A look back at 2023

Strategy, campaigns and results

Across the team, we’ve delivered impactful marketing and communications strategy, and campaigns and content that work.

As Amelia says, “supporting new and existing clients to understand and navigate the ever-changing social media landscape has been a real standout from 2023.”

In her first full year at TBI, Amber too sees getting stuck into projects as her highlight of the year. “Having the opportunity to be creative and produce a collection of visual assets for GetFTR including a video, infographic, and poster, working across a handful of campaigns for a World Congress, and getting to undertake a client’s social audit to round out the year, are just a few to name.”

So with that, here are some examples of the projects we’ve worked on across the team in 2023.

Consultancy

In a rapidly changing industry, publishers face increased challenges in determining priorities. Over the past year, we’ve conducted high-level reviews for society and university press publishers, focusing on aligning journal sales and marketing functions with strategic plans, evaluating skills, resources, strategies, and technology to provide recommendations for immediate and long-term initiatives. 

Research and analysis

We’ve worked with several clients to deliver qualitative research through interviews, quantitative surveys, competitor audiences, and market data analysis. This year, that has included:

• Research on training solutions for open research
• Research perspectives on innovations in publishing (spoiler: AI featured heavily!)
• Setting in place ‘voice of the customer’ measurement and tracking
• Membership satisfaction
• Feedback from author communities on publishing with journal brands 

“We were pleased to work with several scholarly societies to understand their communities this year, including delivering a survey with over 4,000 researchers for the American Physical Society,” says Mithu. “This kind of market insight work forms a critical step in delivering a customer-orientated marketing strategy, which we also worked on for APS, based on both the survey findings and wide-ranging market analysis such as open access publication trends and competitor activities.”

Marketing strategy

This year we’ve supported many clients with comprehensive marketing and communications strategies. We’ve conducted desk research, marketing audits, competitor channel and messaging reviews, and developed new goals and objectives for actionable marketing plans. That has included:

• New launch strategies for open access journals
• Portfolio marketing strategies for journals in the transition to OA
• Competitive positioning for a publisher in a dynamic and evolving OA landscape
• Development of a 3-year marketing strategy and tactical plan with additional implementation support for the first 6-months
• Delivering in-depth social media audits to evaluate the rapid evolution of channels, the effectiveness of current engagement, and to identify areas of opportunity and potential growth
• Creating a communications strategy for a technology partner to increase visibility with publisher clients, including taking on delivery of communications

Lynne describes one project we’ve undertaken to help a Society communicate an important milestone in their journey to open access. “We helped the Society develop directions for a campaign theme, devise a communications plan and implement many of the activities. It was great to have the opportunity to input into the design of the promotion materials, share ideas for raising profile at in-person and online events, and create engaging blog posts, press releases and social media content.”

Marketing implementation

The team have worked on campaign planning and management for many clients in 2023, covering social media, paid search, email marketing, paid advertising, PR, content marketing, and campaign reporting.

A notable highlight is the team’s delivery of registration marketing for an international congress. TBI were contracted 6 months ahead of the congress, with registrations falling below target. TBI was tasked with extending communications beyond their core community. Kelly commented that “our digital marketing efforts, which included paid social, Google Ads, paid advertising, and third-party emails contributed 46% of all conference website traffic and 58% of registration page views; which ultimately helped the organisation to exceed its original registration targets.”

Amelia has been working on an ongoing project with BJUI Knowledge to raise awareness of their urology platform and increase content readership and subscriptions. “In this longstanding relationship, we implement up to four multi-channel campaigns per month across social media, google ads, and email. We firstly deliver campaign plans comprising objectives, copy, creatives, and targeting where applicable, secondly launch the campaigns, and lastly deliver reporting.”

We’ve also worked on several thought leadership projects for clients in 2023. “Unsurprisingly, AI has been a notable topic of interest this year and it was fascinating to research the fast-moving landscape for Silverchair’s white paper on the topic,” says Mithu. “We’ve also been asked to support a number of DEI-related projects this year, such as Springer Nature’s report on researcher attitudes towards diversity, equity and inclusion.” Other key topics that continue to be of interest to our clients include:

• Explaining open access and open science
• Showcasing client success stories, notably for technology partners