As I embark on a new chapter in my life in higher education, I started crafting different digital strategies as well as assessing current efforts that are in the works. Definitely a little bit of a learning curve, but at the end of the day, the main message is clear:
With that in mind, I started to simply search items pertaining to online strategies related to higher education, to see if I was missing the mark, or if my original thought was on track. It turns out that yes, my original thought was correct, however higher education needs greater resources for digital knowledge, as we are blending a traditional vertical with emerging strategies.
What do we do when it comes to things like SEO, PPC, social media, email marketing, mobile and all these different digital outlets? Simple. Educate the educators.
In a few short weeks, I have learned that individuals in higher education are extremely passionate, eager to try new ideas, and curious about how new initiatives will match with the bottom line. Great. So, what is the next step? I have identified three basic areas that deserve attention to benefit the whole.
1. Draft Best Practices
Do they participate in social media, SEO, PPC, etc? Yes. Is there a full understanding of how these channels can integrate with one another, or standards for each department to follow? Perhaps to a certain degree, but everyone is on a different page. Create a best practices document for each channel, send it out and gather feedback. Everyone is involved, as each area has their own goals to achieve. [Whether this will be a Best Practices or Training doc doesn’t matter, the concepts transcends all.]
2. Reporting
This can be tricky. First thing’s first – who needs reporting? Once you know who will be touching a report, decipher the level of detail they will require. Are they only interested in the high level data or do they need to know how someone navigated to what page via a certain campaign? Once decided, a reporting schedule can be drafted and sent to team for final approval.
3. Meetings
Do you need meetings? Yes. All day, every day? Absolutely not. This is very similar to the reporting aspect. I like to touch base with members of the team on a fairly regular basis – perhaps twice a month – to review online campaigns, learn about new print initiatives, and brainstorm on how to make everything bigger and better. And the way to ensure this is effective is to be organized – create an agenda and inform those attendees ahead of time so they can also prepare and make the meeting as efficient/effective as possible. After all, they are just as busy!
Still going strong and discovering new and exciting things every day. The morale of the story – we are all in this digital game together. And in the end, we all want the same thing – to understand, to learn, to grow, to get that ROI!
