Educational Marketing Case Study

Background

I had the opportunity to work for a small resource center in a university’s Humanities department. To keep things confidential, I will refrain from naming the university.

I was hired to work as a contract, per diem faculty member to assist the Director of the center with administration work, but most importantly, consult him and the students that work within the center with marketing strategies to promote the center and its accomplishments online and throughout campus.

The resource center’s mission is to provide students and faculty digital support for academic work, but also provides federal work study students the chance to have a paying job in which they are trained in relevant skill sets such as computer programming, video production and editing, research development, graphic creation, etc. Due to this unprecedented paid, training opportunity, I was able to find that point-of-difference and establish a marketing plan around that unique attribute.

With the circumstance of the center, it does not have a marketing budget to utilize paid advertising, so we had to use organic content only. Another difference with this center is they are not selling a product, the same goes to universities in general. In this example, the center was “offering” a service to its students and faculty, while also “offering” a paid federal work study position for eager students who wish to learn more. My task was to promote these services and opportunities while showcasing the work and training that has already been done.

Research Development

I figured this first part out within the first two weeks of working there, this was my own personal brand audit. After my audit, I found that the center had a Facebook page, Twitter account, and a deactivated Linkedin page. There was no instagram account and the frequency of posting was maybe once a month. A month! I also looked over the center’s designated web pages which are hosted on the university’s main website. Gaining access to the web pages became a temporary roadblock because it took at least one whole week to go through the proper web training set by the university. Once I was given access to the center’s pages via Wordpress, I was able to go in and determine which pages or sections needed some TLC throughout this process.

After gaining access to all of the social media accounts, I continued my research path and met with the Director many times to strategize content creation and brainstorm content categories. Initially, the posts that were already on the social media accounts were dry, boring, way too text heavy, and not at all dynamic. There were barely any links that directed others to the center’s webpage and had no organization to its information. There also was no logo for the center, preventing any type of branding opportunities. So I established a logo contest among the federal work study students who were training in graphic design. The top voted logo design, by the Director and fellow students, would become the new branded logo, in which I would use for all social media accounts and web pages.

Now before implementing my marketing plan, I wanted to do a quick study of which social media platforms perform well for our center and which receives the most engagement among different target audience segments , ie. students, faculty, humanities professionals, and prospective students. After surveying different students and faculty about which social media accounts they use to view educational content or campus-related news, I checked different social accounts run by student organizations, other departments, other campus centers, etc. to see what platforms they use and if they have a successful engagement rate.

Findings

Once I have finalized my research, I noticed that students primarily use Instagram to view and engage with campus-related content, faculty members and educational professionals use Twitter and Linkedin, and viewers who are looking for generic information, such as prospective students or parents, typically use Facebook as their resource. Based on my findings, I strategized how each platform was going to serve each target audience. Afterall, not all content is going to speak to everyone, so I had to plan what type of posts were going to be published on each platform.

Implementation

My first step was to reactivate the Linkedin page for the center. Once I activated it, I updated the page information with our mission, location, affiliations, and profile photo with our newly designed logo. After seeing that students utilize Instagram more so than any other platform to engage with educational accounts, I recruited some of the work study students to come up with effective posts that would speak to other students accordingly, while I created the account and set up the bio and profile photo. I repeated these steps to rebrand the Facebook and Twitter accounts to make everything cohesive.

Once we had all of our accounts set up, we came up with a marketing schedule of what days of the week and what type of content was going to be posted. Setting up this schedule that could be shared among these students was beneficial because it let them take the reigns and be creative. I steered them in the right direction once in a while and even helped them with the creative design of the content when needed. While they worked on content strategy, I worked on a bulletproof branding guideline document for the students to refer back to later on once I leave. These documented branding guidelines included our center’s mission, target audience, platform and account information, logo and content usage, tone, and the different on-going campaigns the students and I have established.

Results

When we finally rolled out our content on a weekly basis, I monitored our engagement by keeping track of our followship and overall engagement on each post. We went from having 0 Instagram followers to 56, 0 Linkedin followers to 15, 35 Facebook follows to 48, and 43 Twitter followers to 83 all within 2 weeks! Now for bigger companies, that result is miniscule, but for a small resource center within a university that only has 42 students and a Director running it, that is a huge improvement.

Going back to their origins, their social media accounts would rarely be used and were hard for viewers to read and retain the information, so by growing these numbers, the center now has a consistent marketing plan and increasing brand awareness. After a few weeks, we found faculty members and students that have never been to the center, visiting and asking questions more often. The Director also noticed a spike in internship and federal work study applicants than ever before! We were able to correlate this to the internship postings we did on our social media accounts, which were then directed to our newly designed website that have all the information displayed in a digestible manner. These small improvements ended up having a tremendous impact for this small, yet transformative digital resource center. The Director and the students who put in hours a week to keep it running were able to see the increase in awareness and recognition among their fellow students, faculty members, and even the Dean of the college!