Education Marketers Must Think Like Publishers

Think about it. Magazines know their audience and give them kinds of content they want in different ways. They have helpful and useful reading material that readers need to get things done, and others to build knowledge or even fuel their imagination.

Make your school a valuable resource that students crave throughout their search and decision process. With a change in mindset and tactics, colleges and universities have an opportunity to create content with real value that will position their expertise, academic rigor and success, and make an emotional connection earlier in the process.

How do you provide value?

The following is a framework for organizing content across the student journey that we use to help our clients plan their communication strategies. It provides some examples of valuable content that your school could champion that will support students at critical moments in their decision process.

So how do you take the next step?

Build a content culture that’s experientially driven:
1. Build a team dedicated to pumping out great original content
2. Set a communications strategy across the student journey
3. Create an editorial calendar that seizes milestone moments
4. Curate/adapt third-party content for different platforms
5. Leverage student-generated content to build trust and relevance
6. Use paid, earned, and social media to amplify it

As students increasingly fly “stealth” until they apply, if they do at all, it’s critical that higher education institutions provide them the content they are looking for so they can personalize their own discovery process. If you don’t, they might just eliminate you from consideration before you’ve even pitched your story.

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