Five Things I’ve Learned For Our Fifth Birthday: The Urban List Founder

It has been five years since Founder and Director, Susannah George, launched The Urban List; a digital lifestyle guide that has gone on to become Australia and New Zealand’s top digital media platform in the local lifestyle sector. And on its fifth birthday, George shares her five digital lessons for success.

Since establishing itself as an online source of the best recommendations in Brisbane in 2011, The Urban List has not only expanded its lifestyle platform to cover Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Auckland, but just in time to celebrate its fifth birthday, it is also able to boast an impressive 2.2 million unique visitors every month.

Speaking of this milestone birthday, George says there are many integral learnings she and her team are grateful for, which have positively contributed to their success.

Her five burning insights learnt along the way are:

You can’t fake it or you won’t make it

Having a full time content team on the ground in each city has been key to our success. Knowing the idiosyncrasies of a city only comes from living there and sharing the same passions of the people you are talking to very day.

Sometimes you will need to break the rules

We threw out the social media and content creation rule book pretty early on. Instead, we experiment and innovate constantly and rely on our reader data and sentiment to tell us what works and what doesn’t.

Don’t be a sheep and don’t be too full of yourself

We are irreverent, conversational and accessible whilst still being aspirational. People thought we were crazy moving into Melbourne and Sydney where competition is fierce, but we believed both markets would embrace our unique style and our growth suggests they did.

Know your audience but allow them to surprise you

We knew we couldn’t be all things to all people. Our decision to speak to millennial women with our content was deliberate. We know their passions and how much they love anything salted caramel, we know how to surprise and delight but we make sure we evolve and change as they do.

What you set is what you get

We’ve never been afraid of setting ourselves a high target. Our team want something to climb towards and be proud to arrive there.

While The Urban List may have only just blown out the candles on their fifth birthday cake, George says they are not afraid of continuing to set high targets.

“We’ve got a dedicated in-house content, design, marketing and business team. Together we strive to achieve the best possible outcome for our clients and believe in working collaboratively in order to do so. It’s lucky we all love what we do!”

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