Streamlining Content Workflows to Help Universities Drive Student Recruitment and Engagement
It takes time for universities to roll-out marketing content and student communications. Too much time, if you ask their marketing teams. Many universities have built up a complex tangle of planning, creating, editing, approval and publication processes over the years, making it difficult to deliver projects on time and personalise experiences for students on their preferred channels.
Meanwhile, the demand for content being placed on university marketing departments has never been higher and grows each day. A single open day event at the University of Leicester, for example, requires up to 100 digital, print and large format assets – that’s a lot of content for a small, in-house creative team to handle.
As importantly, today’s students and prospective students expect higher production values from their academic institutions across a wider range of digital channels. It’s jarring when a university’s website looks like it was built in 2012, especially for an 18-year-old who has grown up with the glossy visuals seen across Instagram, TikTok and other social platforms.
In fact, research indicates that communicating clearly has a material impact on young peoples’ decisions on where to study. A recent Times Higher Education survey found that while 78% of university marketers think their university’s employment rates matter most to prospective students, 80% of those same prospective students actually value clear course information above all else.
But clarity alone isn’t likely to win them over. Adobe’s Make it Personal research found that 76% of people want to be treated as individuals by the organisations that interact with them, and 24% feel they don’t fit many – or any – of the stereotypes associated with their age group. In other words, they’re looking for a personalised experience. It’s safe to assume this sentiment goes beyond consumer experience and applies to young people when they’re weighing up the pros and cons of different universities and courses as well.
Adobe’s content supply chain solutions help academic institutions around the world to engage with students on this more personalised level, using visuals and language that align with their expectations and digital habits. This may sound like a strange term to describe the creative process of copywriting, creating visuals, videos, social posts and all the other assets that go into marketing communications, but content marketing is very much a process and it’s one that benefits greatly from a systematic approach. Education is not a workflow, but an efficient content supply chain enables delivery of the content required for personalised student experiences, which helps build connections, and through it, makes university experiences feel current, connected and relevant.
A critical enabler to removing friction from content production is a structured, repeatable workflow, with feedback and sign-off loops and reporting. Adobe Workfront, part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, is a cloud-based digital solution which helps our customers do just this. Workfront makes content planning, creation and ideation processes more efficient through automation, frictionless feedback processes and integrations with other tools, giving universities a foundation upon which to accelerate and scale their marketing activities. Meanwhile, increased visibility into request volumes, the time it takes to produce assets, spend and how well utilised each piece of content is, helps university marketing teams to better align on timelines, resources and budgets, and ultimately improve the quality of their content over time based on in-depth performance analytics.
What does this transformation look like in practice? Ask the University of Leicester. Their marketing, creative services and communications teams used to do all their work manually, making it increasingly difficult to keep up with exploding content demands. After accelerating their content supply chain with Adobe Workfront, the university’s content team were able to handle a 46% rise in project requests across their marketing channels, while virtually eliminating the duplication of tasks, gaining cost-efficiency and allowing staff to be more productive.
Marketing and content traffic officer, Cole Dixon, reflected on these enhancements saying, “This is the first time we’ve had the insight to demonstrate our small team’s efficiency and value.” Today, the assets the University of Leicester creates assisted by Adobe Workfront feature everywhere from Open Days to fundraising and community partnerships content, fuelling the university’s quest to help its 20,000 students advance the frontiers of human knowledge.
This is the ultimate goal for future-focussed higher education institutions. To extend their reach and inspire more students from a broader mix of backgrounds to attend their institutions and realise their career dreams. That mission is multi-faceted, but untangling the web of legacy processes and inefficiencies in their content operations is one step in the right direction. A step that will help universities connect with young people, ignite ambition and inspire the leaders of tomorrow.
Read more about how the University of Leicester is using Adobe Workfront to streamline its content workflows and scale content production efficiently.
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