Designing a Content Strategy for Your School, College or Uni — Part 4: Making Goals, Measuring, and Improving

Welcome back! Thanks for joining me on this brief whistle-stop tour of content strategy for higher education. If you’re looking for part three, part two or part one...

Here, I’ll be sharing the final step of this basic content strategy for your higher education institution — namely, measuring and improving.  If you find it useful, drop me a message and we can design a more complex strategy for your college or university. 

Make Achievable Goals

So you’ve created a great piece of content that addresses your prospective students’ needs. It’s been adapted to reach the intended audience via a number of relevant channels. Time to hit SEND, right? 

There’s one final step we must take before publishing — make measurable, achievable goals. Ask yourself: what outcome do we want/expect from this piece of content? It could be newsletter signups, requests for your prospectus, or even enrolments; each piece of content should have a CTA that directs the audience towards this goal.  

Each piece of content should have one of the following goals: 

• Increase brand awareness

• Increase engagement

• Increase leads

• Increase enrolments 

• Increase traffic 

Each content goal should also be SMART: 

• Specific

• Measurable

• Attainable

• Results-focused

• Time-bound

If you’re just starting your content strategy journey, this might feel quite alien. The good news is you have a treasure trove of data in Google Analytics to help. Take a look at your site’s best-performing pages/posts — find one with a comparable goal to the content you want to publish (increase leads, for example) and set that as your baseline. 

Here’s an example: 

New content: 

• The content: a video of the university’s new eSports facilities aimed at male students 16-21 — “visit our new eSports facility during our open day — highest score wins!” 

• To be hosted on YouTube, embedded on uni webpage

• To be shared within UK eSports subReddits and UK-based eSports professionals on Twitter

• Short clips to be teased on Instagram

Content Goals

• Increase leads — signups for an open day visit.

Making it SMART

• Specific — the goal is to encourage signups for the open day

• Measurable — we’ll use page views, signups (leads), and attendees (conversions) as a framework for measurement.

• Attainable — Can we improve on the previous open day result? Of the 2,000 attendees, 60% of signups were female and/or male over 21, so we should adjust our goal accordingly.

• Results-focused — We want to see 200 more male (16-21) attendees at this open day.

• Time-bound — The goal has a time restriction built-in, but we should publish and promote the content at least three months before the open day.  

Measuring Results 

So you’ve published your content, the pages views have been recorded and the signups counted. Now is the time to compare your expectations with reality. Dive into the data to see what worked and what didn’t; you may have had a huge number of page views but few signups. Why? 

Look for patterns and trends; assess views, comments, and engagements with the video/posts/tweets. Were people positive about the video? Ask for feedback from those who visited on the open day. 

Working with others in this process is invaluable; in the data, they will see things that you don’t. I suggested another roundtable discussion — a debrief — to talk about the results and what you learned from the experience. Use the conclusion from the debrief to inform your next content project. 

Thanks for your time

You made it. If you implement these basic strategies in your content marketing, you will see better, more consistent results. I sincerely hope you learned something useful from this and I’d be more than happy to answer any questions you might have — contact me at kerrith@kerrithbritland.co.uk or @kerrithbritland.  

And those looking to improve further, check back soon; I’ll be posting a series that presents a more complex approach to content strategy, which will include building an internal content team, improving content workflow, and using content to support enrolment goals.