Marketing and Engagement
"Design and content can only matter so much if no one sees it." - Mishal Charania 2021
Seeing is believing
When I was online editor, I was in charge of making sure that our community knew what we were doing this. I did this in a few different ways. The biggest way was just using social media. Below are a few examples of my posts promoting Emery content, news, or general announcements. Facebook example here.
Selling a brand virtually
The Enthymion is truly an iconic part of Huron. Students know staffers by their badges and honestly like being pulled out of class even if it is just for a minute. This year, we conducted our reporting completely virtually which confused some of our community members. The biggest question I have received is "is the yearbook worth it this year?" and I genuinely have a hard time emphasizing how important it is. We have really expanded our online community for The Enthymion by kick starting our Instagram and Facebook. Our yearbook program is currently in debt meaning that every single ad sale and book bought means so much. We have also been reporting through Instagram and have received pretty great results.
Our first Instagram post about yearbook sales. Ultimately, social media and emails are the main way students are getting information about the yearbook and we want every single student to have the information they need. Lots of students have admitted that they don't look at email announcements but we have instead been able to market through Instagram.
This is an example of a post we have done to promote engagement. We have been able to interview quite a few students just by asking if anyone met the criteria through Instagram. With this post we wanted students to fill out a survey. We understand that this can sometimes probe the same students to reply over and over which is why we do more to get more students.
Analyzing the analytics
The picture above represents thehuronemery.com page views from when I was the Online Editor-in-Chief. We progressed to having a higher daily average number of page views than what we did at the beginning of the year. The first high spike came on February 24 with 771 page views. This spike most likely came from our story on the Women's basketball team winning regionals. The next spike is from March 12, this was the largest spike of the school year with 847 page views. This spike most likely came from the posts I was putting up about school shutting down. We continued to have activity on our website regularly after March 12 because we were constantly updating the community. I would constantly check our website analytics to see what posts were doing best. While we post in every category, it is important to place an emphasis on the sections that the readers prefer.
The photo to the left demonstrates the most viewed posts from the last two years. 11 out of 12 of these posts were created during my time as Online Editor-in-Chief. (fun fact: the one post that was not during my time as EIC was a post that I still did the reporting for.) This makes sense as without sports and in-person school, some of our content is not as interesting/does not clearly feature students. Instagram is the main way that we stream views on our website and so looking at the posts that do the best helped me decide what needed to be posted on our Instagram. This year we have also been using LinkTree. Even though LinkTree only tells us how many views and clicks we have in total, it is still helpful to know that our viewers are looking at the content we work on.
All about the audience
When I first started on The Emery's social media, I would honestly post randomly. There wasn't a method to what went on Facebook versus Twitter versus Instagram. Through trial and error, I was able to figure out a simple formula for The Emery's socials:
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Instagram: promote sports photos, news, and school/community announcements
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Twitter: sport scores(!!!!!) and news
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Facebook: student features, parent information, and news
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With this information, we are able to cater to every demographic we serve (students, parents, general community members, staff, etc.) as best as possible. Ultimately, we are a news source and everyone wants the news.
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For more on these ideas, check out my marketing portfolio which won second in the Marketer of The Year contest from the National Scholastic Press Association.
When we were applying for NSPA individual awards, I decided to submit for the Best Use of Social Media Reporting and Promotion categories. We received an honorable mention within the social media reporting category. Both presentations can be found below.
Even though we only received an honorable mention, we were able to use that and expand our coverage this year. We have been engaging in more promotion as well as reporting because of the award.
Award and progress
The Emery often releases news before students can hear about it from another source. With this, we often receive a lot of questions with the comments that we try to answer as best as we can.
Even when we do not have all of the answers we try our best to accommodate every question.
Engage, engage, engage
Get that bread
Both The Emery and The Enthymion are in some debt. Every year this debt decreases a little bit but I am trying to eliminate as much as possible this year.
Above represents The Emery editors presenting to Huron's Parent Teacher Organization. They agreed to fund the physical printing of our newspaper to be distributed to the students so we as a publication do not have to incur the cost. The first button below is our new online advertising contract. I created this at the beginning of the year and have had multiple businesses/clubs advertise with us. The second button represents the spreadsheet I made tracking the business reach-out from last school year. These are all examples of what I do outside of calling businesses.
The first button below is our new online advertising contract. I created this at the beginning of the year and have had multiple businesses/clubs advertise with us. The second button represents the spreadsheet I made tracking the business reach-out from last school year. These are all examples of what I do outside of calling businesses.
Even though we have been virtual all school year, we have been able to physically distribute two issues at semester book pickups. With these two issues we received the most traction as every student was given a copy.
Above: My friend Salome reading The Emery at book pickup! Even when we can not distribute in-person, we have been able to distribute online with great results.
