How I Plan to Expand Our District’s Content Marketing on My Flight to Nashville: What I’m Doing to Win Parents and Students

“Regardless of quality, content marketing success must also include the community, distribution, and promotion.” – Mark W. Schaefer

I am going to accomplish THREE goals while I am at the NSPRA National Conference in Nashville next week.

1. Learn from my Awesome Colleagues
2. Network with PR and Marketing Professionals
3. Expand my District’s Content/Inbound Marketing Plan

Here is a breakdown of what I am going to do on my two-hour flight to boost goal number three of expanding my district’s content marketing initiative. Feel free my plan to expand your district’s own marketing strategy.

Car Ride to the Airport [25 minutes]

Your buyer/parent/student personas are very important as you build any type of marketing strategy for your district. The days of sending a blanket newsletter through email are over. You must have specific campaigns to specific personas you are trying to target. It’s all about moving your prospects through the decision making marketing funnel.

My first plan of action is to refresh my knowledge of creating personas by listening to Joe Pulizzi’s Content Inc. Podcast episode 60 entitled Building Personas Now.

The episode is around 6 minutes and gives great insight into personas and why you need them. Listen and take notes… unless you are driving yourself to the airport.

 

Waiting for my Flight at the Gate [45 Minutes]

Since we all have to get to the airport two hours early, this gives us plenty of down time waiting for our flight at the gate. During this time I plan to fill in Hubspots FREE Creating Buyer Personas Template.

This is a great in-depth resource to truly define whom you are targeting with your campaigns. This will be the foundation for all you do to reach the group you are targeting. It is very important to really know your audience. Every marketing piece or initiative should be driven by your personas. You will want to fill in more information when you get back from your trip by interviewing and surveying your persona group.

Before I board my flight, I am going to send an email to my district Webmaster to make sure the domain we purchased is linked to our website we created specifically for this campaign. I am also going to make sure our landing page and pop-up Call-To-Action buttons from Lead Pages are ready to drive our personas to our Super Content Offer.  More on Super Content later.

Flight to Nashville [Two hours]

Two hours is plenty of time to get stuff done. My first order of business is to write a blog article targeting the personas we have identified as the most important in brining new families to our district. A blog is a great way to consistently publish useful content for you parents that they will find valuable. If you district does not have a blog, here is a great video from Pat Flynn, which shows how to build a blog on Word Press in less than four minutes.

We use our blog, www.schoolahoop.com, as an educational tool for parents as they navigate raising their children in the 21st century. We have used this blog to drive readers to specific parts of our website, as well as capturing their email address to send exclusive content or invitations to our district events including specific programs they might be interested in.

I can usually write and edit a blog post in under an hour, as well as creating a catchy headline to go with the post. Publishing a blog post is not just about writing an article. You also need create graphics to go with your post as well as graphics to promote the blog post on social media and your website. Another important element that I mentioned above is creating your post headline. A catchy headline is very important in driving people to your post.

Here are some tips on writing a great blog post headline: 

Hubspot's Guide to Writing Kick- Ass Titles

In total, writing the article, editing, creating the headline, preparing it for SEO, creating visuals and publishing the post should take about two hours including a ginger ale drink break mid-flight.

Taxi Ride to Hotel [20 Minutes… Give or Take]

As I ride in the taxi with my district colleagues, I am going to review what I have put together so far in regards to new content for our new initiative. Get their feedback and see what needs revised.

NSPRA Conference [Sunday – Thursday]

I plan to put my content building on hold while I am at the conference. I’m going to take a break and learn from the best minds in School PR.

Taxi Ride to Airport [20 Minutes… Give or Take]

Our blog is such an important resource in our content plan; I figured I would review new ways to build our blog audience by listening to Social Media Examiner’s Show Podcast entitled 6 Ways to Grow Your Blog Audience. Socialmediaexaminer.com is one of my favorite websites to visit for great social media and marketing tips and trends.

Waiting for my Flight at the Gate [45 Minutes]

This chunk of time will allow me to create four different social media posts I can use for Facebook and Twitter to promote my blog post. Ninety-five percent of my social media posts have visuals.  I believe in visual storytelling. Twitter allows you 140 characters, but by attaching a picture, we can tell a whole story.  I recommend reading The Power of Visual Storytelling for great insight on visual storytelling.

The reason I create four different social media posts directing my audiences to the same blog post are that I don’t want to bore my audience. Mix up your social media. Don’t repeat your same post over and over again. And please do not use the same post across Twitter and Facebook. They are not the same medium.
 

Flight to Dallas [Two hours]

Now I need something special. I need Super Content. This might be in the form of a SlideShare (which has been a great success for my district), an eBook, How-To Videos, White Papers, Infographics or any other thing that will be of high value to my audience.

This piece of content needs to be very special for your audience, so they will want to give you something in return to get it. In order for your audience to get it, they need to give you something in return. Most of the time for us, this is getting their email address.

An email address can be very powerful. We use their email to send special event notices, information about programs and other promotional items including additional content that they may find valuable. Having the people you are targeting willingly give their email address is awesome. It means they are aware of you and they want more information. You are one step closer to reeling them in. 

A Few Days Later…

After I get back to the office next week, it’s time to combine all of these creations including the website and landing pages that were created, to build something special.

We will use our website and blog to drive our audience to the landing page we built by having a Call-to-Action using our Super Content. Social media will do double duty by driving people to our website and landing page.

Hopefully our content will be valuable enough to convert our audience from spectator to subscriber. Our main goal will be to gather email addresses and create an email campaign to pull them through our marketing funnel.

Do you have any questions about our content marketing process? Leave your questions in the comment section below.