Earlier than the Thanksgiving turkey is gone, entrepreneurs are already planning for the brand new yr. A year-in-review marketing campaign is a well-liked and impactful method to join with clients and workers.
Have you considered doing one however are not sure easy methods to pull it off? We’ll stroll you thru the making of such a artistic marketing campaign with a step-by-step information and examples from manufacturers which have achieved it efficiently up to now.
What’s a year-in-review?
A year-in-review is a advertising marketing campaign that celebrates your model and viewers by honoring completely different milestones or achievements all year long. A profitable one makes clients really feel like part of your story and makes use of infographics, movies, letters, multi-page PDFs, articles, or a combo-set.
These campaigns sometimes give attention to model constructing however will also be used to re-engage former clients or transfer prospects down the funnel with the proper call-to-action.
What does a year-in-review seem like?
Essentially the most partaking year-in-review campaigns inform an viewers a personalised story about themselves, normally utilizing buyer knowledge. You’ll need to watch out with this technique—it may be a bit creepy when you go overboard—however when achieved proper, it’s one of the efficient methods to make somebody really feel like your model understands them.
Spotify’s Wrapped playlists are a well-known instance of this technique. They create customized playlists for listeners on the finish of the yr based mostly on their distinctive preferences. These playlists embrace your high songs, artists, tracks, podcasts, episodes, and extra.
Picture Supply: TechCrunch
Spotify sends an electronic mail on the finish of the yr to drum up pleasure earlier than their Wrapped playlists drop, which has change into an eagerly-awaited occasion for customers of the platform.
Google used buyer knowledge another way. Moderately than sharing customized insights for each consumer, they aggregated world search developments and chosen a theme to rejoice in an end-of-year video. This yr’s #YearInSearch targeted on developments associated to folks’s willingness to vary themselves, their lives, and the world for the higher.
I’m not crying; you’re crying.
Some select to share knowledge about their enterprise’s accomplishments in a manner that expresses gratitude to clients for making them a actuality. In 2021, Marketing campaign Monitor launched an infographic and weblog submit masking milestones just like the variety of emails they despatched, merchandise launched, help tickets resolved, and the variety of nations they’d expanded to.
A year-in-review marketing campaign can be a good time to rejoice your workers’ accomplishments by sharing knowledge just like the variety of workplaces opened, workers employed, range statistics, conferences, or emails. Think about together with enjoyable knowledge right here too, like cups of espresso drunk or books learn.
Nordstrom took this route final yr in a press marketing campaign that coated all of their firm milestones all year long:
Progressoft.com’s CEO wrote a letter to workers and clients that included anecdotes from all year long and celebrated the perseverance he noticed from his inside group.
The year-in-review marketing campaign will be simple to dismiss when you’re not targeted on branding targets, but it surely shouldn’t be discarded flippantly. Buyer engagement is important all through your entire funnel, and the extra related your viewers feels to your model’s story, the extra they’ll really feel an incentive to be part of your success.
How you can Efficiently Launch a 12 months-in-Assessment Marketing campaign
To drag off a year-in-review marketing campaign, you’ll need to begin early and have a system for staying organized all through the planning, analysis, creation, and measurement phases.
1. Plan
Begin your year-in-review marketing campaign at the very least two months earlier than your required launch date. In some bigger organizations, you may need to begin a full quarter upfront. You’ve completed planning your marketing campaign once you’ve received the next deliverables:
- A checklist of stakeholders and readability on who’s chargeable for efficiency, accountable for property, and consulted or simply stored knowledgeable
- Settlement from these stakeholders on the deliberate format of your property
- A brainstormed checklist of potential knowledge or anecdotes
- An permitted storyboard or define for every deliberate asset
- Settlement on the marketing campaign’s purpose, the key efficiency indicators (KPIs) to be measured, and the call-to-action (CTA) for every asset
Each stakeholder must align on the potential knowledge or anecdotes within the starting stage. Making modifications to the story after you’ve began analysis or asset creation shall be irritating for everybody concerned and should end in extra work.
2. Analysis
Gathering the information it’s essential to create your marketing campaign will contain a number of groups. This normal information ought to act as a place to begin that can assist you search out info however will change from firm to firm.
- Engineering or knowledge science groups can pull buyer knowledge
- Human Assets (HR) or info expertise (IT) can pull knowledge on headcount and workplaces
- Finance can pull knowledge on income and buyer spend
- Executives can pull collectively firm and {industry} milestones
- Advertising can pull knowledge from the web site and distinctive buyer knowledge in collaboration with buyer success (to create profiles like Spotify does, based mostly on consumer interplay with software program)
Acquire all of your potential knowledge and anecdotes in a single define for approval. Embrace all of the stakeholders you recognized in the first step, in addition to authorized and compliance if vital. Spend lots of time at this stage choosing your knowledge and getting applicable, written approval. This stage may take lots of time, but it surely’s essential to make sure a clean launch.
3. Create Belongings
Begin by contemplating the artistic expertise you may have in-house and people it’s essential to outsource. Relying in your format of alternative, chances are you’ll want to seek out writers, editors, analysts, graphic designers, video producers, or audio producers.
Workers your freelancers as early as potential, in order that they’re able to hit the bottom working when you’ve completed your analysis. Hold everybody organized with a transparent workflow that visualizes the artistic course of from begin to end. Contently is an industry-leading content material advertising platform that gives entry to over 160,000 freelancers worldwide and lets you construct customized workflows, in order that they work seamlessly together with your inside group.
In case your year-in-review marketing campaign consists of a weblog article, for instance, you may need to embrace steps in your workflow for the transient, define, draft, approvals, revisions, social media copy, and publishing.
Your workflow would change for an infographic, doubtlessly together with knowledge choice and steps for design and revisions. In case your infographic will stay in a weblog article, it would make sense to mix the 2 workflows, so every part stays in a single place.
Video workflows will embrace steps for storyboarding, scripting, manufacturing, and the suitable approvals. Think about particular video parts you may must approve alongside the best way, like animations or photographs, and embrace steps devoted to them to chop down on redundant work.
Don’t overlook the extra property it’s essential to create for distribution. In some circumstances, it would make sense to arrange extra workflows for emails or social media content material.
Your electronic mail workflow ought to embrace copy, design, and scheduling alongside steps for revisions and approval.
Social media may embrace lots of completely different levels, relying on the kind of content material you produce. A video marketing campaign will look loads completely different from one that features carousel picture property or simply normal copy, so modify accordingly. The next instance workflow consists of normal copy, design, and enhancing steps.
While you work with Contently, the platform routinely notifies group members when it’s their flip to work on a venture or a deadline is approaching. It additionally permits content material entrepreneurs to separate funds between workflow steps, so you’ll be able to simply pay completely different freelancers in the identical workflow (and skip reducing checks via Accounting).
5. Set Up Analytics
Test that you’ve the technical infrastructure to trace the KPIs you agreed upon in your planning part earlier than your property go stay. Precisely the way you measure your success will rely in your content material’s format, however you can begin by asking your self questions like:
- Do monitoring pixels should be put in on any touchdown pages so I can see the place site visitors is coming from?
- Do customized hyperlinks should be constructed with urchin monitoring module (UTM) codes to simply monitor marketing campaign efficiency in Google Analytics?
- Is the advertising automation system related to the gross sales group’s buyer relationship administration (CRM) software so I can measure the influence on income?
The solutions to those questions may require knowledge science and analytics groups, however you’ll be able to simply monitor success utilizing instruments like Contently. For instance, Docalytics can monitor the worth of the content material you’ve created based mostly on the quantity you’d have paid for natural site visitors, in addition to the place readers focus essentially the most inside a PDF.
6. Launch!
Lastly—in any case that effort to organize, write, design, take a look at, edit, and take a look at your property once more, you’re able to launch your year-in-review marketing campaign.
The lifecycle of such a marketing campaign is brief. Recurrently assessment your progress for any vital optimizations—we suggest each week for a month. On the finish of the month, recap your marketing campaign’s influence in your general targets.
A 12 months-in-Assessment Marketing campaign Is About Celebration
Your marketing campaign ought to be pushed by an emotional need to attach together with your clients and workers—and to rejoice with them on the yr’s finish.
Infuse this vitality into each stage of your year-in-review marketing campaign, from planning to measurement, and deal with it as a chance to deliver the voice of your viewers to the forefront of your model story. For those who can entertain, delight, and specific gratitude for them, you’ve made an actual emotional connection and might name your yr a wrap.
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