Developing impactful content strategies for postgraduate student recruitment. Part 3: Creating a vision for content and lead nurture
This is part three of a four part blog series on developing impactful content strategies for postgraduate student recruitment. We’ve already explored how to make the case for creating one and the need to map your understanding of your audience. In this post we think about how to dive into the substance and structure of your content strategy, planning your approach and priorities.
In other posts in this series we explore:
Identifying core content types to focus your efforts on
A key stage in the development of any content strategy is the identification and prioritisation of content types that you will centre your efforts on. These might be new content types that you will start to develop, or improvements to existing content types. For postgraduate recruitment, the following content types can be particularly important to really invest in getting right and making them an outstanding - and stand out - user experience:
Programme or course pages
Module information (the detail of specific programmes is more important at postgraduate recruitment level)
Academic (faculty member) profiles
Scholarship finder or search functionality
Scholarship information (detail pages)
Research-focused content (i.e. group pages, which become more important when recruiting to research/doctoral programmes)
Career destination and impact content (especially important for postgraduate taught programmes like MBAs and Masters degrees).
The above list represents content types that you should already have. So it’s likely to be a case of improving these. As you look across the journey maps, however, you’ll also start to identify opportunities for new content types to introduce. Don’t be afraid to consider retiring some content types or content formats too. A key part of any content strategy - especially with limited implementation resource - is to identify what you will stop focusing on, not just what you will add.
Identifying and designing content clusters to enhance SEO and user experience
Content clusters are woefully under-utilised in higher education marketing and recruitment tactics. And yet they are an excellent approach for boosting SEO performance, creating content marketing assets that last beyond a single touchpoint in the decision making journey, and creating an overall excellent user experience.
With content clusters you identify particular topics and themes - likely informed by your user journey map and key phrase research combined - and you build clusters of content types focuses on those topics. Typically the clusters would have a hub that links out to and connects the other related content also relevant to that topic.
For postgraduate recruitment purposes these might align with your organisation’s priority research themes or focus on specific subject areas that are especially important to you. They could include:
Your unique take and position on a particular subject area
Academic profiles of those who make a difference in this subject area
Links to relevant stories, case studies and research papers
Advice and guidance on progressing a career or learning path in this subject
Links to relevant scholarships
Links to relevant programmes.
The beauty with these hubs is that if you design a strong structured content approach and taxonomy for your overarching content strategy, you can have them auto-populate and update. You can also roll them out over time, starting with just a few and then building more and more hubs as you refine and prove the success of them.
Co-ordinated CRM and lead nurture
Lead nurture techniques, email marketing and broader CRM activities can make or break your recruitment success. When they’re intentionally and collaboratively designed with consistent and useful content offered throughout, they can leave a prospect or applicant recognising your institution as helpful, empathetic, credible and trustworthy.
However, when lead nurture and conversion activities are distributed across a jumbled blend of the admissions team, the international office, a finance office, and an academic school, then they quickly become disconnected and out of sync. When our lead nurture activities are non-existent, patchy, or disconnected, they leave your applicants and prospects with the impression that you’re disorganised, organisation-centric (instead of student-centric) and confusing. Who would want to actually study there?
Therefore making sure that your wider lead generation and CRM activity is embedded into your postgraduate recruitment content strategy is crucial. Again, time invested in journey mapping will help you to achieve this.
How can Pickle Jar help your institution with postgraduate recruitment?
If you’ve made it this far in this long and detailed post, you must be serious about making a difference to your institution’s postgraduate recruitment. And undoubtedly you understand the importance of content strategy in doing so. At Pickle Jar we can support your institution through a bespoke programme of activity designed to meet you exactly where you are at and tailored to your budgets. This might include:
Audience journey mapping
Producing a full content strategy
Developing a content marketing plan
Creating compelling content to drive postgraduate recruitment
Training and coaching your teams to support them to create their own content strategy and approach, or to produce better content.
Contact us by email to hello@picklejarcommunications.com to set up a no obligation conversation about your postgraduate recruitment content strategy needs, and to discuss how we might be able to be your strategic content partner in addressing your challenges.