Leveraging Micro-Communities in HigherEd Content Marketing

Never before have HigherEd institutions been so challenged to do so much with so little. Budgets are shrinking, job descriptions are expanding, and departments are disappearing. Along with that, when it comes to getting  your message in front of the right people at the right time, audiences have never been more demanding. What’s a HigherEd marketing and communications pro to do? We've got the answer: bring some robot friends to the party!

One thing that can help is to leverage the power of your marketing automation platform to deliver value to your communities and their communities by making sure the right content gets to the right identified micro-community at the right time.

What’s that, you say? Your organization doesn’t make use of a marketing automation platform? There are a host of good reasons to look into this. Of course, we’re fond of HubSpot, and we've built up our certifications around making sure we know how to guide folks through using that platform, but they certainly are not alone in the marketplace. By setting up workflows and using segmentation to attach micro-community level specificity to your targeted personas, a marketing automation platform can be like having a robot working in your university marketing communications office, doing a bunch of the work for you.

Look, everybody knows that when it comes to marketing to millennials and generations beyond, there are some special rules in place. Those audiences are constantly bombarded on every side with content, and their crap detection filters are set to maximum, so if you want to make sure the right content gets in front of them at the right time, you need some extra help -- some robot-level help. After all, these are the generations that were born shopping on Amazon and listening to Spotify -- there is an expectation that they should not have to search for the right content, but that it should be surfaced for them when they need it, right?

Making use of micro-communities in HigherEd content marketing is a tough job without that extra layer of robotic support; support that can recognize which clubs, majors, academic groups, social groups, dorms, on-campus restaurants, sports, or professors your target audience has already shown an interest in. A good marketing automation platform can help you get the right content in front of those folks at the right time and make certain they have what they need to get to the next step and beyond.

What’s that, you say? You need extra support justifying, deploying, and maintaining a marketing automation platform? You want some certified eyes to help you sort through your data to identify which micro-communities you should develop content for or need help developing the content? You happen to be in luck! We’ve got a team of certified pros who have extensive experience working inside of Higher Education, who are super-excited to help bring some robot friends to your marketing and communications.

We’ll be showing you more about how you can take advantage of these ideas at EduWeb16 in Denver this August. Won’t you join us? In the meantime, take a look at this presentation we've created about how Intelligent Inbound adds value to communities through content (and feel free to share it with your supervisors, too).

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