Higher Education Content Marketing Strategy Best Practices for Colleges and Universities

Great content is the lifeblood of successful brands. Most colleges work tirelessly to produce content, but few understand the steps to make it “productive” in service of realizing broader strategic enrollment, reputation, and advancement goals.

In an earlier post, we shared a 101 Basics Guide to Higher Education Content Marketing Strategy for Colleges and Universities. As a top higher education marketing agency, clients often ask us for our best practices for content marketing strategy. We are pleased to share our list:

Listed below are twelve best practices for higher education content marketing strategy we recommend:

1. Connect communication efforts with broader strategic enrollment, reputation, and advancement goals.
2. Set aside any turf battles or territorial claims and convene your counterparts in enrollment, advancement, marketing/communications, and the president’s office and make a pact — to better understand how content productivity can change the institution’s destiny.
3. Ask each representative to make a list of five non-branded keyword phrases that would be of strategic value (non-branded meaning phrases that do not use any iteration of your name or derivatives of your name). Formalize this into an Institutional Keyword Guide. Inform new content creation with this Guide.
4. Begin an inventory of all existing/archived content, and its potential for digital productivity.
5. Tell a better story. Tell smart, authentic, real, honest, surprising, and delightful stories — celebrating students, faculty and alumni as heroes on their personal journeys. Tell stories of types of people you would like to get more of.
6. Fortify every touch point – including websites, social media channels, your Wikipedia entry, email signatures, newsletters, tours, information sessions, and all your presentations.
7. Romance prospects with high-fidelity academic program pages and landing pages. Show them that the value of the degree exceeds its cost. 
8. Avoid posting your flagship publications as PDFs and embeddable flipbooks.
9. Democratize knowledge. Be positive, real, helpful, accessible, insightful, professional and knowledgeable. Avoid jargon. Educate, engage and serve people.
10. Go long on proofs, short on claims. Invest your energy into creating indisputable truths instead of empty sloganeering.
11. Think of content holistically. Capture iconic photographs that bring the excitement, immediacy and candor of photojournalism to the college’s brand, website, social media, campaigns and magazines. Create brand anthem videos that distill the argument for a college’s brand essence, and reason for being in a concise and impactful manner.
12. Quantify the impact of your content on essential metrics.

If you are seeking an inspired content marketing agency for your organization, consider partnering with us.