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 option to join with clients and staff.
Have you considered doing one however are not sure find out how to pull it off? We’ll stroll you thru the making of the sort of inventive marketing campaign with a step-by-step information and examples from manufacturers which have carried out 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 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 may also be used to re-engage former clients or transfer prospects down the funnel with the appropriate call-to-action.
What does a year-in-review appear like?
Probably the most participating year-in-review campaigns inform an viewers a personalised story about themselves, normally utilizing buyer information. You’ll must watch out with this technique—it may be a bit creepy when you go overboard—however when carried out proper, it’s one of the crucial 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 develop into an eagerly-awaited occasion for customers of the platform.
Google used buyer information another way. Relatively than sharing personalised insights for each person, they aggregated international search developments and chosen a theme to rejoice in an end-of-year video. This yr’s #YearInSearch centered 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 information 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 put up protecting milestones just like the variety of emails they despatched, merchandise launched, assist tickets resolved, and the variety of international locations they’d expanded to.
A year-in-review marketing campaign can be a good time to rejoice your staff’ accomplishments by sharing information just like the variety of workplaces opened, staff employed, variety statistics, conferences, or emails. Contemplate together with enjoyable information right here too, like cups of espresso drunk or books learn.
Nordstrom took this route final yr in a press marketing campaign that lined all of their firm milestones all year long:
Progressoft.com’s CEO wrote a letter to staff 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 may be straightforward to dismiss when you’re not centered on branding objectives, however it shouldn’t be discarded calmly. Buyer engagement is significant all through the whole funnel, and the extra linked 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 Yr-in-Evaluate 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 not 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 whenever you’ve received the next deliverables:
- A checklist of stakeholders and readability on who’s liable for efficiency, accountable for belongings, and consulted or simply stored knowledgeable
- Settlement from these stakeholders on the deliberate format of your belongings
- A brainstormed checklist of potential information or anecdotes
- An authorised 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 information 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 further work.
2. Analysis
Gathering the information it’s essential create your marketing campaign will contain a number of groups. This basic information ought to act as a place to begin that can assist you search out data however will change from firm to firm.
- Engineering or information science groups can pull buyer information
- Human Sources (HR) or data expertise (IT) can pull information on headcount and workplaces
- Finance can pull information on income and buyer spend
- Executives can pull collectively firm and {industry} milestones
- Advertising can pull information from the web site and distinctive buyer information in collaboration with buyer success (to create profiles like Spotify does, based mostly on person interplay with software program)
Accumulate all of your potential information 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 crucial. Spend plenty of time at this stage choosing your information and getting applicable, written approval. This stage would possibly take plenty of time, however it’s important to make sure a easy launch.
3. Create Belongings
Begin by contemplating the inventive abilities you may have in-house and people it’s essential 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, in order 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 inventive 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 means that you can construct customized workflows, in order that they work seamlessly along 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 information choice and steps for design and revisions. In case your infographic will dwell in a weblog article, it’d 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. Contemplate particular video parts you would possibly have to 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 belongings it’s essential create for distribution. In some circumstances, it’d 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 plenty of completely different phases, relying on the kind of content material you produce. A video marketing campaign will look lots completely different from one that features carousel picture belongings or simply customary copy, so regulate accordingly. The next instance workflow consists of customary copy, design, and enhancing steps.
While you work with Contently, the platform robotically 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 completely different freelancers in the identical workflow (and skip slicing checks by 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 belongings go dwell. 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 have to be put in on any touchdown pages so I can see the place site visitors is coming from?
- Do customized hyperlinks have to be constructed with urchin monitoring module (UTM) codes to simply monitor marketing campaign efficiency in Google Analytics?
- Is the advertising and marketing automation system linked to the gross sales group’s buyer relationship administration (CRM) device so I can measure the influence on income?
The solutions to those questions would possibly require information 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 any case that effort to organize, write, design, take a look at, edit, and take a look at your belongings once more, you’re able to launch your year-in-review marketing campaign.
The lifecycle of the sort of marketing campaign is brief. Usually assessment your progress for any crucial optimizations—we advocate each week for a month. On the finish of the month, recap your marketing campaign’s influence in your total objectives.
A Yr-in-Evaluate Marketing campaign Is About Celebration
Your marketing campaign needs to be pushed by an emotional want to attach along with your clients and staff—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 carry the voice of your viewers to the forefront of your model story. In the event you can entertain, delight, and categorical gratitude for them, you’ve made an actual emotional connection and might name your yr a wrap.
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