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 technique to join with prospects and workers.
Have you considered doing one however are uncertain pull it off? We’ll stroll you thru the making of this sort of artistic marketing campaign with a step-by-step information and examples from manufacturers which have executed it efficiently up to now.
What’s a year-in-review?
A year-in-review is a advertising and marketing marketing campaign that celebrates your model and viewers by honoring totally different milestones or achievements all year long. A profitable one makes prospects really feel like part of your story and makes use of infographics, movies, letters, multi-page PDFs, articles, or a combo-set.
These campaigns usually give attention to model constructing however will also be used to re-engage former prospects or transfer prospects down the funnel with the proper call-to-action.
What does a year-in-review appear to be?
Essentially the most participating year-in-review campaigns inform an viewers a customized story about themselves, often utilizing buyer knowledge. You’ll must watch out with this technique—it may be a bit creepy in case you go overboard—however when executed 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 e mail on the finish of the yr to drum up pleasure earlier than their Wrapped playlists drop, which has turn into an eagerly-awaited occasion for customers of the platform.
Google used buyer knowledge another way. Moderately than sharing personalised insights for each person, they aggregated international search tendencies and chosen a theme to have fun in an end-of-year video. This yr’s #YearInSearch targeted on tendencies associated to folks’s willingness to alter 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 method that expresses gratitude to prospects 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, assist tickets resolved, and the variety of nations they’d expanded to.
A year-in-review marketing campaign can also be a good time to have fun your workers’ accomplishments by sharing knowledge just like the variety of places of work opened, workers employed, range statistics, conferences, or emails. Take into account 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 prospects 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 in case you’re not targeted on branding targets, nevertheless it shouldn’t be discarded calmly. Buyer engagement is significant 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.
Methods to Efficiently Launch a 12 months-in-Evaluation Marketing campaign
To tug 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 no less than two months earlier than your required launch date. In some bigger organizations, you would possibly need to begin a full quarter upfront. You’ve completed planning your marketing campaign if you’ve received the next deliverables:
- A listing of stakeholders and readability on who’s chargeable for efficiency, accountable for property, and consulted or simply saved knowledgeable
- Settlement from these stakeholders on the deliberate format of your property
- A brainstormed listing of potential knowledge or anecdotes
- An authorized storyboard or define for every deliberate asset
- Settlement on the marketing campaign’s objective, 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 strategy planning stage. Making adjustments to the story after you’ve began analysis or asset creation can be irritating for everybody concerned and will end in further work.
2. Analysis
Gathering the info it is advisable to create your marketing campaign will contain a number of groups. This basic information ought to act as a place to begin that will help you search out data however will change from firm to firm.
- Engineering or knowledge science groups can pull buyer knowledge
- Human Sources (HR) or data know-how (IT) can pull knowledge on headcount and places of work
- 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 person interplay with software program)
Gather all of your potential knowledge and anecdotes in a single define for approval. Embody all of the stakeholders you recognized in the first step, in addition to authorized and compliance if vital. Spend loads of time at this stage deciding on your knowledge and getting acceptable, written approval. This stage would possibly take loads of time, nevertheless it’s crucial to make sure a easy launch.
3. Create Property
Begin by contemplating the artistic abilities you’ve gotten in-house and people it is advisable to outsource. Relying in your format of selection, you might want to seek out writers, editors, analysts, graphic designers, video producers, or audio producers.
Workers your freelancers as early as doable, so that they’re able to hit the bottom operating when you’ve completed your analysis. Preserve everybody organized with a transparent workflow that visualizes the artistic course of from begin to end. Contently is an industry-leading content material advertising and marketing platform that gives entry to over 160,000 freelancers worldwide and lets you construct customized workflows, so 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 would possibly 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 reside in a weblog article, it would make sense to mix the 2 workflows, so every thing stays in a single place.
Video workflows will embrace steps for storyboarding, scripting, manufacturing, and the suitable approvals. Take into account particular video components you would possibly must approve alongside the best way, like animations or photos, and embrace steps devoted to them to chop down on redundant work.
Don’t overlook the extra property it is advisable to create for distribution. In some circumstances, it would make sense to arrange further workflows for emails or social media content material.
Your e mail workflow ought to embrace copy, design, and scheduling alongside steps for revisions and approval.
Social media might embrace loads of totally different phases, relying on the kind of content material you produce. A video marketing campaign will look loads totally different from one that features carousel picture property or simply normal copy, so modify accordingly. The next instance workflow contains normal copy, design, and modifying steps.
While you work with Contently, the platform mechanically notifies group members when it’s their flip to work on a undertaking or a deadline is approaching. It additionally permits content material entrepreneurs to separate funds between workflow steps, so you possibly can simply pay totally different freelancers in the identical workflow (and skip slicing checks by means of Accounting).
5. Set Up Analytics
Examine that you’ve got the technical infrastructure to trace the KPIs you agreed upon in your planning section earlier than your property go reside. 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 must be put in on any touchdown pages so I can see the place site visitors is coming from?
- Do customized hyperlinks must be constructed with urchin monitoring module (UTM) codes to simply monitor marketing campaign efficiency in Google Analytics?
- Is the advertising and marketing automation system related to the gross sales group’s buyer relationship administration (CRM) device so I can measure the affect on income?
The solutions to those questions would possibly require knowledge science and analytics groups, however you possibly can 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 spite of everything that effort to arrange, 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 this sort of marketing campaign is brief. Commonly overview your progress for any vital optimizations—we advocate each week for a month. On the finish of the month, recap your marketing campaign’s affect in your general targets.
A 12 months-in-Evaluation Marketing campaign Is About Celebration
Your marketing campaign must be pushed by an emotional want to attach together with your prospects and workers—and to have fun 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 convey the voice of your viewers to the forefront of your model story. If you happen to can entertain, delight, and specific gratitude for them, you’ve made an actual emotional connection and may name your yr a wrap.
Join our weekly publication for extra insider tips about efficiently execute content material advertising and marketing campaigns like these all yr spherical.
Picture by
treety
