“There are so many things in higher education where content marketing would be the perfect solution. It’s an environment that is ripe for content marketing—there are so many stories and so many opportunities, but there’s not a lot of content marketing going on in higher ed. So that’s where I decided this is a book that needs to be written.”—Brian Piper
In this #ContentChat recap, Erika Heald is joined by Brian Piper, Director of Content Strategy and Assessment at the University of Rochester, to discuss how higher education institutions can unlock the power of content marketing. Brian shares learnings from his book Epic Content Marketing in Higher Education, exploring the importance of developing consistent, long-term content strategies that appeal to diverse audiences with authentic storytelling.
Watch the entire conversation on YouTube and read through the highlights below.
Bringing Content Marketing Strategies to Higher Ed
Educational institutions historically did not market themselves because they didn’t need to.
“Marketing in higher ed itself has kind of been taboo. And up until about a decade ago, a lot of institutions didn’t really need to market themselves a lot. There was a lot of demand, there was a lot of need. There were people that this was the path you took: You went to high school. If you wanted a good job, you went to college, and then you were able to get a better job. Things have changed a lot. That’s not the only way that you can get a good job. These days, you don’t have to have a four-year degree. There are lots of different certifications and two-year degree programs.”—Brian Piper
“About a decade ago, a lot of institutions started thinking, ‘Okay, we probably should actually start doing some marketing.’ [It was] mostly push marketing, traditional marketing, and they didn’t really start thinking about using all these resources we have and telling all these stories. And we didn’t think too much about audience-first marketing and really trying to provide information that was useful to all of our different audiences.”—Brian Piper
The many audiences can make it difficult for content creators in higher ed.
“Another thing in higher ed is we have a lot of different audiences. We’re trying to reach the parents and the students, and graduate students, and international students, and faculty… and then we have government relations. So all these different audiences we’re trying to communicate with from all these different siloed areas, and it’s just really challenging for people to start thinking as an institution about our overall brand and how we can deliver our message in a way that really resonates with specific audiences, and how we can actually help them with our content—which is what content marketing is all about.”—Brian Piper
Institutions are now increasingly finding success with content marketing.
“Now we’re starting to see some schools that are really doing this and really leaning into it, and it’s paying off for them. At Content Marketing World, I think two or three years ago, Purdue won the content marketer of the year. Ethan Braden won that for the work that they have done. And it’s all about storytelling. It’s all about thinking about the perspective: What do students want? What do they need? People who are researching what colleges to go to, what are they thinking about? What questions are their parents asking? And then providing that information through their content, through their videos, and making sure that they’re thinking about what channels all these audiences are on and making content specific for those channels.”—Brian Piper
Content Marketing Helps Institutions Stand Out
Content can help prospective students feel like they will be welcome at the school they choose.
“I recently was at a conference, and they had a student panel… it was the perfect audience to really ask them what they wanted and what they needed and what their considerations were, what the decision factors were [when selecting a college]. A lot of it was location, whether they wanted to go in-state or out of state or close to home. And then what size of the school, if it was big or small. And then price, obviously, financial is a huge determination, first for a lot of students. And then it came down to they wanted to hear stories from other students. They wanted to get that user-generated content. They did a lot of research on social channels and watching videos, and they wanted those ’day in the life’ pieces. And so many schools are not doing that.”—Brian Piper
Authenticity is critical in storytelling.
“It’s really trying to figure out how to get not only the right stories out there, but use the right storytellers to connect with those audiences in a very authentic way. Students can very quickly recognize scripted, highly produced content, and they know that for what it is. And that’s not what they want. They want to see the real. They want to know the backstory, whether it’s good or bad. They want to understand what it’s really like to be a student there, and what their life is going to be like for the next four years.”—Brian Piper
Parents are an important higher education audience to consider. However, they are not the only audience to appeal to.
“So much of the marketing has been focused on the parents. But the parents aren’t always the ones paying for the school. And regardless of if they are or not—unless you’re in a situation where you have a parent who is a big donor and you’re a legacy and you’re going to be disowned by the family if you don’t go to that university—it’s the kids that are going to make the decision.”—Erika Heald
Content marketing helps institutions earn the attention and trust of prospective students.
“Content marketing for higher ed is really thinking about what differentiates you, what is the right student for your institution, and how do you reach them? You do have to reach their parents, too, because a lot of times it’s the parents or the student counselors that will initially connect the students to those institutions or make them aware of those institutions.”—Brian Piper
Campus tours are an especially important opportunity to personalize the experience and appeal to distinct needs.
“If they come and do a campus tour, that is such a critical moment. You have to be so intentional about what you show them, who your hosts are, and how you represent the university. Because that’s what makes that impression on them that they say that’s where I want to go.”—Brian Piper
“Think about those campus tours as content. This is part of your content marketing program. Have those different tours led by different people who you know are going to show a different slice of life, depending upon what you know about that student.”—Erika Heald
Making the Case for Content Marketing in Education
Start small with something you know will have an impact. Brian started with SEO.
“The key, ike with any sort of content marketing project, is to start small. Start with something where you know you can get a win. Start with something that you know is going to have an impact. So when I first came into the institution, I focused on SEO, because no one was actively doing SEO.”—Brian Piper
“I went through our content and looked at what content was the most related to our strategic priorities, the most relevant to the programs we wanted to promote. And then I did SEO optimization on those stories. Within the first six months, I doubled the organic traffic to our news center, which was the bulk of the original content that we put up on the website. And so then I was able to take that to leadership and say, look at the impact we’re having. Look at how much more brand awareness we’re getting, recognition we’re getting, how many more people we’re driving to our content.”—Brian Piper
Scale your program to encompass other departments and teams.
“We started launching an institutional SEO program. I would go around and do workshops with different departments and different teams. And now we have an overall institutional SEO awareness, so everyone is aware that when you’re writing content, you should be thinking about what your keywords are, who you’re trying to target, and what questions they have. Now we’re getting much more into doing proactive content marketing versus reactive content marketing.”—Brian Piper
“The proactive content performs five times better in organic traffic and three times better in overall traffic than the reactive content. Once you start collecting that data and have those pilot programs, then you can go back to leadership and say we need to invest more into this.”—Brian Piper
Building a Higher Ed Content Strategy
Define your goals.
“It all starts with your goals. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you just trying to get more students registered? Are you trying to get a better class of students? Are you really focusing on specific programs that you’re wanting to promote for your institution? And the same thing for faculty. How are you trying to bring in new faculty?”—Brian Piper
“You have to understand where you’re going before you can start creating tactics and figure out how to get there.”—Brian Piper
Have a clear audience for everything you create.
“[Institutions] create so much content, but so much of it is not targeted to a specific audience. So that’s one of the first things we started looking at for every piece of content that was being created. Who is this for? What are you trying to do with it? Because if you don’t know that, and you’re just making stuff to put out there, then you’re you’re missing the mark, you’re missing opportunities, and you’re wasting a lot of your time putting out stuff that, even if people read it, might not have any sort of impact on you reaching your goals as an institution.”—Brian Piper
“You have to know who you’re talking to, and the more specific you can get about that, the better.”—Brian Piper
Brian shares several examples from institutions in the full recording.
“Looking at some of what different institutions are doing is a great way to start coming up with ideas. There’s a lot of case studies in the book. University of Miami and Ohio has a student run podcast and blog that is focused on answering the questions and the fears of first year students. So they are having students talk about what it was like when they first came on campus and how they dealt with homesickness, and that’s been working really well for them.”—Brian Piper
Using AI to Streamline Content Governance
AI can automate repetitive tasks and streamline work so teams can focus on content marketing opportunities and providing value to their audiences.
“There are so few resources that people are like, we don’t have time to do that. We don’t have personnel to do that. And that’s one of the ways that I see AI really playing a positive role for a lot of these institutions. AI can take a lot of those repetitive tasks and kind of mind-numbing work that we hate doing and we don’t want to do anyway. If AI can take care of that and make us more efficient and effective in our roles, then we’ll have more time to be able to think about other opportunities.”—Brian Piper
Document your content governance to empower AI to deliver content that meets your needs.
“This is where content governance comes in. Let’s say, for example, people do not enjoy writing meta descriptions or optimizing the title of a page for search. You can write a really good description of your approach to what your recipe looks like for doing a meta description and all these other things you can feed that into an AI.”—Erika Heald
“I’m the chair of our AI committee for the institution, and we’re getting ready to roll out ChatGPT teams. One of the custom GPTs we have is an alt tag generator, a meta tag description, and one that helps with SEO keywords. It’s so easy to just have that resource and be able to go there and not have to think about it. Just drop the picture in and say what keywords you want, and it’ll generate the alt tags for you. And you can look at them and verify them and make sure that they’re right.”—Brian Piper
Provide AI training, and always keep a human in the loop to review AI outputs.
“Before we give anyone access to ChatGPT or Copilot, we give them some training on the risks of using the tools and best prompting strategies and different use cases so that they’re not coming in and just throwing in a question and then getting back a horrible output because they didn’t give it enough details.”—Brian Piper
“You have to give it information. This is like a really smart intern. And if you had a real intern and they gave you a bad recommendation, you wouldn’t tell them don’t ever come back here again. You would coach them. You would work with them. You would give them more information and give them boundaries and guidelines.”—Brian Piper
Activating Alumni For Your Content Marketing Strategy
Alumni deserve genuine opportunities to reconnect with the institution and become embedded in your content marketing strategy.
“The alumni audience is such a powerful audience to be advocates and influencers to really help spread your brand message. Some institutions are really trying to embody the lifelong learning opportunities and bring those alumni back in and really engage them; instead of just sending them an email or making a call once a year to ask for money. You’re actually providing value to them, and they want to come back and mentor new students and find those ways to connect and grow those networks.”—Brian Piper
“Purdue has huge alumni events where they bring in faculty and students and alumni to help share knowledge. They do different lecture series all open to any alumni or current student, faculty, or staff. And that’s just such a great way to continue giving back and to continue developing really strong representatives of your institution and of your brand out there.”—Brian Piper
Overcoming Content Marketing Challenges in Higher Ed
Approach content marketing as an ongoing investment, not a one-off campaign.
“A lot of people that I talked to had examples of using content marketing, but it was being pitched as a content marketing campaign, like we’re going to do six blog posts. That’s just not the way content marketing works. You need to be consistent. It’s a long-term process. It’s a lifestyle.”—Brian Piper
“You’re forming relationships. You don’t form relationships with six blog posts. You’re trying to get your audience to know, like, and trust you. The know part can kind of happen quickly, but the like, and especially the trust part, takes consistent content over a long period of time. You have to make sure that leadership knows that. This might take a year, this might take 18 months before we start seeing some traction, before we start seeing people are coming back to us consistently and regularly.”—Brian Piper
Be strategic about which content channels and formats you invest in.
“I think with podcasts, you’ll hear that a lot. People will say we’ll just record these six podcasts. If you want to just record six things, then that’s just audio content. And there’s nothing wrong with it, but don’t market it as a podcast, because it’s not going to work that way. It’s not going to get people subscribing if there’s nothing happening.”—Erika Heald
“You have to be cognizant of what each different kind of content marketing tactic can provide to you, because podcasts are a difficult way to grow an audience. It’s a great way to connect and engage with an audience you already have, but it’s hard to expand your audience with a podcast. There are better ways that you might be able to do that, through your website content, more SEO, or very intentional, audience-first content on your website. That’s a good way to build an audience, to reach a broader segment of people, and then point them to your podcast.”—Brian Piper
Institutions with a medical center or healthcare component must be extra careful to follow regulations and industry best practices.
“We also have a Medical Center as part of our university, so we have huge regulations. You can’t release any sort of personal information, personal health information, any of that. So we’re very careful about what data we’re going to load into an AI system, or what information we’re going to release in our content.”—Brian Piper
“If we’re going to talk about students that won some awards, we have to make sure that they know that their names are going to be on the website and their pictures are going to be on the website.”—Brian Piper
“There’s a ton of research going on at the institution, and we can’t publish information about ongoing research until either it’s been published in a peer-reviewed journal or been verified.”—Brian Piper
