Designing a Content Strategy for Your School, College or Uni — Part 1: Plan and Research
I’ve been producing content for higher education (HE) providers for three years. During this time, I’ve worked with HE marketing teams to develop content strategies that help focus their content towards their target audience.
The content strategies I’ve designed also help teams create a process for content creation; that means no more asking around the office for blog ideas — instead, editors know which topics to cover weeks (even months) before they write and publish the final piece.
I’m going to share a basic four-step guide for creating a content strategy for your higher education institution over the next week (or so) to get you started. If you find it useful, consider hiring me to design a more complex content strategy for your school, college, or university.
Step One: Plan and Research
The basis for your content strategy starts in the planning and research stage. You need to understand who you are trying to reach by creating audience profiles (or customer personas). Audience profiles help you think about:
What your intended audience reads/watches/listens to + their reaction
Where they spend time online
Their interests
Their concerns
Their aspirations
Why they want to study
Why they don’t want to study
Their motivations
The biggest influences in their respective lives
The important dates in their calendars
Their age
Their occupation
Location
Try to answer the questions in as much detail as possible. You can refer back to this document before writing your content and cross-check to see if it addresses your audience’s concerns, expectations, interests, etc. I’ll be uploading an audience persona template on Instagram.
A side note for those working in education; I found HE providers often do not make use of their internal resources. Unlike the quick-buy nature of FMCG customers, students stay at HE providers for years. Your converted customer is on campus often and they speak with staff regularly. They are great sources of information and insight; take time to ask them the questions above, and ask your academic and admission teams question (and anyone who deals directly with your students) about these people.
After you’ve completed the audience profile, be sure to check your Google Analytics demographics. It’ll give you some interesting details on your audience’s interests.
The Content Calendar
Next up we want to create a calendar of important dates for our target audience. At this stage, it’s about getting down as many as possible; think A-level, BTEC examinations, end of term, national holidays, UCAS submission dates, sporting events. More is better at this stage.
I always prefer seeing things IRL so I used these big whiteboard sheets for my content calendars — I recommend writing all the major events for the next three months on spread out over three A1 sheets. They’re great because we can wipe out any inappropriate events during the calendar-creation process; we’ll be using these sheets to decide what we’ll be posting and where we’ll post it.
Join me next time for part two where we’ll be talking about developing topics and creating an equation for idea generation.
Got any questions? Feel free to contact me!