Tuesday, July 7, 2015

How You (and the network) Did All Last Year - 7/6/15

Winners of the Year: Everyone! 

 
We'll risk the comparison to the "everyone gets a trophy" cliche and award Winner of the Week status to all metros for completing a full year of Weekly KPI reports. Just think - around this time last year, you were still pulling your own audience numbers and sending them to us. Three of you weren't even metros yet. Crazy!

All that time means we now have YoY numbers for all metrics! With a 30-second skim, you can see how much your user base has grown in a year, check out if you're adding subscribers at a faster rate, and read your most successful July FB post in 2014. This should all be huge in both benchmarking and planning.

To help even further in your quest to secure the next winner of the week title, we pulled all of the network-wide applicable learnings from past weekly winners, and came up with the...

Top 10 Wins You Could Do In Your Market Right Now: 
  1. Run some RSVPs - they can get you 70X the traffic of a standard event page, work best when you get creative about incentivizing attendance, and can single-handedly ramp up your metro's growth.
     
  2. Talk about how your city is changing on social: These perform unusually well and are right in your sweet spot as in-the-know sites. Think city rankings and venue openings/closings/repurposings
     
  3. Sharing on FB? Share it the right way. (The right way = using a link share instead of a photoediting your headline and preview texts, and doing everything you can to make sure people with social audiences share your post.  
     
  4. Fests will make or break your traffic! Get the most out of them by hosting aftershowsand thinking of post-festival content that will keep users engaged.
     
  5. Content: Focus on the big wins. Re-contextualize popular evergreen content and scan for SEO-driven content opportunities. Create a neighborhoods page (then sell it) or run some on-site contests.
     
  6. BUILD LISTS. They're great for SEOperform well on your other channels, and can position your site as the authoritative resource for harder-to-find events.
     
  7. Use cloying "[Festival] in [city]!" subject lines to increase open rate. It worked for DoLAand Do214.
     
  8. Sell some sponsored content, like a lens or a tastemaker collaboration.
     
  9. Put on an event/event series. Anniversary partiesfree weeks, and genre mixers have all worked in multiple markets. Or if you can't throw an event series, you can at leastpitch an ECP to an existing one.
     
  10. Monitor, investigate, and ask us questions about your KPIs every week. We're always here to help on this one, and you can start off on the right foot by checking out the most recent week's stats below:

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Thoughts to share? DO!

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

How You (and the network) Did All Last Year - 7/6/15

Winners of the Year: Everyone! 

 
We'll risk the comparison to the "everyone gets a trophy" cliche and award Winner of the Week status to all metros for completing a full year of Weekly KPI reports. Just think - around this time last year, you were still pulling your own audience numbers and sending them to us. Three of you weren't even metros yet. Crazy!

All that time means we now have YoY numbers for all metrics! With a 30-second skim, you can see how much your user base has grown in a year, check out if you're adding subscribers at a faster rate, and read your most successful July FB post in 2014. This should all be huge in both benchmarking and planning.

To help even further in your quest to secure the next winner of the week title, we pulled all of the network-wide applicable learnings from past weekly winners, and came up with the...

Top 10 Wins You Could Do In Your Market Right Now: 
  1. Run some RSVPs - they can get you 70X the traffic of a standard event page, work best when you get creative about incentivizing attendance, and can single-handedly ramp up your metro's growth.
     
  2. Talk about how your city is changing on social: These perform unusually well and are right in your sweet spot as in-the-know sites. Think city rankings and venue openings/closings/repurposings
     
  3. Sharing on FB? Share it the right way. (The right way = using a link share instead of a photoediting your headline and preview texts, and doing everything you can to make sure people with social audiences share your post.  
     
  4. Fests will make or break your traffic! Get the most out of them by hosting aftershowsand thinking of post-festival content that will keep users engaged.
     
  5. Content: Focus on the big wins. Re-contextualize popular evergreen content and scan for SEO-driven content opportunities. Create a neighborhoods page (then sell it) or run some on-site contests.
     
  6. BUILD LISTS. They're great for SEOperform well on your other channels, and can position your site as the authoritative resource for harder-to-find events.
     
  7. Use cloying "[Festival] in [city]!" subject lines to increase open rate. It worked for DoLAand Do214.
     
  8. Sell some sponsored content, like a lens or a tastemaker collaboration.
     
  9. Put on an event/event series. Anniversary partiesfree weeks, and genre mixers have all worked in multiple markets. Or if you can't throw an event series, you can at leastpitch an ECP to an existing one.
     
  10. Monitor, investigate, and ask us questions about your KPIs every week. We're always here to help on this one, and you can start off on the right foot by checking out the most recent week's stats below:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thoughts to share? DO!