Content strategy
Every institution creates and distributes content. But do you have a vision for how you do it?
If the answer is no, then perhaps it’s time you invested in a content strategy.
Creating and sharing content for a school, college, or university can often feel like a frantic job.
After all, how do you ensure you’re making content that will inspire your audiences, fulfil your goals, satisfy all your different stakeholders - and still do all the other parts of your job?
At Pickle Jar Communications, we believe that a great strategy pays back the time and investment, many times over.
What is a content strategy for?
It will help you to:
Put together a clear vision for your content, that resonates with multiple stakeholders
Clarify how you’ll plan, create, distribute and maintain it (and who’ll do it)
Ensure your content is useful and useable to your audiences, and…
Make sure it works wherever it’s going, including with machines and intelligent systems
We can work with you and your stakeholders to fully understand your requirements. And then we’ll devise a plan to meet them.
Whether you’re building a new platform, refreshing your website, or launching a digital campaign, we can help you produce a roadmap that really gets you somewhere.
We’ve worked with all sorts of education institutions to deliver:
Audience, stakeholder and competitor research
Strategic alignment, setting objectives and creating a vision
Content structuring and modelling
Creative editorial planning
Creation of new workflows and processes
Governance and implementation guidance
We can help you build a powerful strategy from the very beginning. Or we can work with you to improve just one part of it.
So you’re about to embark on a digital transformation project? What does that actually mean? In our experience, digital transformation is rarely about technology. It’s more often about culture, content, user experience and a myriad of other things.
One evening recently a thought popped into my head: What would happen if I gave creative control over a university brand and content project to AI-tools like ChatGPT and DALL·E 2?
Within an hour or two I had somehow become the unlikely founder of a new university:
The University of Anywhere.
When I talk about a brand strategy, what do you expect that to include?
For years now I’ve grappled with understanding where brand strategy ends and content strategy begins. As a content strategist I’ve had to retrofit more brand strategies and brand visions than I care to count. Brand strategies are rarely fit for purpose to meaningfully bridge the intention of the brand vision with the actual reality of the lived experience of that brand and everything in between.
Defining what makes a university distinct from others can be quite tricky. There’s not a lot of reputational space in which to play - so if we’re starting to think we’re the same as everyone else, how do we really make our university feel different?
Last week, thousands of students found out which universities they were heading to - and the majority of the UK education sector has been focused on helping some of them find places through Clearing. Now, they’re moving on to the next big milestone: arriving at university.
At its heart though, your content needs to see this as an extension of the application process. Your students’ experience doesn’t start now. It began months ago.
“We want to be seen as bold and pioneering, but we want to follow other people already doing it and be extra cautious about what we do.”
It’s a common occurrence that we see with clients over the years, the desire to be bold but not actually behaving in line with their brand strategy and organisational vision. This blog talks about our new BCE model which will help your team overcome these problems, and helps to create the best experience for your audience.
There are very few things that I think are “wrong” in how we might approach any project. But today, I’m going to share ones that I have some pretty strong opinions about when it comes to website redesign, and why your planning for any redesign probably needs to start sooner than you think.
How can you make peer-to-peer a pillar of your conversion strategy? Try these three ways: outbound via SMS/texting, inbound through messaging, video or chat, and anonymously through reddit.
We all know prospective students need a lot of information to help them make a decision about where and what to study. And it makes sense to provide that information in a manner that’s as useful as possible. But that means we need to make some informed decisions of our own about what information should be presented in what kind of format.
Experience design is a method for understanding how we create better experiences for our customers by thinking not just about the isolated touchpoints or functional elements within a journey, but about how our customers feel, and what their experience is actually like.