‘A hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a trainwreck’
2020 has been rough, but the entire year doesn’t have to be a total loss, right? At least not where your marketing experiments are concerned. We’ve rounded up 9 things to try before the year is over. Hey, what do you have to lose….
Automated reporting - As resources become more and more limited, your staff’s time has become that much more valuable. Don’t let them spend it on pulling manual reports. If 2020 is the dumpster fire, your 60+ excel docs are the kindling. Good news! A TFD custom solution for streamlined reporting is coming soon.
Hosting a virtual event - It’s not too late to get your hands dirty and start to experiment with virtual events if you haven’t already. Work off your digital event jitters now and streamline payment, execution and follow up before you start sprinting into digital events in 2021. Start small, provide a service to a niche part of your audience.
A holiday gift guide/giveaway - Doing a holiday gift guide or a giveaway is going to take some time to set up. Start today, because once November hits with Black Friday and Cyber Monday paired with a few days off, it’s basically 2021. Determine the level of capacity you have up front. Perhaps building a landing page will take too many resources. Create a mini-gift newsletter or a PDF download with gift ideas. Bonus points if you set up affiliate revenue links for any of the products and a sponsor for the program.
Step your Instagram game up - Instagram was the highest growing traffic source for CRMA publishers from 2019 to 2020 and that isn’t slowing down. Take a page out of The Economist’s book and invest in creative ways to distribute your content on IG stories and tease new articles in your feeds. Later.com held a conference this year all about social media, and they posted the entire 9 hour video on YouTube. Leave the conference playing in the background of a work day and absorb as much information as you can from experts in their field.
Evaluate your newsletter offerings - Take stock of all the newsletters you’re producing. Are they still serving your audience in 2020? Evaluate the level of effort that goes into each newsletter and the revenue that it generates. Is it profitable to spend that much time on it? Do you need to implement some new strategies to keep your audience engaged? Quite a few of our clients have decreased the number of newsletters they produce, shifting focus to produce better content for fewer newsletters and their open rates and CTRs have improved. The end of the year is a great time to sunset things that aren’t working.
Get your GTM in order - In 2021 you’ll likely be adopting new platforms and with them? Pixels and tags. Don’t wait to add them to an existing mess. Review your GTM and get your house in order before you add your 2021 guests. Publishers can use GTM to get to know what resonates with your audience better. Find out which author drives the most subscriptions, which sponsored content performs the best with your audience, and even keep track of pop ups and forms that drive the most newsletter subscriptions. Need some inspo? Here’s 99 metrics and dimensions you can track with GTM.
Pull together your best and worst hits - Go through your Google Analytics and find your most popular content pieces of 2020. Do you have any evergreen content that needs a little love? Update and share with your audience the pieces they may have missed this year. We all love a round up. Remind your audience of your hits with a special blog post and feature. Extra credit if you share your content to your Instagram Stories like @dallasnews.
Learn a new skill. As audience developers we need to know a little bit of everything. Facebook and Google have entire programs designed to teach skills from the ground up. Dedicate one hour a week to get a better understanding of paid Facebook targeting, Google Analytics dimensions, UTM tracking, or organic social best practices straight from the source. Give yourself 3 hours to learn Canva. It’s a simple tool that can help non-designers design elegant pieces quickly. Audience developers need some skills in all areas to be effective, so add design to that list. Being able to crank out a graphic quickly will change the way your department operates, trust me.
Vote. Caring about our democracy is cool and crucial. Do something good for you and humanity before the year is over.
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