enough theory! let's put that content strategy into action!

ENOUGH THEORY!

Let’s put that content strategy into action!

@EmmanuelCollege | @honanm | @zigzagJeff | @thePrimacy | thePrimacy.com

Thank you for coming today!

Molly Honan DiLorenzoEmmanuel College – BostonAVP, Marketing Communications

Jeff JohnsonPrimacySVP, Education Practice Lead

Tweeting today?

#eduweb14@EmmanuelCollege@honanm@zigzagJeff@thePrimacy

Good conference?

How many here are…–With a school?–Marketing side?–Technology side?–Different business?–An agency or vendor?

4@EmmanuelCollege | @honanm | @zigzagJeff | @thePrimacy | thePrimacy.com

At the Conference:Listening. Talking. Sharing.

Many challenges to address!

MAXIMIZING THE CONTENT EXPERIENCE USING TOPICS, THEMES, AND TAXONOMY

@EmmanuelCollege | @honanm | @zigzagJeff | @thePrimacy | thePrimacy.com 6

Importance of Content Strategy Create, organize, structure, govern and maintain audience-aligned content that is audience-aligned. At its root, helps address the following:

What is most valuable to, or required by, our audience?

How does content activate, personify and differentiate the Emmanuel College brand, mission, vision, values and traditions?

How does content align with our business objectives?

What format, structure, and organization does content take?

Where is our content distributed and accessed?

“Content Strategy” means many things

Today’s context:

Understand how we tell the [Emmanuel College] story in most compelling and relevant way possible

Elevating the brand and connecting with key audiences

Deliver an experience that proactively guides our audiences by anticipating their needs

Help audiences make optimal decisions, provide the right resources, insight and expertise at moment of need

Challenges we’ll address

Using the overhauled Emmanuel College (Boston) website as backdrop

Balance between organizational structure of your school… with target audience’s mental model(s)

Differentiating in a sea of “me-too” schools all saying same thing

Effective storytelling that helps “connect the dots” on the “why”

emmanuel.edu/

Educational Offerings

Scholarly Achievements

/ Outcomes

Nuts and Bolts

What How

Informational Transactional

Experiential

Our Starting Point

Two insights…

Storytelling.What sets you apart. The unique stories only YOU can tell.

Today: utilizing a “topic-driven” approach and leverage taxonomy and tagging techniques to share content across organizational boundaries.

Context:Website visitors respond well to content presented in context.

Personalizing content experiences allows visitors to “explore” on their terms, and “discover” with your guidance.

EMMANUEL COLLEGE

Small, private, residential, Catholic, liberal arts and sciences college, in the heart of Boston

Sounds great, huge problem

More than 100 colleges and universities in greater Boston area*

20 miles

Tired website

Served admirably for 6 years

Mirrored the organizational structure

Website began to collapse with attempts to extend content experience

And we needed to celebrate things unique to us…

So we started bolting on microsites

• Maintain content in two places

• Resource drain

We hit the wall…

…and embarked on a website redesign

Let’s get our priorities straight

Website Redesign Priorities

Attract (higher-

credentialed)Students

Tell the Emmanuel

Engaging and Intuitive

Brand AND content experience

Imperatives:

Flexible content strategy – Can expand with needs

Create lasting IA structure – One that doesn’t need to be rethought

Common theme:This stuff is hard!

No other category of website has a greater range of relevant target audiences than a college or university.

Feel free to tweet this.

Media, Faculty, Staff (and Prospective)

Current Students

Alumni/Donors

Family / Influencers

Prospective Students

Typical Education Website Audience Identification and Prioritization

It’s easy to oversimplify

And…also easy to spoof!

Result of many website redesign efforts

9-18 months of pure fun

New design

New CMS – more often than is often

necessary

Similar underlying structure

Little or no change with content strategy

Congrats! You put a new suit on the same challenges.

Foundation for Website Redesign

Where teams should spend

MORE of their time

Where organizations should spend

MORE of their time

Where teams spend MOST of their time

Where organizations spend MOST of their time

Communication & Content Strategy

Information Architecture

Technology

Visual Design

Meanwhile, back at Emmanuel College…

In effort to help make connections we provide so many ways to navigate.

We’ve forgotten the reason “they” are here.

To consume, experience and interact with… content!

Often, the structural “bones” are there…

There’s only so many ways to name and

organize these sections

…but every page works too hard

Navigation

Contextual Links

Factoids and

thematic content

AKA: “I read somewhere about a 3-click rule, so lets put navigation everywhere”

AKA: “We have added too many things and now the IA isn’t intuitive”

AKA: “I know you came looking for something specific but maybe click on me instead”

WHICH BRINGS US TO…

Cue up the foreboding

music please

The Information Architecture (IA) Dilemma

Information architecture had performed admirably, considering…

Often the real need transcends ANY information architecture structure.

The “IA Dilemma”

Easy, Intuitive,

Task-driven

Contextual Content

RelationshipsStorytelling

The Dilemma

Longstanding Approach:Aligning Website with User’s Mental Model

Organizational Structure versus User’s Mental Model

Question: What if we stop fighting the endless, winless battle?

Revisiting the “IA Dilemma”

Answer: And…Choose both!

1st: IA Organizational Approach

Everything gets “home” within core IA structure

Navigation/nomenclature streamlined to accelerate “findability”

Somewhat common to most colleges, i.e., low learning curve

Mostly managed by respective organizational owner

Tier One

Tier 2 Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4 Tier 4

Tier 5

Tier One

Tier 2

Tier 3 Tier 3

Tier 4

Tier 3

Tier 2 Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4 Tier 4

Tier 5 Tier 5

Tier One

Tier 2 Tier 2 Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4

Tier 5

Tier One

Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4

Tier 5 Tier 5

Tier One

Tier 2 Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4 Tier 4

Tier 5

Tier One

Tier 2

Tier 3 Tier 3

Tier 4

Tier 3

Tier 2 Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4 Tier 4

Tier 5 Tier 5

Tier One

Tier 3

Tier 4

Tier 5

Tier One

Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4

Tier 5 Tier 5

1st: IA Organizational Approach

Good for finding a piece of information

Not as good for contextually related information

Test drive:

“what’s your passion?”

Science?

Programs Internships ResearchAlumniFaculty Big News

Education stakeholders are consumed by reflecting their organizational model.

What’s missing? The “connective tissue” to tie it all together.

Conceptual Approach: Connect the Dots

Every school has signature features that truly differentiate it from other schools. Celebrate them.

2nd: Add a Topical / Thematic Overlay

Sciences at

Emmanuel

Topical / Thematic Overlay

Sciences at

Emmanuel

Eschew organizational boundaries

All schools have topics and themes that make them distinctive.

Topics/themes transcend any one part of the organization.

Consider ways in which to “celebrate” your school, topically/thematically.

Arts at Emmanuel

Topic of ____ at

Emmanuel

Boston

Residence Life at

Emmanuel

Mission and

Spirituality at

Emmanuel

The Catholic

Intellectual TraditionAcademics

at Emmanuel

Visiting Emmanuel

Beyond the Classroom

Global Studies

Research at

Emmanuel

Sciences at

Emmanuel

Arts at Emmanuel

Topic of ____ at

Emmanuel

Boston

Residence Life at

Emmanuel

Mission and

Spirituality at

Emmanuel

The Catholic

Intellectual TraditionAcademics

at Emmanuel

Visiting Emmanuel

Beyond the Classroom

Global Studies

Research at

Emmanuel

Sciences at

Emmanuel

Tier One

Tier 2 Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4 Tier 4

Tier 5

Tier One

Tier 2

Tier 3 Tier 3

Tier 4

Tier 3

Tier 2 Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4 Tier 4

Tier 5 Tier 5

Tier One

Tier 3

Tier 4

Tier 5

Tier One

Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4

Tier 5 Tier 5

Organizational AND Topical

Identifying Topics

Signature themes and brand attributes

Centers of gravity around research, centers and institutes

Aspects of the customer journey that matter

Unique, intersecting characteristics that tell the Emmanuel story

Bringing it to life

Home Page Bringing it all

together on the homepage

Primary navigation

Gateway access

Footer with utility and high-value links

Streamlined

Focused on the prospective student

It’s the front door, not the catch-all

Access for all

Themes/topics as centerpiece feature

Streamlined

Focused on the prospective student

It’s the front door, not the catch-all

Access for all

Themes/topics as centerpiece feature

Celebrate Topics Signature

Emmanuel themes and topics

Boston

The Catholic

Intellectual Tradition

Sciences at Emmanuel

Topic Page

Topics, Taxonomy, and Tagging

Aggregate and syndicate within site

Create a taxonomy of key words to “tag” all content within the site

Use tags to aggregate and filter

Leverage CMS to write once, share many

The new home page

Topics, in action

Topics main page

Content can live anywhere

In the topic area

In News

Any other place in the site

Contextually relevant throughout experience

Conveniently, all wired and ready

to go for DMS

Beyond the website

Viewbook– Sections align with topics and are tethered to the website

Email– Topics are focus of campaigns during Admissions cycle

Social – Feature topics during downtimes or when contextually

relevant

Viewbook

Social

Impact to date?

Impact

Page Views +12%/visitLength of Visit Time +13.8% /visitNew Visits +6.4%Bounce Rate -17%Mobile Traffic +93.7%Tablet Traffic +46.7%Content authorship + storytellingInternal satisfaction + satisfactionTopic Pages + site engagement

Impact

Campus Visits IncreasedDeposits Increased

Activity-based AND performance-based

How is this all managed?

Staff: 400+

Project Management

Process Model

Vision and Leadership

ContentWeb PrintSocial

Writers conversant in CMS

Budgets tight– Had to figure

how to be robust with limited resources

Efficiency– Centralize

content repositories

– Build system without holes, pull in default stories

Takeaways

Tear down the organizational barriers

Create pages that address key “signature” and “ownable” topics

Use to aggregate access to content found throughout the website (connect the dots)

Test with target audiences

Test early, and as often as possible

Next wave

Customized content delivery based on user behavior

Integration with external marketing efforts (online and offline)

Take advantage of CMS search and

digital market tools

THANK YOU

WWW.EDUWEBSPEAKERSURVEY.COM

@EmmanuelCollege

@honanm

honanm@Emmanuel.edu

@thePrimacy

@zigzagJeff

Jeff.Johnson@theprimacy.com

Emmanuel + Boston Video Feature

enough theory! let's put that content strategy into action!

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