Marketing & Audience Engagement
Audience engagement and marketing are two things that are particularly important for the Digital side of journalism. Whenever something is posted on our website, I have think about what will make it engaging for our audience, and the best way to promote it so that our audience knows it's there, usually through social media. Through focus groups, polling, selling subscriptions, and fundraising, I always keep in mind that the ODYSSEY is not just a student group, but a professional media group, and a professional business, and we get our credibility from our audience and their support and their opinions of us.
Focus group
I was part of a small group of ODYSSEY members who held a focus group with a group of students from Clarke Central. We showed them our magazine and website, and asked them questions about how they engaged with it, what they would like to see more, and what would make them more likely to look at a story for longer.
Analyzing engagement
On both our website and social media, we have analytics about how many people have visited, what they've clicked on, and how long they've stayed for. We look at these numbers periodically to see what content we should have more of, and what content people don't engage with. They are a good measure of the quality and quantity of our content over a period of time, and so can be used to quantifiably measure how well we did during a certain time. When they are dropping in specific areas, we can adjust our content and our output.
Social media promo
As the Digital Managing Editor, I help to coordinate social media promotions for stories on our website, which helps to increase traffic to our website. Social media is the primary way we have to reach our student body, so we make sure that stories that students might be particularly interested in, or that are particularly important, are promoted.
_edited.jpg)
Selling subscriptions
As a member of production class, I have to attempt to sell at least five subscriptions to our newsmagazine every year. Over the course of my time on staff, I’ve sold nineteen subscriptions to the ODYSSEY. Here I have my list of people to sell the ODYSSEY to, and how I organized my sales.
Selling to family members
When reaching out to family members to sell the ODYSSEY, I focused on my individual achievement and position within the program, knowing that they would be motivated to buy it in order to support me and see my work.
Selling to community members
I also sold ODYSSEY subscriptions to several Athens community members. One example is Margaret Holt, a prominent community member in Athens who I started a conversation with after covering an event where she spoke, and then sold a subscription to.
Polling the student body
For my story “Engaging with gender,” I polled the student body in order to see how students at Clarke Central viewed the issue. I had to go into the lunchroom and get a lot of students to fill out the survey, which also contributed to getting higher student engagement with the ODYSSEY.
Distributing magazines
For magazines in the 2019-20 and 2021-22 school years (we did not have the opportunity to distribute paper magazines in 2020-21 due to COVID-19), I was part of the distribution team for the newsmagazine. We walked around the school and gave magazines to teachers and students, ensuring that they would get a wide readership. We also had to ensure we were professional and gave a good impression of the ODYSSEY as we were distributing, so we were a part of the ODYSSEY professional branding and were worthy ambassadors.
