Jennifer Younker, Executive Director of Marketing and Communications and Romana Amato, Web Strategist from Saint Xavier University presented MCS10 Marketing and web strategy: repurposing traditional promotions into innovative formats.
St. Xavier University is a smaller school in the Chicago suburbs where the team is working to use new marketing methods to boost awareness. Although data suggests that 84% of traditional marketing methods no longer work, they still lead with it. Since print is often out of date as soon as it is made, the team wanted to get more use out of all the photo shoots, video interviews and other content that is being collected on campus. Their goal was to create useful and useable content that can be paired across their sites.
The main focus was on helping prospectives gain insights into the school, answer questions, build trust and drive their decision to apply.
All content in the Marketing department is evaluated with the classic questions:
- Who is target
- What is relevance
- When reuse content
- Where place content
- Why pair it
- How pair it
Recapping events? Tell story after. Have lots of student photos? Pair with quotes from their interviews that didn’t make the viewbook. Have stats? Create charts to share lots of data at a glance.
They shared videos and other content from their “Join the Conversation Campaign.” A brochure was created and added to web with all the social media connections. The students were encouraged to blog and share. All content was tagged with promoted hashtags and more content was generated from the responses. Students helped share these stories.
Currently the team is working on a site redesign that will include more social media.
Photo Credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/92132559@N00/4425771596/”>ansik</a> via <a href=”http://compfight.com”>Compfight</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>cc</a>