Higher education content marketing: 3 Keys for ensuring your content gets the most exposure

Today, there is a lot of advice around how to create high quality, student-centered content in the higher education space — from bringing student experiences to life through stories, photos and videos to creating content by involving passionate faculty, students and brand champions.

However, far less is said regarding how to create an orchestrated effort around content publishing to ensure that your content receives the most visibility and positive engagement. Often, marketing teams get caught up in the demanding work of content creation and fall short when it comes to creating a well-thought-out content release plan. The result is limited exposure of a content piece that was incredibly time consuming to complete.

At Elliance, for each piece of high-fidelity content — whether it’s an infographic, guide, video, blog post, story, etc. — we develop a content release plan to ensure maximum exposure among target audiences. While each piece of content demands unique considerations, here are a few recommendations that can be applied in most cases to boost your content’s visibility.

Optimize content for search engine impact. Optimizing your piece of content for greatest search engine impact should occur before your content is published and must be in line with your SEO strategy. The goal of optimization is top placement in search engine results for a specific keyword phrase. Typical optimization process involves strategic adjustment of the text for keyword usage, as well as inclusion of relevant inbound and outbound links. You will also need to create optimized meta descriptions. At Elliance, this process is a collaboration between our SEO strategist and lead copywriter.

Publish content across multiple channels. Typically, a piece of content, such as a program-specific infographic, is published via program or department blog and various social media channels. However, a careful consideration of specific program pages can yield additional opportunities for relevant inclusion of content. Use of clickable thumbnails, buttons or page carousels are some ways that content, such as infographics, guides, stories, etc. can become durably visible to target audiences.

Promote content with paid social advertising. Once you’ve published your piece of content via social media, it’s time to promote it. Leveraging paid social advertising via channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn allows added exposure of your social posts among target audiences. This ensures that your piece of content is not lost in the long stream of news feed posts but instead, reappears for the duration of your promoted social post campaign — typically no more than 2 weeks.

Creating, publishing and promoting high quality content in support of your marketing campaign requires incredible effort and can be particularly consuming for your marketing team. From planning and strategizing to brainstorming and conceptualizing, each piece of campaign content demands cross-functional collaboration and therefore, vast talent and time resources. Following the above steps can help you get the most exposure for your content marketing efforts and ensure that your hard work pays off.

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