set up your marketing team - Walsworth Yearbooks

set up your marketing team
Recruitment and selection of the right students for the yearbook staff
is essential for the success of your yearbook program. You must not
only recruit students who will make excellent writers, designers and
photographers, but you also will need students who will be interested in
marketing and selling the yearbook. And you will need a special student
who can lead the marketing team – a student marketing manager.
Recruiting
Begin recruiting for next year’s staff before the deadline for students
to turn in their class schedule requests. When you announce you are
recruiting – in the daily announcements, school newspaper, posters,
talking to classes – make it clear that marketing is part of the job.
Seek out students who would be good with marketing and sales by
asking for recommendations from business teachers, current editors
and staff members. Tell teachers the specific skills and characteristics
you are looking for, such as friendly and outgoing, trustworthy, good with
math, good communication skills. Send letters to these recommended
students.
To learn more about staff
recruitment and selection, go
to The Yearbook Suite, Set 7 –
Advisers, Section 2.
Have the student marketing manager and an editor or two visit business
and English classes and talk enthusiastically about work on the yearbook
staff. Hand out applications in these classes, and have applications
available in the yearbook room and the counseling office.
If it appears that no marketing-type students applied and were accepted
on staff, contact the marketing and business teachers to discuss
whether students from their classes can help with yearbook marketing
as a graded project, with one student becoming the student marketing
manager.
When forming your sales team, determine whether the students will also
create the yearbook or, if you have enough students, form a separate
team with these students. This will mostly depend on the number of
students involved.
Train the student marketing manager
Give the student marketing manager the My Marketing Plan workbook.
Tell them they are to write this year’s marketing plan in it. Use this manual
to grade them.
Find the student marketing
manager job description in My
Marketing Plan, A Workbook for
Student Marketing Managers.
The role of the student marketing manager is to plan, carry out and
manage a yearlong marketing campaign, and determine its success
at the end of the campaign. The marketing campaign should gain
awareness of the yearbook, build the value of the yearbook among the
parents, students, faculty and community businesses, and ultimately
sell more yearbooks than the previous year. The student marketing
manager will work with the adviser, editor and others to set budgets for
marketing expenditures and also track income.
Review with them the different types of marketing available and what
your program can afford. The two of you should meet with the marketing
team to discuss the marketing plans and assignments.
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Train the marketing and sales team
Explain to your students, if they do not already know, that
marketing is the presenting of products or services in a way to
make people want them, and sales is the exchange of money or
other items of value for the item. If they can market the yearbook
and ads correctly, sales should be easier.
The students on the marketing and sales team need to be
knowledgeable about your marketing campaign to promote the
yearbook and be well trained to sell. The salespeople work with
the adviser, the student marketing manager, editors and others
to execute the plan and increase awareness of yearbook and to
sell yearbooks and ads.
Once you review the marketing plans and resources available –
located in this manual and in the My Marketing Plan workbook
– it is time to train the marketing and sales team.
• Make copies of these pages to share with the staff.
• Discuss roles and expectations.
• Assign duties.
• Role-play situations where the marketing team members will
meet the public, such as kiosks and selling business ads.
Some of the training may include:
• Setting up and operating yearbook kiosks or sales tables
• Sending marketing emails, letters, fliers or brochures
• Putting up posters
• Selling business ads door-to-door
• Managing a Facebook Fan Page
To learn more about training, go to
The Yearbook Suite, Set 3 – Business,
and Set 7 – Advisers, Section 3,
Financial Planning.
• Record-keeping and other administrative tasks
One other person needed on the team is a business manager to
handle the business chores. The purpose of this job is to keep
records of the money spent and earned, the products purchased
and distribution of them. Read more about the duties of this job
in the record keeping section of this book.
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