Designing a Content Strategy for Your School, College or Uni — Part 3: Channel Distribution
Welcome back! Thanks for joining me on this brief whistle-stop tour of content strategy for higher education. If you’re looking for part two (developing content) or part one (researching your audience) ...
Here, I’ll be sharing step three of my basic four-step content strategy for your higher education institution — namely, where you should be publishing your content. If you find it useful, drop me a message and we can design a more complex strategy for your college or university.
But before we begin, here’s a fact: in a survey on content marketing, businesses ranked content strategy (2nd) and distribution (3rd) just behind content creation in the ‘factors contributing to increased success’. Here’s another fact: 63% of those surveyed had either an undocumented strategy or no content strategy at all. Having a solid, well-researched strategy will set your college or university apart from the competition.
Step Three: Understanding Distribution
Just as important as what content your produce is where you publish it. Imagine producing an engaging video tour of your university’s eSports facilities but uploading it only on Vimeo and embedding it on your site. You’ve wasted the effort of filming and editing because you didn’t know where your audience consumes video (it’s YouTube btw).
A Side Note on Best Practice
Most of the time you’ll be aiming to drive relevant traffic to your website, but you’ll also want to produce native content for the channels where your audience hangs out (Facebook, Twitter etc.) — that means creating specific strategies for each channel (this is another topic for another day). But one way we can keep the wheels spinning on these external platforms is to adapt your big content projects — more on this later.
Research, Research, Research
OK, so we’ve researched our audience’s needs, and we’ve produced some content that’s going to add some serious value. Now it’s time to jump back into our research for some further insights.
Our audience personas should provide plenty of data regarding where our audience spends their time online; to take this one step further, we should talk to our audience (current students) about their content consumption habits.
Pick out a group of students who fit within your target demographic and ask for details about the sites they frequent; are they active or passive consumers? Ask about the content they share online and how they share it. Next, ask questions about their purchasing decisions — where do they go for content in each of the AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, action) stages? Finally, ask questions about why they chose your institution — again, bring the AIDA stages in to understand what impact different information had.
Different Platform: Different Flavour
By now you’ll have a good idea of where to distribute your content depending on where it sits in your conversion funnel and your audience’s preferences. Finally, we need to dress our content up in the right outfit.
As mentioned above, each channel should have a checklist that guides what you post, the tone you use when posting, when you post etc. Each content ecosystem is unique; Instagram is image-heavy and linking externally is still restricted; YouTube is the platform for videos; Twitter is short and conversational. So it’s worth spending some time on a channel-by-channel style guide.
Users appreciate brands that use the platforms appropriately. Content that’s adapted for each performs better. The good news is you can usually eke out maximum value for every big project you produce if you start with content conversion in mind.
And don’t be afraid to create paid campaigns on the most appropriate platforms; start small with your budget and work from there. If you’re promoting quality content and your targeting is good, your click-through-rate and costs-per-action will stay low.
Converting for Conversion
Here’s an idea on converting a single piece of content for multiple channels that drives your audience back to your target pages:
ORIGINAL PIECE: 30-minute interview with successful alumni
Upload interview to Youtube and embed on a webpage
Upload 30-sec snippet to Instagram via ‘story’ (change bio link to the target web page)
Pick out highlight quotes and post on Twitter w/link (with @alumni and @their company included)
Create a transcript of the interview for the website
Post most interesting quote on Facebook w/image and link
Make podcast version of the interview (share on LinkedIn)
Use standout quotes to create graphics for Instagram (link to target page in bio)
Create listicle — 6 Most Valuable Lessons from a Successful Alumni — share on Facebook
These Things Take Time
Understanding when to post is important. With so much internet traffic around, it’s key we understand when our audience is ready to engage. Dedicate some time to researching your audience’s habits to understand when would be an appropriate time to post.
Thanks again for joining me. There’s a lot to consume in this one, so if you need some extra insight, feel free to contact me on Twitter and I’ll do my best to answer questions.
As you’re probably starting to realise, a content strategy can make a huge difference to your marketing performance. So if you’re interested in designing a bespoke content strategy for your college or university, get in touch today. And remember to join me for part four where we’ll be talking about measuring success and using insights to improve your content.