Two words every PR pro loves to hear? Shoestring budget. Next time you have to operate on one, stretch your resources with these tips from educational marketing consultant Shane Haggerty:
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Post by: @ShaneHaggerty
For nearly a decade now I have worked in a world of marketing and communications where resources and time are limited. In both my roles as a one-person marketing shop working in school districts or as an educational marketing consultant, getting creative with how to create movements and build awareness with little to no resources has become a way of life.
This isn’t breaking news by any means, but technology has leveled the playing field for those of us who aren’t in the world of marketing where budgets and multi-person teams thrive with unlimited resources. So just how do you leverage online platforms to overcome lack of time and scarce budgets?
Leverage the Power of Online Influencers
This past year my client, the Ohio Educational Technology Conference (OETC), the third largest educational technology conference in the nation sponsored by Ohio’s Board of Regents, needed to grow their event registration and build awareness of what the conference was all about to audiences who may have been unfamiliar. There was a catch, though, and it is what every marketer dreads: no money in the budget to do any marketing.
So with a little creativity, we built several mini-campaigns to utilize their prospective registrants to market the conference for us, and it required no additional money to do so. The mini-campaigns included:
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Instagram/Vine Takeovers — Seven Ohio high schools were given access to the OETC Instagram and Vine accounts and created original content in the weeks leading up to the conference. The content was created by students and showcased how educational technology was being integrated into the classroom and resulted in more than 50 original pieces of content that could be re-purposed to use in other online marketing efforts.
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The #BestEdTech Awards — We launched a crowdsourced award program attached to the conference. In the weeks leading up to the conference, nominations in 10 categories were accepted and online voting took place. More than 40 different people and programs were nominated and over 18,000 votes were cast online. The success of this campaign came from the social sharing element that created a completely organic way of not only spreading word about the awards, but also the conference. The human/in-person element was added by having all of the winners come to the conference, be honored on the mainstage and be part of the OETC social media command center during the event.
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#BestEdTech Hashtag — We also encouraged sharing of #BestEdTech moments through photos and videos on social media by teachers and others working on the front lines in schools. In just a three month window more than 2,000 tweets and Instagram photos using this hashtag were shared and more than 150 pieces of content were created by 25 different school districts.
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Pinterest & Blogger Influencer Campaigns — We leveraged the strong educational technology blogging and “pinning” communities online to share #BestEdTech practices and information about the student takeovers and awards on their online platforms. We had a stable of more than 25 influencers who shared the content on a continuous basis via Twitter, created a collaborative Pinterest board where influencers “pinned it forward”, and had over 10 bloggers continuously writing about #BestEdTech and the conference.
Without any money and with limited amounts of time, we were able to leverage influencers and the very audience we were targeting to tell the story of the conference. All of this activity also yielded a dozen media impressions throughout the state and helped drive an increase in conference registration thus meeting the goals of the conference team.
Open up Storytelling via Twitter Teams
Another issue normally faced is finding the time to tell all of the stories that need to be told. A strong way of solving this problem and spending no money in the process is to train your team to help tell your story. In my current role as the manager of marketing for a school district, I knew I was not going to be able to showcase daily success stories on a consistent basis. I needed to train our team to be open and willing to contributing content. In just three months, we have more than a dozen staff members, including our superintendent, our principals and teachers showcasing daily happenings. This becomes a powerful first person account and helps our school district become more transparent and open to our constituents.
So how do you get buy-in? There is some initial time that needs to be spent training your team. I held Twitter 101 sessions and provided sample tweets as people got started. I also help support the growth and awareness of the content by creating a weekly curated “newsletter” on a WordPress blog called “The Week On Twitter”. Here, I showcase the various tweets from our team.
When money and time are issues, creativity is needed in order to get results. These two tactics leverage the greatest assets–our target audiences and our human capital working within the organization. One-to-two person internal shops can’t always do it alone, so empowering multiple voices can create powerful ways of solving that issue.
Shane Haggerty is the marketing and special projects manager for Tolles Career & Technical Center in Central Ohio and the owner of Public Assembly, an educational marketing and engagement consultancy. A former English teacher and educational administrator, he has worked in public education for more than a decade. His work and campaigns in the education sector have earned him statewide and national recognition, and he is a frequent presenter on topics relating to social media, content marketing, enrollment, and education communications. He holds degrees from Huntington University, University of Dayton, and Xavier University and is a past president and former board member of the Ohio School Public Relations Association.
Photo credit: Diana Susselman, via Flickr Creative Commons