A well-organized content calendar is a roadmap for your marketing efforts, ensuring that your messaging aligns with your institution's goals and resonates with your target audience.
In this blog post, we'll explore the how-to’s and process of creating a content calendar tailored specifically for higher education marketers.
A content calendar is a tool for scheduling and organizing marketing content, ensuring consistent, strategic dissemination that aligns with your institution's goals.
Content calendars prevent last-minute scrambles and misaligned efforts, facilitate performance tracking, and enhance content resonance with your audience.
It helps streamline marketing processes, aligns content with strategic goals, and maintains a consistent presence across platforms, making it an essential asset for effective marketing.
Before diving into the details of your content calendar, it's crucial to establish clear and measurable marketing objectives.
Consider the following questions:
With clearly defined marketing objectives, you provide direction and focus for your content strategy, guiding the types of content you create and distribute through your content calendar.
This strategic approach ensures that your content efforts are purposeful, impactful, and aligned with the broader goals of your institution.
Schools have diverse audiences, including prospective students, current students, parents, alumni, faculty, and staff.
Each group has distinct needs, interests, and preferences when it comes to content consumption.
Things like desktop versus mobile consumption can see a greater increase in engagement, as we saw a 45.59% web traffic increase at Belhaven University when they created a more user-friendly mobile site.
Conduct thorough research to understand your target audience segments' demographics, behaviors, and preferences, and remember:
If you market to everyone, you market to no one.
That’s especially important in regards to the looming demographic enrollment cliff where these types of insights will inform the kind of content you produce and the channels you use to distribute it.
Creating a content calendar that provides value and relevance to your audience and aligns with your institution's brand identity and strategic goals requires careful planning and organization.
Consider the following areas to build specific messaging around:
Academic Programs
Showcase the depth of your academic offerings, highlighting unique programs, faculty expertise, and student achievements.
Student Life
Provide insights into campus culture, extracurricular activities, student organizations, and student success stories to give prospective students a glimpse of campus life.
Career Services
Offer resources, tips, and advice to support students' career development, including internships, job placements, resume writing, and networking opportunities.
Research
Share research initiatives, faculty publications, and interdisciplinary collaborations to showcase your institution's contributions to knowledge creation and innovation.
Community Outreach:
Highlight community partnerships, service-learning initiatives, and volunteer opportunities that demonstrate your institution's commitment to social responsibility and community engagement.
Determine the frequency and timing of your content publication based on audience preferences, platform algorithms, and marketing objectives.
Consider the optimal times to reach your audience on various channels, including social media, email newsletters, blogs, and website updates.
Balance your content mix to provide a variety of formats, including articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, webinars, and user-generated content.
According to a recent New York Times article, there are a few content marketing trends that will be on the rise, including highly personalized content, videos, and more.
A few to name with high mentions:
Effective content marketing in higher education thrives on collaboration and coordination among various departments within the institution.
Here are some ideas to engage departments across campus and ensure that your content calendar reflects the collective efforts of the entire organization:
While it's essential to plan and stick to your content calendar, it's also important to remain flexible and adaptable in response to real-time events, trends, and feedback.
Leave room in your calendar for spontaneous content opportunities, such as timely news stories, trending topics, or user-generated content. Monitor the performance of your content regularly and be prepared to adjust your strategy based on analytics and audience feedback.
Track key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts and identify areas for improvement.
Measure metrics such as:
Then you can use analytics tools to gain insights into audience behavior, preferences, and content performance. Continuously review and refine your content calendar based on data-driven insights to optimize your marketing strategy over time.
Creating a content calendar that aligns with your marketing goals requires careful planning, audience insights, collaboration, and flexibility.
By following the steps outlined in this guide, higher education marketers can develop a strategic roadmap for their content marketing efforts that drives engagement, builds brand awareness, and achieves measurable results.
Last Updated: May 16, 2024 11:00 AM
