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Policies52 is a lot of Mondays
Paper might be the typical one-year gift, but we hope you’ll accept these pearls of wisdom instead.
This week, we celebrate the one-year anniversary of 52 Mondays with a look back on the lessons we learned about content marketing.
Jessica Nord
Business Management
Storytelling
6 minute read
Have you ever been running, head down, so focused on the steady rhythm of your feet hitting the pavement that when you stop for a rest, you were amazed to see just how far you’d travelled? Okay fine, I haven’t... but, if I was athletic enough to run without my breathing sounding like the roar of an oncoming freight train, it might come close to the feeling I have after completing our first year of 52 Mondays.
From its humble beginnings as an all-staff email to keep our agency up to date with the latest industry news, 52 Mondays has evolved into a weekly staple for over 8,000 monthly email recipients and a growing LinkedIn community of nearly 4,500 people. Our writers ranged from grads to our leadership team and came from every guild.
So, 52 Mondays on, I wanted to share three lessons we learned from this last year that helped CX Lavender increase its LinkedIn follower growth rate by 515%, build a platform that more than tripled the visibility of our agency and start conversations in the spaces it matters most.
From its humble beginnings as an all-staff email to keep our agency up to date with the latest industry news, 52 Mondays has evolved into a weekly staple for over 8,000 monthly email recipients and a growing LinkedIn community of nearly 4,500 people. Our writers ranged from grads to our leadership team and came from every guild.
So, 52 Mondays on, I wanted to share three lessons we learned from this last year that helped CX Lavender increase its LinkedIn follower growth rate by 515%, build a platform that more than tripled the visibility of our agency and start conversations in the spaces it matters most.
In short
- Content marketing means testing your mix until you get the recipe right.
- Packaging your material can make your material more digestible for a time-poor audience.
- Creating opportunities for collaboration keeps content fresh and gives your impressions a boost.
1. Be in it, test it, then win it
Designing a unique content strategy for 52 Mondays gave our team of grads a chance to turn theory about frequency and channels into practice, resulting in a 17% increase in LinkedIn followers and an average of 2,943 monthly page views.
We knew that cross-channel promotion would be the key to building our audience base, and that producing regular (but diverse) content would be essential in keeping 52 Mondays and CX Lavender top of mind amidst the saturated agency market. But the recipe for success took some fine tuning – here are our ingredients.
- Half a cup of LinkedIn: Our hypothesis for posting to LinkedIn (our primary seeding channel) was that two posts a week would strike the perfect balance to both launch and remind our audience about the article. However, through talking to our network, we found the saturation of posts was too high; people were ignoring posts with repeated content. So, we dialled back to a single, more meaningful post each week and focused on boosting shares and likes so that 52 Mondays came as a recommendation, rather than promotion.
- Two parts owned channels: The CX Lavender website and staff email signatures became the perfect always-on channels to drum up interest and keep 52 Mondays top-of-mind. The banners then drove traffic to the CX Lavender website where, after 15 seconds of interaction on the 52 Mondays pages, a pop-up was designed to automatically prompt visitors to sign up for the monthly newsletter – a far more effective tool than the subscribe box in the footer of each page we initially designed.
- Instagram, to taste: Despite originally incorporating Instagram into our comms plan, we backtracked after considering its relevance to our audience. For us, Instagram serves to promote agency culture and attract talent. In reality, there would be little ROI for thought-leadership content targeting a business audience. Now, Instagram is more valuable to conduct social research with our follower base to inform articles.
2. Package it up
Consistency of posting may be the key to staying relevant, but consistency of readership is our key to creating enduring relationships. We want 52 Mondays to spark the right conversations with clients and prospects about improving CX. And while we’d love for everyone to loiter LinkedIn awaiting the latest weekly post, we recognise that we need to be more proactive in delivering content to our audience.
Our solution was to package the latest articles into a monthly ‘debrief’ eDM, sharing the freshest insights and expertise with our full database in a neat summary. This way, 52 Mondays becomes a digestible way for our audience to engage with each edition or pick up articles they missed. Site views are more than double on the days that eDMs are sent out. Plus, around 90% of views are unique, proving that we’re capturing a vast portion of our audience who haven’t already seen the articles on LinkedIn.
Our solution was to package the latest articles into a monthly ‘debrief’ eDM, sharing the freshest insights and expertise with our full database in a neat summary. This way, 52 Mondays becomes a digestible way for our audience to engage with each edition or pick up articles they missed. Site views are more than double on the days that eDMs are sent out. Plus, around 90% of views are unique, proving that we’re capturing a vast portion of our audience who haven’t already seen the articles on LinkedIn.
“Consistency of posting may be the key to staying relevant, but consistency of readership is our key to creating enduring relationships.”
3. Collaboration is key
After initial success in establishing an audience base, we found that growth rates started to plateau. To reach new people, we needed to shake up our approach to creating and sharing articles so they’d have broader appeal without losing our 52 Mondays edge. Our solution? Leveraging the power of collaboration.
Collaboration was already at the core of each 52 Mondays edition. So, we evolved our social strategy to match. By celebrating and tagging the team behind the creation of each edition, impressions increased as their networks liked, shared and engaged with their work.
We also shook up the 52 Mondays format, introducing interview-style Q&A articles, as well as co-designing the visuals for special editions so that we could collaborate with agencies and organisations beyond our day-to-day scope of work. These articles were a huge success – not only did they reach our agency audience, but they were shared by our collaborative partners, broadening readership and creating referrals for new business.
Collaboration was already at the core of each 52 Mondays edition. So, we evolved our social strategy to match. By celebrating and tagging the team behind the creation of each edition, impressions increased as their networks liked, shared and engaged with their work.
We also shook up the 52 Mondays format, introducing interview-style Q&A articles, as well as co-designing the visuals for special editions so that we could collaborate with agencies and organisations beyond our day-to-day scope of work. These articles were a huge success – not only did they reach our agency audience, but they were shared by our collaborative partners, broadening readership and creating referrals for new business.
So, what does this mean for the next year?
The key to the ongoing development of 52 Mondays has been to keep pushing the boundaries and experimenting with tactics to engage our audience. Our hope for the next year is to use this platform to continue testing new formats and ways of expanding our reach to delight the 52 Mondays audience with fresh insights and expertise.
In turn, we want to inspire intelligent conversations about customer experience and how we can help businesses re-centre the customer as their true north.
But for now, I’m taking a moment to catch my breath and appreciate the magnitude of what a team of CX Lavender grads can do with a year and an idea.
In turn, we want to inspire intelligent conversations about customer experience and how we can help businesses re-centre the customer as their true north.
But for now, I’m taking a moment to catch my breath and appreciate the magnitude of what a team of CX Lavender grads can do with a year and an idea.
52 words on being one year old!
At one year old, most humans can nearly walk, say a few words, and maybe feed themselves (with some assistance in preparing the food). This sounds impressive until you learn that snow leopards are out living completely independent lives by the time they’re one. Still, 52 articles in 52 weeks isn’t bad.
Written by Jessica Nord, 52 Words by Adelaide Anderson, editing by Abby Clark, key visual by Patrick Brennan and Jaimii Jakab, page built by Angelica Martin.
