Winning content strategies for your alumni outreach.

Why Your Alumni Outreach Should Market Tasty Content

My alma mater—particularly its Alumni Association—seems to spend a fair amount of time calling me, and I spend a lot of time avoiding those calls. I’ll tell you right now that it isn’t because I have no interest in supporting my school, either by donating money or attending events. I just really hate cold calls.

Here’s what I wish the folks responsible for alumni outreach at my university would do: send me relevant content that’s engaging with accompanying details how I can be involved.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today: The top 3 reasons why your alumni outreach department needs to step up on content marketing.

  1. Creating great content is the best way to increase engagement. Blog posts are great, but I also love to see folks utilizing email series and relevant downloadable content. When you create content that your alumni will sign up and provide information for, you know who they are and what is important to them—this drives even more meaningful engagement. Write blogs to let your alumni know the issues your school is facing then use your email databases to drive traffic to that content..
  1. Content marketing is a fantastic way to ensure alumni can continue to be part of your school’s story. They are out there, talking about when they were at your school, reliving the events that shaped them. You should be doing the same to draw them back in. What could be more interesting than telling your story or talking about the issues, successes, and setbacks you’ve had. Whatever that challenge happens to be, tell the story and push it out through all your social channels so everyone can stay involved.
  1. Content marketing, when done correctly, equals great SEO. SEO is no black art, and there are no tricks or secret tactics to ensure success. People link back to content they find meaningful and engaging, and those linkbacks to your site improve rankings on search engine results pages. This means folks find you more easily and your online presence keeps you deep in fresh, qualified traffic. If you can tell your story effectively, you will also get the benefit of ranking for keywords that are relevant to your audience.

Do you have any questions about how to develop content or market it with marketing automation? Let me know, and I’ll be happy to help.