Earlier than the Thanksgiving turkey is gone, entrepreneurs are already planning for the brand new 12 months. A year-in-review marketing campaign is a well-liked and impactful strategy to join with prospects and staff.
Have you considered doing one however are uncertain the way to pull it off? We’ll stroll you thru the making of this kind of inventive marketing campaign with a step-by-step information and examples from manufacturers which have performed it efficiently prior 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 sometimes concentrate on model constructing however can be used to re-engage former prospects or transfer prospects down the funnel with the fitting call-to-action.
What does a year-in-review appear like?
Essentially the most partaking year-in-review campaigns inform an viewers a customized story about themselves, often utilizing buyer information. You’ll must watch out with this technique—it may be a bit creepy if you happen to go overboard—however when performed proper, it’s some 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 12 months based mostly on their distinctive preferences. These playlists embody your prime songs, artists, tracks, podcasts, episodes, and extra.
Picture Supply: TechCrunch
Spotify sends an e-mail on the finish of the 12 months 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. Somewhat than sharing customized insights for each person, they aggregated international search traits and chosen a theme to have fun in an end-of-year video. This 12 months’s #YearInSearch centered on traits associated to individuals’s willingness to alter 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 means that expresses gratitude to prospects for making them a actuality. In 2021, Marketing campaign Monitor launched an infographic and weblog put up masking milestones just like the variety of emails they despatched, merchandise launched, help tickets resolved, and the variety of international locations they’d expanded to.
A year-in-review marketing campaign can also be a good time to have fun your staff’ accomplishments by sharing information just like the variety of places of work opened, staff employed, range 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 12 months 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 prospects that included anecdotes from all year long and celebrated the perseverance he noticed from his inside group.
The year-in-review marketing campaign might be simple to dismiss if you happen to’re not centered on branding objectives, but it surely shouldn’t be discarded flippantly. Buyer engagement is significant all through your complete 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 Yr-in-Overview 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 not less than 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 obtained the next deliverables:
- A record 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 record of potential information or anecdotes
- An accredited storyboard or define for every deliberate asset
- Settlement on the marketing campaign’s aim, 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 adjustments to the story after you’ve began analysis or asset creation shall be irritating for everybody concerned and will lead to extra work.
2. Analysis
Gathering the info you could create your marketing campaign will contain a number of groups. This normal 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 information science groups can pull buyer information
- Human Sources (HR) or data expertise (IT) can pull information on headcount and places of work
- 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 1st step, in addition to authorized and compliance if crucial. Spend lots of time at this stage deciding on your information and getting applicable, written approval. This stage may take lots of time, but it surely’s vital to make sure a clean launch.
3. Create Property
Begin by contemplating the inventive expertise you’ve gotten in-house and people you could outsource. Relying in your format of alternative, you could want to search out writers, editors, analysts, graphic designers, video producers, or audio producers.
Workers your freelancers as early as attainable, in order that they’re able to hit the bottom working 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 permits you to 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 embody 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 would make sense to mix the 2 workflows, so all the things stays in a single place.
Video workflows will embody steps for storyboarding, scripting, manufacturing, and the suitable approvals. Contemplate particular video components you may must approve alongside the best way, like animations or photographs, and embody steps devoted to them to chop down on redundant work.
Don’t overlook the extra property you could create for distribution. In some circumstances, it would make sense to arrange extra workflows for emails or social media content material.
Your e-mail workflow ought to embody copy, design, and scheduling alongside steps for revisions and approval.
Social media might embody lots 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.
Once you work with Contently, the platform robotically 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 may simply pay totally different freelancers in the identical workflow (and skip slicing checks by means of Accounting).
5. Set Up Analytics
Test that you’ve got the technical infrastructure to trace the KPIs you agreed upon in your planning section earlier than your property 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 must be put in on any touchdown pages so I can see the place 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) instrument so I can measure the impression on income?
The solutions to those questions may require information science and analytics groups, however you may 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’ll have paid for natural visitors, in addition to the place readers focus essentially the most inside a PDF.
6. Launch!
Lastly—in any case 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 kind of marketing campaign is brief. Frequently evaluation your progress for any crucial optimizations—we advocate each week for a month. On the finish of the month, recap your marketing campaign’s impression in your general objectives.
A Yr-in-Overview Marketing campaign Is About Celebration
Your marketing campaign must be pushed by an emotional need to attach together with your prospects and staff—and to have fun with them on the 12 months’s finish.
Infuse this power 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. In the event you can entertain, delight, and categorical gratitude for them, you’ve made an actual emotional connection and might name your 12 months a wrap.
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