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How to align your content with your marketing strategy
Jamie PragnellOct 10, 2019 9:30:00 AM3 min read

How to align your content with your marketing strategy

How to align your content with your marketing strategy

- 6 min read - 

As the recruitment season fast approaches and strategies start to come into place, there comes the next question… What type of content do we build?

Building the right strategy is extremely important when determining how best to spend your marketing dollars, and how to reach the right audiences. However, if you don’t have strong content to back that up, it can be a lot like lighting a fire without a match. 

Driving prospective students to a website with absolutely no information on the program of interest could potentially cause your campaign to backfire. You could lose that prospect forever. Moreover, building a tired ad that doesn’t stand out amongst the clutter or get to the point could cause you to have to spend a whole lot more just to get the prospect interested in what you have to say.

In order to align your content with your marketing strategy, we’ve broken down some key things to consider when building out content for each piece of your strategy. Depending on the goal, these ideas can be applied to everything from creative designs to website and landing pages. 

Awareness:

Goal: Generate Impressions – Prospect knows your brand
  • Make your institution logo and brand clear
  • Avoid lots of wording and use bold colors
  • Keep it simple & avoid Clutter

    blog sup pic- awareness-how to align your content with you marketing strategy

Engagement:

Goal: Students understands your brand
  • Showcase what makes your institution unique
  • Showcase what students want to see (reputation, life on campus)
    • Online ads that featured an image of a campus, present in 64% of ads in the sample, performed significantly better than those that did not – [1] [2]
  • Keep it genuine
    • Avoid ‘Stock photography’ – Gen Z’s will see right through this
  • Showcase students that people ca relate to!
    • 35% of the ads in our sample showed one or more people (typically a student), and those that did averaged 64% higher conversion rates[1].
  • Video
    • Using video content can increase effectiveness of your other media channels and one of the best ways to connect with Gen Z’s
    • blog sup pic-Engagment-how to align your content with you marketing strategy

Conversion:

Goal: Student or prospect takes action
  • Make it relevant – what does that audience need to see?
  • Make your Call to Action clear and enticing
  • Give exact Information (Open house dates & times, ‘apply here’, etc.)
  • Have a strong and specific landing page that gets right to the point 
    • don’t overcrowd with too many questions or information

blog sup pic-conversions-how to align your content with you marketing strategy

Content is King! Apply these ideas to all of your ad designs, website, everything! Your message needs to be clear across all channels and students need to be able to find exactly what they are looking for when they need it.

One other important thing to consider when building content is to know your audience. This will help determine where to best invest your dollars in. Lead nurturing is not about sending content to everyone, it’s about sending the right content, to the right leads, at the right time. If your website is deterring potential students, that may be a great place to start! Are you utilizing all the potential platforms to re-target on? You probably wouldn’t send your great grandmother an email about the latest tech trends, right? She would have no interest. So why would you send a lead info that isn’t relevant to them?

Based on research that we have conducted with high school student's across the country, what high school student find relevant might not be the same as a parent or influencer. A high school student for instance is very interested in reputation and understanding campus and student life. Parents might be more interested in reputation of programs and scholarship opportunities. [2]. Invest in creating different content for each audience, content is not a one size fits all strategy.

To learn more on how today’s high school students interact with key media and post secondary marketing initiatives download our Gen Z Media Report.

We collected insights from 1,700 high school students on their media preferences for higher ed advertising. Access Report.

Sources:

  1. RocketFuel Guide to creative optimization – page 49 (online ads in education)
  2. Whitepaper

 

 

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