The new year is always a time for fresh starts — and for media companies, that means new budgets, new campaigns, new energy. What it can also mean? Upgraded platforms and tools to power those campaigns in new and better ways.
That’s why this is the perfect time to put plans in place to onboard, update, and modernize your campaign technology. And one of the most game-changing moves you can make is upgrading to the new Audience.io 2.0 platform.
Now we know software onboarding sounds daunting — but don’t let that keep you from moving forward. Software migration is one of the most strategic moves a company can make to accelerate growth, creativity, and revenue. It’s a chance to eliminate inefficiencies, retire outdated or broken systems, and adopt the kind of flexible, compliant, data-driven infrastructure your business needs to thrive in 2026.
Check out these software onboarding best practices — and how a move to Audience 2.0 can be a game-changer for your company and your clients.
Software Onboarding Best Practices: Your Practical Roadmap
Even with the best tools available, a smooth migration doesn’t happen by accident and can benefit from a bit of structured planning.
You’ve heard the saying, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Don’t let that happen to you!
From clear goal-setting to good communication between teams, here are some steps to keep in mind to ensure any interactive campaign software upgrade — including your Audience 2.0 migration — is a success from start to finish.
- Lay the Groundwork: Before you even pass “go,” think about what you want to accomplish with a migration and what success looks like. With Audience 2.0, many users have business goals like faster campaign launches, more compelling sponsorship programs, better zero-party data, and improved compliance.
- Review Your Current Systems: It’s quite possible that your migration is upgrading or replacing one or more systems. So, if that is the case, take stock of your existing tech stack and what campaign tools and integrations you’re actively using. Think about what’s working in your current lineup and what’s not (or what’s just redundant). For many users of Audience 2.0, they sunset many of their contesting and sweepstakes programs because they’re no longer necessary with Audience’s all-in-one platform.
- Identify an Onboarding Champion: Consider a person or micro-team in your organization who can serve as the onboarding champion. The people in this role should be equipped with knowledge about the migration and empowered to make decisions, and also be the point of contact for questions to streamline the process.
- Curate and Scrub Your Existing Data: If you plan to transfer data between platforms during the migration, make sure it's as “clean” as possible. That means removing duplicates, archiving any outdated information, and organizing and segmenting your data. It’s a time-consuming step — but it pays off in the long run. Clean data ensures smoother imports and the most accurate analytics once you’ve completed the migration.
- Proactively Train Your Teams: A successful software onboarding depends on teams adopting the new platform and learning to maximize it — and you don’t have to wait until the migration is complete to start training. Schedule training sessions along the way, so everyone understands the various new tools — and for Audience 2.0 especially — how to use all the features to build, sell, and measure campaigns.
- Test, Then Do the Rest: It can be helpful to onboard in phases, so you can catch any errors and troubleshoot along the way. Start with a beta or pilot test campaign to review the platform’s workflow, integrations, and reporting — and then address any issues that may arise. Then, once you’re confident with the results, you can resume the full migration.
- Launch, Then Optimize: Once the onboarding is finished, it’s time to press “play.” It’s prime time! Your teams can begin pitching more campaigns — and closing more deals — with the benefits of a new platform like Audience 2.0 at the ready. As you launch and activate campaigns, keep a close eye on performance metrics to optimize along the way. Audience 2.0’s built-in analytics make it easy to track engagement and revenue growth.
By following these software onboarding best practices, you’re well on your way to a successful launch.
The Benefits of Audience 2.0
Audience 2.0 gives media companies the tools to break through the noise with interactive experiences, smarter data, and AI-powered capabilities that provide faster creation and deeper insights. Here’s what you can expect when you migrate to this platform:
- Expanded Toolkit and Efficiency: Audience 2.0 simplifies campaign creation in an all-in-one engagement suite that includes intuitive tools and mix-and-match formats like polls, quizzes, UGC, forms, and videos. Plus, if you find yourself needing some inspiration for quiz questions and content variations, the AI-powered content creation tools make it easier than ever to generate those things — and so much more.
- Sponsorship Sales Growth: To increase sponsorship revenue, Audience 2.0 has expanded the available custom branding options. In addition, there’s a library of outcome-focused playbooks that can help sales teams show their clients clear and compelling examples of ROI to sell campaigns more effectively.
- Full Data Compliance: With data regulations becoming stricter than ever, media companies need to focus on first- and zero-party data strategies to stay competitive for their clients. But it’s essential for data privacy and compliance to be fully buttoned up —especially when you’re capturing data through contests, giveaways, and other similar promotions. Every Audience.io campaign is fully compliant, secure, and auditable.
- Audience Intelligence: AI-powered natural language tools let teams quickly create audiences while activating those audiences across channels using Audience’s growing list of native integrations. This means smarter targeting, stronger customer loyalty, and greater sponsor ROI.
- Easy Integration: Audience 2.0 is the key to simplifying your tech stack because the platform integrates seamlessly with CRMs, analytics dashboards, and other marketing tools to reduce redundancies and ensure you’re equipped for the future.
Setting Your Teams Up for Success
The benefits of software onboarding for media companies can generate a positive impact for many of your teams. For example, upgrading to the new Audience 2.0 platform offers significant advantages for your content, sales, and tech/legal teams.
- Content teams will love the expanded toolkit, which makes it easier than ever to implement interactive, creative campaigns that foster innovative ideation and audience engagement.
- Sales teams can leverage the platform’s ready-to-sell templates and revenue playbooks to create compelling sponsor packages that demonstrate measurable value and faster go-to-market timelines.
- Tech and legal teams will appreciate the unified, clean data sets that simplify governance, auditing, and security oversight — and that are critical for compliance.
Build Momentum for 2026
An end-of-year software transfer like a migration often gets framed as a headache, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, when done purposefully, a platform upgrade — like switching to the new Audience 2.0 platform — is a strategic lever for revenue growth and puts you ahead of legacy drag.
If your team is ready, the opportunity is ready and waiting for you to make the move, migrate smart, and unlock the full potential of Audience 2.0.
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