Higher Ed Content Talks with Kait Lanthier, Content Strategy Director – Babson College

Kait Lanthier, Content Strategy Director at Babson College, is one of the 12 presenters of the 2020 Higher Ed Content Conference .

In this 4-question interview, Kait tells us about best and worst content trends in higher ed, content measurement, great content ideas and a favorite tool.

1) What are the worst and best content trends in higher ed?

The worst? Flyers on social media, especially Instagram. There are a host of issues associated with this tactic—accessibility and readability, to start—but at its core, the problem is with the practice itself. If your social media strategy is strictly one of event promotion, you’re missing the point of social media. What are users going to Instagram for? Not to see a digital replication of a bulletin board in the campus center. To make the content fit right social, you have to think beyond the transactional desire to fill seats and think about the strategy behind each platform. When we’re asked to think about event promotion as a tactic, we back up and ask, “What story are we trying to tell?” Once we have that conversation, a thoughtful strategy—with channel-appropriate tactics—follows suit.

For the best content trend, I’d love to see a rise in the strategic use of long form video. I know, I know; for years we’ve been hearing, “attention spans are short!” and have been capping our videos at 30 seconds to one minute because of it. I get it. And in some cases, this is absolutely the best way to go. But I’d love to see content creators focus less on the logistics of “how long” and more on the quality of the story they are trying to tell. That means some videos will be snackable, others will be long form, but their length will be dictated by the content quality, not by the notion that everything has to fit into thirty seconds.

2) Why is it still so difficult to measure the performance of higher ed content?

I think the real challenge is that vanity metrics like impressions and likes are the easiest to pull and report on, but they don’t capture the whole picture. In reality, content is part of every single stop on a higher education customer journey. But impressions, or even page views, can’t easily be tied to action. You need to have the right measurement tools in place in order to really capture the effectiveness of content, but in order to know what those tools are, your conversations have to start with goal setting. Goal setting helps determine what KPIs you want to use to evaluate the effectiveness of any effort. From there, use the tools at your disposal to measure what matters. And what matters may be RFI completions, it may be resource downloads, it may be social shares, it may be pageviews. But you’ve got to decide what matters from the get go.

3) Share 3 pieces of higher ed content that made you envious or proud.

I’m forever a fan of News @ Northeastern. The site, and the team behind it, does such a tremendous job of connecting what’s happening at Northeastern with what’s happening in the world. Beyond their day to day news coverage, I love their “Seen Around Northeastern” gallery. It’s a strong visual representation of campus life in and out of the classroom.

Did you see BU Today’s response to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s break from the crown? Their story, “Six BU Classes That Might Help Harry and Meghan,” was so much fun from start to finish. I loved the cheeky tone in which it was written, and thought it was a really creative way to highlight the variety of classes that Boston University offers. It’s another stellar example of being timely with your content delivery, while thoughtfully and appropriately connecting your institution’s goals with what’s happening in the world. 

I’m going to take the opportunity to praise my team, too. This year we welcomed Babson’s 14^th President, and developed a robust integrated communications plan for July 1^st, his first day on the job. It kicked off with a presidential address via Facebook live at 12:01 a.m., and we kept the momentum going throughout the day with additional touch points across all of our channels, from an article on our storytelling site to an Instagram stories Q&A, an email campaign, posts on his personal social channels, and more. We saw a tremendous amount of reach and engagement, and generated a ton of excitement around the start of his presidency.

4) What’s your favorite new tool for content work?

Over the last year we’ve focused on building a more robust in-house SEO operation. We invested in BrightEdge, a SEO tool that helps us identify, implement, and track our keywords across all of our owned content. I think the best part of the platform has been that everything is all in one place—competitor analysis, keyword research, performance tracking, content recommendations. Previously we had been using free or low-cost solutions that did one or two of those functions. Having it all in one place has saved us valuable time, which we can put towards content development.