What Higher Ed Can Learn from the Business World

Conferences are the best!

Attending higher education conferences—in person or online—is great for career development, networking, and exploring the latest challenges and opportunities in our industry. I’ve learned a lot from my experiences at Confab Higher Ed, various CASE conferences, and Higher Ed Experts’ online conferences like the Higher Ed Content Conference in April.

Last year, though, I felt it was time to get out of the higher education conference bubble. The higher-ups at work suggested checking out Content Marketing World, an annual conference and expo hosted by the folks at Content Marketing Institute (CMI). The event is billed as “the largest gathering of content marketing professionals in the world” and it draws an array of speakers, attendees, and sponsors from across industries, sectors, and leading companies, including LEGO, Google, Microsoft, REI, and Kellogg’s.

A group of us from the University of Rochester made our way to Cleveland, Ohio, to experience #CMWorld2016. The conference was primarily geared toward business professionals, those folks who regularly use words like “B2B,” “C-level,” and “synergy.” While most colleges and universities are technically classified as non-profits, higher education—especially in the United States—is nonetheless a business. For that reason, it can be worthwhile to see what our friends in the for-profit business world are up to when it comes to content marketing.

So without further ado, let’s start TCB.

It’s less about you and more about your users.

“Your consumers should be center stage, not the brand,” Lars Silberbauer, Global Senior Director of Social Media and Video at LEGO, said as part of his keynote.

Identifying and adapting to users’ changing needs and behaviors is paramount. A recurring—albeit not surprising—theme at the conference was the continued and expanding uses of mobile devices. Mobile search, for example, is the new normal as more and more Google searches happen on mobile devices than on desktops. It’s also why Google will penalize your site in search engine results pages (SERPs) if it isn’t mobile-friendly, according to Arnie Kuenn, CEO of Vertical Measures and author of Content Marketing Works.

LEGO’s Silberbauer works at the intersection of search and social media. In an interview with CMI’s CCO magazine, he said, “YouTube is the biggest search engine for kids so it’s necessary for search to be part of the YouTube team; that’s how we learn about how kids are searching. Also, we need to target how kids are actually using their mobile devices.” Silberbauer and his team examine the questions their users are asking Google and then cross-reference those queries with social media conversations to get direction about what content to create.

I think we in higher education could benefit from doing some more active listening and responsive content creation. As a web writer, I aim to balance the content needs of my institution (what we want our audience to know) with the inquiries and expectations of our users (what they want to know and how they want to know it). One way I try to meet our users’ needs is by incorporating web-writing techniques in web content, something we cover in depth as part of Higher Ed Experts’ course on writing for the web and social media.

It’s less about keywords and more about topics.

Some of the best sessions I attended at Content Marketing World were about search engine optimization (SEO). I made a foray into the world of SEO strategy when I took Higher Ed Experts’ course on SEO for higher education last year, but I’m anxious to learn more on the subject. That’s because “SEO can make you a better writer,” to quote Andy Crestodina, another conference keynote speaker.

Crestodina is the author of Content Chemistry and co-founder of Orbit Media. At the conference, he and other SEO experts—including the aforementioned Kuenn and Moz founder Rand Fishkin—recommended focusing on topics instead of only keywords. Google is getting better at understanding searchers’ intentions by taking into account related topics and words, including relevant, supporting terms plus synonyms and close variants. (Anticipating searcher intention is also why Google works to answer simple queries—such as a word’s definition or a restaurant’s hours—directly via an Answer Box rather than make users click.)

Per Crestodina, “Find the words and phrases semantically connected to your target phrase. Make the best page on the internet for your topic. Be the best answer.” To achieve this goal, Fishkin suggested trying seven kinds of keyword research expansions. Additionally, Kuenn noted that content depth is correlated with SERP rankings in that pages with 2,000-plus words often end up in the top ten results. That’s why a Google search for “book about jews living in alaska” returns a top result of Wikipedia’s approximately 2,319-word entry for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (an example from Fishkin’s presentation on “The 7 Biggest Trends in SEO: 2016”).

The lesson for higher education?

Keywords are still important, which is why we practice incorporating them in web copy as part of the web writing course I teach. But in “The role of long-form content in #highered content strategy,” my Higher Ed Experts colleague Joshua Dodson sums it up nicely:

“It is now [more] important to build semantic relationships between pages and topics than it is to focus on a single keyword. Use keywords, but also allow other phrases to occur naturally in the article. This will be rewarded by Google and will allow you to tell a better story.”

It’s less about publishing and more about amplifying.

Allow me to adapt the classic tree-falls-in-a-forest thought experiment: If a writer creates content but nobody reads it, does it matter? Publishing fresh content is important for humans and search engines, but Content Marketing World underscored for me how much amplification must be part of the overall content strategy.

The idea that “amplification starts after you hit publish” counts as some of the worst advice marketing ever gave to content, according to Fishkin. “If you haven’t set up your content for amplification success, the probability that ‘it’ll just spread naturally’ is very low,” he contends.

Instead, Fishkin suggests that before producing content, ask yourself, “Who will help amplify this content and why?” Your answer should comprise a specific list of brands and accounts. These are your amplifiers and (possible) influencers, and they can take many forms, including bloggers, podcasters, and social media personalities with the right messaging, profile, and brand relevance.

In short, content marketing success requires business networking, or what we in higher ed typically call “relationship building.” This fact can be hard for some in higher education, particularly academics, to grasp. After all, shouldn’t the merits of the work alone determine its success?

Well, no university is an island, which is why Crestodina’s advice on amplification emphasized the “social” aspect of “social media.” If you want to be included in other people’s content, you should include them in yours: “An ally in creation is an ally in promotion.”

Back to Work in a Post-#CMWorld World

Higher education occupies a special middle ground between the non-profit and for-profit realms, with a foot in each. Attending Content Marketing World gave me a brief and helpful look into the workings of the latter. That said, my inclination in 2017 is to try a new higher ed conference.

So the question now is, which one should I attend? Let me know your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.

Meet the Faculty: Sofia Tokar

Higher Ed Experts is a professional online school for digital professionals working in universities and colleges.

When you take a professional certificate course with us, you get a chance to upgrade your skills by working on your projects, interacting with classmates just like you and getting detailed personalized feedback from your instructor.

Sofia Tokar Sofia is the web writer and communications officer for Arts, Sciences and Engineering at the University of Rochester. As part of the web team, her work includes creating, editing, and curating content for the university’s homepage and top-level pages, departmental web pages, and social media accounts. She regularly co-hosts on-campus presentations and workshops about strategic and tactical web communications.

Sofia earned her master’s degree in English language and literature from Queen’s University in Canada. She is currently pursuing her master’s in online teaching and learning at UR. She is also a graduate of the Higher Ed Experts web writing certificate program.

Sofia teaches Higher Ed Expert’s 4-week online course on Web Writing for Higher Education.