Review this checklist before we get started:

We’re excited to help you increase the quality and frequency of your engagement with students. But before we do, here’s a quick checklist of items that you should make sure you’ve configured on your uConnect site to set you up for success:

Upload a subscriber list upload form:

Make sure that you’ve submitted your current student subscriber list so that your emails and outreach campaigns will reach your entire audience! If you haven’t uploaded student subscriber lists, your students won’t be benefiting from the personalized emails. If you haven’t refreshed or updated, it could lead to inaccurate information on current students. We recommend updating this list at the start of every semester/quarter! You can upload your list here if you haven’t done so already.

Have you set up Twitter and Facebook as social sharing options? This is a great way to engage with students. If you’re posting a new blog, job, or event - you can automatically share it to Twitter and Facebook with the click of a button, increasing your exposure and ensuring that students receive your message. If you haven’t set these up, or aren’t sure, reach out to support@gouconnect.com and we can help get you set up.

Set up automated emails:

Have you set up automated emails? This feature sends out regular emails to your various audience groups based on the academic and career content in which they’re interested. This is a great way to maintain engagement with students with minimal effort on your part!

Create an email signature:

Make sure your entire staff includes a link to your career center website within his/her email signatures! This is an easy way to direct traffic to your platform through all of your correspondents.

Start with content:

Do you have content on your site? If you’re going to begin marketing and drawing people to your career center website, it’s important that there’s a lot of great content for them to see when they arrive. A great way to organize content is through the Editorial Calendar! You can schedule faculty, staff and student staff to post specific types of content so that the burden of keeping content updated doesn’t fall just on your shoulders. This also helps to diversify the voice of your career center, and keep things fresh. Watch this quick video if you need a refresher on using the Editorial Calendar.

Don’t have time to write?

Bring in the experts! You can post blog content from our integrations with The Muse and WayUp! These career service feeds all provide insightful information and new perspectives on topics of interest to your students.

Let’s get going!

Now, all your career resources are all in one place (finally!), but how do you get the word out to your students? There’s so much to tell them about - new resources, featured jobs, the freshest blog content and upcoming events - the list goes on! The question now, is how do you promote this information in an organized and effective way? Through a killer marketing strategy, that’s how.

Whether you’re a pro-marketer or just learning the ropes, it’s important to regroup and review your strategy before diving into a new marketing campaign. At uConnect, we’ve focused in on the three main components of a killer campaign:

Who are you speaking to? In this case, we’re talking about students as your target audience. Keeping your audience in mind is an important part of designing an effective marketing strategy, as it affects how, when and what you say.
How are you reaching them? Email? Twitter? Instagram? Your students spend as much as five hours a day checking social media. You might find that some audiences are more easily engaged through different platforms. Students, for instance, are social-media savvy. You might consider Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to engage with them directly and act as vital components to an overall marketing campaign.
What are you trying to tell them? You should have a clear message and outcome that you’re trying to achieve through this marketing campaign. Is there an upcoming event you want them to know about? Are you trying to get them to sign up for alerts on your website? Are you solving a pain of theirs? Are you offering a specific value? Whatever the message, you should make it clear and bold so that students will absorb it.

If you can answer these three questions as they pertain to each of the marketing plans in this section, before you create them, you’re guaranteed to create a concise and valuable campaign.

Best Practices: include native .edu links in all correspondences to increase search engine optimization and direct traffic to your site.