C H A L L E N G E S
As a commuter community college with a higher than average student age, our institution has struggled to create a sense of community, fun, and student involvement. To overcome this challege, we needed to create content that covers complex topics with entertainment and a touch of levity – as well as content that is strictly fun and entertaining – without sacrificing our brand.
As a minority majority college with a lower than average student income level and a high proportion of first-generation college students, we needed to create an image of hope and accessibility while also addressing the pressing needs of our students and connecting them to resources.
G O A L
The goal of our 2017-2018 digital marketing campain sought to address the challenges of our institution head-on and connect with students in an honest and meaningful way. To do this, we had to create an online presence that is aspirational, entertaining, and original while addressing the barriers to our students' success.
T A R G E T A U D I E N C E
At Amarillo College, we have created a hypothetical amalgamation of our student demographic averages which we refer to as "Maria". Maria is a 28 year old female first generation college student with ≈2 children who attends part time. In addition to prospective students similar to Maria, we also sought to reach a younger generation of future college students and their parents.
This younger audience has recently become more important than ever due to a groundbreaking new local scholarship program offered through a collaboration between AC and several other local organizations which offers all new graduating seniors from Amarillo Independent School District the opportunity to take 60-hours of course work at AC without paying a penny toward tuition, books, or fees regardless of family income.
S T R A T E G I C E X E C U T I O N
S O C I A L M E D I A
We used social media as the primary means of communicating our messages digitally. In addition to more traditional posts on
Facebook,
Instagram,
Twitter, and
YouTube, we also made liberal and consistent use of newer avenues like Instagram
stories, Facebook stories, event filters, live video, and Snapchat geofilters. Creative paid advertising strategies were also employed on social media. Leveraging our access to student information, we crafted timely paid ads that were more personalized and relevent to the individual, their interests, and their specific situation. In all aspects of our social media presence, we made a consious shift toward quality over quantity and rejected the common longstanding practice of valuing volume output and "reach" over genuine engagement.
B L O GOn our
blog platform, we highlighted meaningful stories that celebrated the successes of our students, faculty, and the institution as a whole. We also began to add depth to our written content by often supplementing stories with accompanying video content.
W E B S I T EWe redesigned much of our website with our students' desire for community in mind. Most notably, we completely shifted our institutional lexicon to replace "departments" with "academic communities" and created
www.actx.edu/communities as a place of discovery for current and prospective students to explore our program offerings. We also fitted each "community" page with new graphics to better align with our current branding and imagery.
A P P In October, 2017, we launched a new
app as another means of connection to our students. With the app, students can access class schedules, grades, virtual ID card, calendar of events, important institutional contact info, student email, and more. The app also connects to our Instagram, Twitter, & Facebook profiles with just a click. However, one of the most impactful features of the app is the capability it gives students to view their planned course timeline a year or more in advance, then register for the desired sections from their phones on the first day registration opens. The app has also been used as a tool for disseminating important or time sensitive information to students through calculated and moderate use of push notifications.
D I S P L A Y A D V E R T I S I N GWe also utilized targeted PPC display advertisements across several ad auctions and media platforms – including traditional banner ads and in-stream video marketing pieces.
U S E R G E N E R A T E D C O N T E N T
We combined digital outdoor advertising and
user generated content using social media aggregation software in order to show
"what success means" to our students and community. Using the aggregation software, we were able to crawl our social media platforms to identify uses of the designated hashtag (#SuccessIsAC), mentions on Twitter, and posts to our Facebook wall which were then approved (in nearly real-time) and subsequently shown on our digital outdoor billboards across the city. We then repurposed photographs of the billboards as social media content.
R E S O U R C E S
The vast majority of all of our digital content – including blog posts, video production/editing, graphics, animations, and photography – is created by a small in-house team of two designers, a writer, and a part-time content producer which is then published and analyzed by our digital communications coordinator. The small size of our team, however, gives us the ability to communicate our message efficiently without losing focus on our objectives.
C R E A T I V E C O N T E N T
