Marketing and Audience Engagement
Without appealing to an audience, a newspaper cannot successfully supply information and news around the world, or in our case, in the student body. One of my goals for this year is to help spread the word about the Tower Pulse website by making it notable and useful features that social media and print can't provide. Areas such as a consistently updating student section, a calendar and even an art competition have all been implemented to help boost site visits.
Tower Tribute
When my co-editor and I attended the MIPA 2022 Conference, the course ‘50 ways to boost online coverage’ suggested that we host contests to gain more student interest in the website. For two months, my co-editor and I have been developing a student section nicknamed the “Tower Tribute” in hopes of gaining more views and commemorating the accomplishments of the student body.
My co-editor worked on wording, while I focused more on connections and design. I created the submission form, Instagram stories, Tower Tribute site page, the Tower Tribute logo and more in order to establish an identity.
Through word-of-mouth and advertising, we successfully created a reliable and professional student section that prioritized students' needs. Calendars, student features and an art competition helped to gain traction to the site. I am pleased to say that our official launch not only gained followers for the Instagram page, but more traction and diversity on the website.
An underappreciated tool to spread the word about news is a QR code. The QR code had not been used frequently around our school, so by creating a poster that directly linked to the website also helped increase views. I personally created the color palette and graphic for the poster design. Utilizing a QR code to spread awareness to the student body was another idea from the MIPA 2022 Conference course ‘50 ways to boost online coverage.’