Marketing Strategy

Wando High School, the home of The Tribal Tribune, established a new initiative called 'The Battle of the Classes' in my first year as Editor-in-Chief. Immediately, I reached out to Student Council Leadership, which I was even a part of before I became Editor-in-Chief, and got permission to the behind the scenes for class scores. Once I gained access, I added the scores to the front of our website, with different approaches between each.

For the mobile site, I placed the 'Battle of the Classes' widget just below 'The Latest'. The way our mobile site is built, the first things students see are the latest sports scores by our best-in-state athletics department, followed by the latest stories produced by our staff. The reasoning for placing the scoreboard below 'The Latest' is that I want students to be exposed to our most recent stories before getting the info they're looking for, which is still a quick enough scroll to justify the website visit as a whole. The goal is to entice these students to click on a story they find interesting before exiting the site.

For the desktop site, I placed the 'Battle of the Classes' widget in the introductory matrix. This is for a few reasons. First, the desktop website is not going to be visited by students intermittently for the sole purpose of seeing sports scores or the Battle of the Classes scoreboard, but to take advantage of all of the amenities (and stories) of the website as a whole. For that reason, there is no need to bait users into scrolling down into something like 'The Latest', and thus I placed the scoreboard right at the top for viewers to see - alongside new stories and such.

Another relevant widget on the Tribal Tribune website, on both mobile and desktop, is the sports score carousel. This carousel has its own dedicated editor, our statistician editor, who checks sports scores daily - updating the carousel as scores come in. I have this widget placed at the very top of the mobile site, because students visit the mobile site for quick updates and info, not full usage like the desktop, so I want to give them another reason to make a habit of checking it. Further, the scores are placed directly under the introductory matrix on the desktop, as an accessory to the other information on the matrix.

While essentially every student is scrolling social media, even more of them have another thing in common: they go to school! Our central audience is all within a radius of around 300 feet of our production room, so marketing within the building we all share is just as important as social media, if not more. The approach I have led with has been to be omnipresent throughout the school building. We have multiple flyers in every hallway, issues in eight boxes in hotspots like the library, entrance, and cafeteria of the school, as well as digital advertising on monitors across the main hallway and cafeteria.

Our advisor, Phillip Caston, who also runs all of Wando's student media programs, created a new program during my junior year called 'Wando Athletics Marketing,' aimed at creating publicity graphics for the athletics department. The work that the students within this program created was outstanding, and I realized that it was getting a lot of attention on social media. In a win-win collaboration, I worked with them to publicize their work on our website as well. A year later, their staff has been naturalized into the Tribal Tribune staff, and they also contribute to our website and social media accounts.