Marketing and Audience Engagement

Perhaps one of the biggest goals I had when I became editor-in-chief was to get more people reading our paper. (In fact, I showed up to my interview at the end of the year with a full list of strategies to increase audience engagement!) We have received praise and awards from SNO, FSPA, CSPA and NSPA for as long as I have been on staff, but our intended audience—the students themselves—have always been eerily silent in regards to our paper. It doesn't just take one tactic to resolve this issue—instead, I have implemented solutions from every angle to increase our readership among the student body.

Key tenets of my marketing strategy

Awareness

This is the most obvious goal, but the most important. Students have to know that our paper exists in order to read it! Above all else, I hope to reduce the amount of students who say "Wait—we have a newspaper?" and increase the amount who check our website regularly.

Quality of content

Having high-quality content ensures that when students do find our paper, they return to it. It also builds trust with our audience. This means eliminating bias from our stories (students love to get angry about any perceived injustice), fact-checking, reviewing articles for spelling and grammar errors (the second a high school boy who wants to feel smart gets his hand on a paper containing a comma splice, it is over for us) and having content that is interesting and enjoyable to read.

Variety of appeal

Our content needs to appeal to as many students as possible. As a student newspaper, we should reflect the interests of all students (and all other communities related to our school), which means ensuring that our content is not repetitive, that we cover events from a variety of organizations and that we constantly expand our horizons as writers and research as many different topics as possible.

Audience feedback

We need to hear from our readers. I have made it a goal to reach out to students in as many ways as possible. This serves two purposes:

1) We learn what people want to read about and are better able to meet those needs, causing the student body to be more interested in what we write about.

2) We increase our transparency, and just by asking for ideas, increase trust from our audience, since they can easily see why and how we decide on certain topics.

Excitement

Students have to enjoy reading our website! Further, they should actively look forward to opening up our site and seeing new content. This is perhaps the most difficult to achieve, as the average high schooler has an attention span that is...less than compatible with the length and subject of most of our stories.

The following are concrete ways in which I have attempted to meet all of these goals.

Flyers around campus

Variety of appeal, awareness

I designed and printed several flyers with information and QR codes and posted them all over campus. This increases awareness of our paper among students and gives them a direct way to access our site.

Recruitment

At the end of last year, Holly, Isabella and I reached out to high-level English and Creative Writing teachers and asked if we could give a presentation about newspaper. We gave several presentations in the span of a week, to AP Language and Creative Writing students, who we figured would already have a strong enough grasp on writing to be successful as a member of the newspaper without taking an introductory course first. We directly recruited two members of our staff, Michelle and Ben, from this, and got the interest of many other students, which also increased our readership.

This year and last year, I also attended Curriculum Night, an event at which prospective students speak with current students and teachers to determine which classes they are interested in taking. The first year I volunteered to represent newspaper, I gave tours of the hallway where the Academy of Media and Communication is located, providing incoming freshmen and their families with information about newspaper, yearbook, photojournalism, digital design and TV production, and showing them around every classroom. This year, I helped out my teacher in the cafeteria, where electives could set up displays about their classes. I really enjoy talking to people about the program, and I began most conversations by asking what they were interested in so I could determine what class they would be the best fit for. A lot of people underestimated just how much variety our newspaper program has, since we do everything from sports coverage to opinion writing to podcasting.

Analytics

I regularly check our SNO Site Analytics to see how we're doing in terms of readership and engagement. This shows what days or periods of time we have different levels of views. Usually these are around when we promote something on Instagram or a specific story starts circulating more than usual. During big events or exciting times, we also see an increase in views: Some of our biggest spikes in activity this year have been around homecoming and the start of the winter/holiday season. SNO Site Analytics also shows which stories have the most views over a period of time, so I know which kinds of coverage students are most interested in reading. Lately, this has included a lot of entertainment pieces, but sometimes a particular feature or sports story will catch people's attention if it's on a topic that many students are invested in.

YouTube also provides analytics. I look at these to determine which videos are getting the most traction, how long viewers stay engaged for before clicking away, and how people are finding our videos (I would have thought most viewers would come from our website, but because some of our content appeals to people outside of just our school community, many viewers are recommended our videos because of other content that they watch).