3 Ways to Turn Admissions Counselors into Content Marketers
Content marketing is no doubt an effective strategy for your institution in reaching students and increasing enrollment. However, despite its name, it’s not something that should be completely limited to your “marketing” office. While it’s true that your marketing office (or a valid third-party partner) will most likely be in charge of the overall strategy, other departments (like faculty or staff) also have critical roles to play. In fact, when it comes to specifically marketing your programs, whether traditional undergraduate, degree-completion, or graduate programs, your admissions counselors have the capacity to play a critical role in your content marketing efforts.
Here is a breakdown of three ways you can (and should!) recruit the experience, insight, and help of admissions counselors by turning them into content marketers.
Tap Their Expertise and Experience
Your admissions counselors are interacting with prospective students more than anyone else in your institution. They are hosting info events and making initial connections. They are fielding prospective student inquiries over the phone, by email, or in person. In other words, they know best what questions and concerns your audience has and the context for their interests.
Content marketing, at its core, provides value and education to your audience. It needs to both answer their questions and help them meet their goals. And while you can glean much from industry research, analytics, user testing, and surveys (and you should certainly incorporate these things!), you can also learn a lot from the people who spend the most time talking to your audience day in and day out.
If admissions counselors field a lot of questions from parents about the safety of your urban campus, for instance, then one content marketing solution could be a whitepaper or robust webpage detailing relevant public safety stats and precautions that your institution takes to keep students safe. If audiences are asking about campus housing, then perhaps you can feature a video series of students sharing about residence life.
By pulling admissions counselors into your content marketing brainstorming sessions, you’ll be able to find out what unique questions students are asking that are specific to your institution. Then you can use that input as a guide to developing answers to those questions through compelling content. Doing this satisfies your audience and also saves your admissions counselors’ time.
Turn Them into Content Distributors
One of the biggest challenges with content marketing is actually getting your content in front of prospective students. You may have crafted a masterfully educational e-book or a compelling podcast series, but if your students don’t know they exist, then they won’t do any good. Of course, there are ways to promote these things via email, social media, paid advertising, and more. But another extremely effective approach is to have your admissions counselors—the very people in your institution who spend time talking with prospective students all day—delivering your content in tailored and personalized formats.
Let’s say you developed a whitepaper for your MBA program that details how to effectively navigate the admissions process (study tools for the GRE, how to craft your resume and talk about your work experience, etc.). While you should have a strategy in place to promote this content using social media, landing pages, email lead nurturing, and so on, you could also educate your admissions counselors about this piece of content. Encourage them to personally send the whitepaper to students who have questions about these very topics. If you’re a prospective student, imagine getting an email like this:
Hi Tracy,
Thanks again for calling and inquiring about our MBA application. It certainly sounds like you're a strong candidate, and I enjoyed learning more about you and your professional goals. To help you, I’m sending one of our whitepapers which unpacks some of the questions we discussed. Please let me know if you have other questions or would like to chat again.
Receiving something like this is a personalized invitation to engage with your institution's content. And it’s likely going to be more effective than merely promoting it on social media or through a landing page.
This means it’s critical to educate your admissions counselors about what content you have available and to encourage them to disseminate it to prospective students. They’ll want to choose what they send depending on what the student needs (or where they are on the buyer journey). This personalized and customized approach to getting your content in front of audiences can be incredibly productive.
Recruit Them as Content Creators
While the first two strategies get your admissions counselors involved in your content marketing efforts (the first in the planning/strategy phase and the other in the distribution/promotion phase), it’s also worth getting them involved in actually creating the content.
On one level, this is effective because it increases your human resources for content production. If you can have two or three admissions counselors writing blog articles for you, then it opens up time in your marketing department to knock out other, higher-involvement content strategies (such as videos or longer e-books). Obviously, you’ll need to make sure your admissions counselors have the necessary writing skills, and you’ll want to plan for editorial oversight to ensure the content is on-brand and aligned with audience needs. But this can still be a great way to bulk up your content marketing team without hiring additional staff or freelancers.
Further, it can also be effective to have admissions counselors serve as content creators because they can provide a perspective that only they can. They are speaking from the role of the counselor—and as an important person in the acceptance process who captures prospective students' attention in a unique way. Take advantage of this privileged position by encouraging admissions counselors to host webinars or write self-authored blog articles. Prospective students may be more compelled to read an article from the flesh-and-blood person who is reading their application than from a faceless author representing the institution.
These are just a few of the ways to get admissions counselors involved in all stages of your content marketing efforts—from planning to creation to promotion. The more you involve them, the more they can serve as advocates for your school and translate your content marketing strategies into wider audience engagement and increased student enrollment.
5° Branding is a creative agency devoted to building strong brands in higher education.
