Gene Begin, Managing Director, CP Education
Colleges, universities, and education organizations have a world of opportunity leveraging their advocates and turning them into influencers.
Utilizing the loyalty loop of a consumer decision journey can be one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies in any organization, let alone education. Advocacy drives awareness and influence and while this can happen within a variety of channels, advocacy is most prominent within social media. Social sharing is the online adaptation of the most successful marketing strategy in the history of humankind – word of mouth.
Just think about how often you gather recommendations from your family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, whether online or in person. That advocacy absolutely shapes your decision-making.
Educational organizations should be taking advantage of this with their built-in community of advocates – employees, current students, board members, alumni, and even admitted students. This network is full of individuals with influence in multiple industries and audience segments.
But in today’s creator economy, advocacy marketing for many organizations is not enough. Individuals within our networks have seen influencer marketing become part of the norm with their social feeds and they now understand how to take advantage of and monetize that sphere of influence. Even my pre-teens understand there are ways to monetize social content as they have seen their older cousin be successful in doing so in her career. Do not hesitate to budget and pay for advocacy and content creation. It should be an essential part of your integrated marketing strategy.
And remember, while our advocate networks in education are large and primed to be tapped into for influence, size doesn’t always matter when it comes to an individual’s network. Some of the most effective spheres of influence can be smaller, yet very committed and engaged. Community engagement really can be about the quality and not the quantity when it comes to activating a network.
Influencer marketing truly harnesses the power and the authenticity of the human voice to impact brand perception and brand engagement. But identifying your target audience and evaluating the influencer’s following as a match is crucial.
I recently moderated an influencer marketing panel at the eduWeb Summit in Portland, Maine. Below is a copy of that panel’s presentation, and if you want a partner on your influencer efforts, don’t hesitate to reach out. Our Influencer Marketing team helps activate the right influencers for your organization to build strategies that foster trust and leverage the strength of the human connection.
