Here is a simple formula for building and improving engagement for any higher ed marketing content.

1. Improve Student Engagement With Your
Marketing Content
Slide 1
Improve Student Engagement With
Your Marketing Content

2. Improve Student Engagement With Your
Marketing Content
Slide 2
1) Defining Engagement
2) How To Build Engagement Into Marketing
Content
3) Is Your Content Emotionally Engaging
4) Is Your Content Visually Engaging
5) Does Your Content Include The Right Structural
Elements It Needs To Engage
6) Takeaway Message
Overview
Source: Higher Education Marketing – 3 Questions To Ask To Improve Student Engagement With Your Marketing Content

3. Improve Student Engagement With Your
Marketing Content
Slide 3
 Student engagement is the objective of much of the content
produced in higher ed marketing.
 To positively engage a prospective student with your print
collateral, website or social media is necessary to have a
reasonable chance of attracting them to your college, and
meeting your marketing goals.
What is marketing engagement?
“Engagement is smack at the intersection of commanding
attention and taking action.”
- Michael Schrange, MIT Academic
1. Defining Engagement
Source: Higher Education Marketing – 3 Questions To Ask To Improve Student Engagement With Your Marketing Content

4. Improve Student Engagement With Your
Marketing Content
Slide 4
Engagement is NOT...
 Getting 25,000 hits a month on your website homepage
 Posting a video on YouTube that gets played 100,000 times
but that has no link back into your brand or marketing
strategy
 Content consumption
Engagement IS getting the attention of your target student
audience in order to promote lead generation and support
conversion.
Source: Higher Education Marketing – 3 Questions To Ask To Improve Student Engagement With Your Marketing Content

5. Improve Student Engagement With Your
Marketing Content
Slide 5
If you can say yes to each of these questions, your content will be
more engaging. Guaranteed!
1. Is your content emotionally engaging?
2. Is your content visually engaging?
3. Does your content include the right structural elements it
needs to engage?
2. How To Build Engagement Into Marketing
Content
Source: Higher Education Marketing – 3 Questions To Ask To Improve Student Engagement With Your Marketing Content

6. Improve Student Engagement With Your
Marketing Content
Slide 6
 Higher ed marketers tend to focus on the academic and technical
details and often forget to apply the concepts of emotional
marketing.
 There must be a human element that evokes some kind of
emotional reaction for your message to truly resonate with an
audience.
 An emotional response to content determines how much
attention you will pay to it, what your conscious response will
be, and how deeply ingrained something will become in your
memory.
 If you build emotion into your content you will greatly improve your
3. Is Your Content Emotionally Engaging?
Source: Higher Education Marketing – 3 Questions To Ask To Improve Student Engagement With Your Marketing Content

7. Improve Student Engagement With Your
Marketing Content
Slide 7
 Visual content is the fastest growing content on the web today.
 Websites, YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Slideshare,
Instagram, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Infographics are now all
pivoting around images and video.
Why?
 A picture is worth a 1000 words and people simply prefer not to
have to read those 1000 words.
4. Is Your Content Visually Engaging?
Source: Higher Education Marketing – 3 Questions To Ask To Improve Student Engagement With Your Marketing Content

8. Improve Student Engagement With Your
Marketing Content
Slide 8
 Proper typography and text design will produce dramatically better
engagement with your reader.
 The visual imagery you create with your content is the key to
engaging with your audience in today’s very visually oriented world.
Source: Higher Education Marketing – 3 Questions To Ask To Improve Student Engagement With Your Marketing Content
4. Is Your Content Visually Engaging?

9. Improve Student Engagement With Your
Marketing Content
Slide 9
Here’s an
example from the
University of
Utah’s Airport Ad
Campaign:
Source: Higher Education Marketing – 3 Questions To Ask To Improve Student Engagement With Your Marketing Content
4. Is Your Content Visually Engaging?

10. Improve Student Engagement With Your
Marketing Content
Slide 10
Last piece of the engagement puzzle:
 That piece involves the prospective student taking an action to
connect with you and/or your institution.
 That action can range widely from a retweet, to a follow, to a like, a
lead form or simply clicking on a link bringing them one step closer
to their objective.
5. Does Your Content Include The Right Structural
Elements It Needs To Engage?
Source: Higher Education Marketing – 3 Questions To Ask To Improve Student Engagement With Your Marketing Content

11. Improve Student Engagement With Your
Marketing Content
Slide 11
 Regardless of the specific action, your content must contain some
kind of call to action to illicit this action.
 Value based statements and icons to share, link, read on, etc. will
provide the best conversion rates to get you there.
 The most important thing is to provide value in one form or
another to the visitor.
 Be creative and experiment with your calls to action to find the
right balance of action, value and fun.
 Clean and simple approaches are often most effective.
Source: Higher Education Marketing – 3 Questions To Ask To Improve Student Engagement With Your Marketing Content

12. Improve Student Engagement With Your
Marketing Content
Slide 12
 If you can respond yes to those three simple questions about
your marketing content, you can be certain that your
engagement with prospective students will improve.
 We recommend that you also go one step further and test this
quantitatively, by examining your engagement statistics. These
statistics can include:
 visitor time on page
 click through rates
 form conversion stats.
6. Takeaway Message
Source: Higher Education Marketing – 3 Questions To Ask To Improve Student Engagement With Your Marketing Content

13. Improve Student Engagement With Your
Marketing Content
Slide 13
Questions?
1.514.312.3968
info@higher-education-marketing.com
Visit our Website: Higher Education Marketing
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