Marketing and
Audience Engagement
This part of journalism, which I disliked early on, has actually become one of my specialties on staff. In addition to participating in staff-wide marketing presentations, I've gone above and beyond the normal staffers workload to market and rebrand the program's social media presence.
01
Spheres of Influence
At the beginning of every school year, the ODYSSEY asks every student in the program to outline their “spheres of influence” – areas of their life where they have influence. These include family members, friends, and other activities we partake in. From there, we outline people we could potentially market an ODYSSEY subscription to. This helped me figure out who would be interested in purchasing a subscription and learn how to market.
02
Marketing Project
After doing the spheres of influence assignment, everyone takes part in the marketing project. Each student is required to send a minimum of ten marketing attempts to some people outlined in the spheres of influence document. This allows the program to cultivate more followers and to bring in more funds to help produce our magazines.
03
Celebration Posts
In terms of stories, we cut promos and post on our social media in order to showcase successes we’ve had. For example, after awards from the National Scholastic Press Association were announced, I did a post celebrating those who were recognized. These posts help show others outside the program what happens and gives them a ‘why’ in terms of our motivation.
04
Middle School Outreach
This year, the ODYSSEY started making a more concerted effort to get middle schoolers to join the program. We started presenting during their free periods at Clarke Middle School, showing them why they should join and getting them more involved with us at a young age. I did many of these presentations, directing them to our Instagram page and helping many of them with their journalism projects – in essence, creating a good first impression so they’ll want to come back later.
