and most glaring is 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 have some pretty severe fluctuations in our numbers from day to day, which is definitely something to improve. We have great page view days and then days where barely anyone visits, so establishing consistency will be a big part of our mission in the future.
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 shown in the web content category, we're constantly promoting our content on social media.
As one of the managers of our Instagram and Twitter, I am always posting to promote articles, videos, and all other kinds of content. Since it is 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 post 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 this year was reposting content from our publication's social media sites onto personal social media accounts. Instagram and Twitter make it so easy to take the content from someone else's page and throw it up onto your own page, instantly and exponentially increasing the total amount of users exposed to the content.
For reference, our publication's Instagram account has 547 followers, and my personal account has 1,541. Reposting a promotion of an article onto my personal account exposes hundreds more users to the content we're creating, significantly increasing audience engagement. It's clear that it's working, too: as the analytics above show, we've had higher numbers of audience engagement just in this last semester compared to the entirety of the last school year.
Communication with Audience (Slide 3)
Apart from just reposting promotions of articles, I also have created and promoted explanations of how our publication was going to be run this unprecedented year.
This year, due to the changes we've made in the way we promote content, I've learned that communication with the audience about how to access content is crucial. We could be making the best high school journalism content ever, but if no one sees it, it doesn't mean anything.
Staff Helping Staff (Slide 4)
I also make 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 is doing.
Reposting work that is not my own has also helped me build those ever-important relationships with everyone on staff as well as staff confidence as a whole; sometimes just a simple repost of a less confident staff member's work, saying "go check it out!" can go a long way.
Audience Engagement Badge
April 2020
November 2020
December 2020
This 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 confirming if anyone had posted that day or if anyone had something to post. If someone had something to post, I'd create the post, the caption, and the link to the story for both the Instagram and the 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 valuable lesson about how important it is to stay consistent with regard to audience engagement, especially on social media.
The process of earning this badge was hugely helpful in improving our audience engagement and requiring us to keep up with excellent standards of content promotion.
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.
Promotional post for 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've found it's crucial to keep track of all the ideas and follow up with those who came up with them so that all those great ideas don't die out.
Merchandise
Something else I facilitated this 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 is just as important. Despite all the work we do in promoting our site, there is always a sizable chunk of the student population who has no idea who we are or what we do.
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 can see the sweatshirt, understand who we are and what we do 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.
I've worn the sweatshirt to school a handful of times since we ordered them and every time I do, someone new comes up to me and asks about my sweatshirt or the links on the back.
What I've come to understand through this endeavor is that there's nothing more powerful than word-of-mouth advertising.
We can do all the social media promoting we want but the best way to continue spreading awareness of what we do and how we do it is just to spark conversations. And what's a better conversation-starter than what you're wearing?
A paragraph I sent into our staff group chat giving directions on how to order sweatshirts.
