Review this checklist before we get started:

We’re excited to help you increase the quality and quantity of engagement with your various stakeholders, from faculty, employers, alumni, students, and more. 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 user import list:

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

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

Don’t have time to write? Bring in the experts!

You can post blog content from our External Blog library that contains thousands of preformatted, vetted articles you can publish from trusted sources. These articles provide insightful information and new perspectives on topics of interest to your stakeholders. If you have questions about this, read this article.

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 stakeholders? There’s so much to tell them about - new resources, featured classes, the freshest blog content and staff profiles - the list goes on! The question now, is how do you promote this information in an organized and effective way? 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 faculty as your target audience. Keeping your audience in mind is an important part to designing an effective marketing strategy, as it affects how, when, and what you say.
How are you reaching them? Email? Twitter? School newspaper? You might find that some audiences are more easily engaged through different channels. Faculty, for instance, spend a lot of time reading emails and keep up with information through the school newspaper. You might consider an email campaign or press release 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 Links: include native .edu links in all correspondences to increase search engine optimization and direct traffic to your site.