Hey, I hope you’re enjoying your Monday! This week, let’s check in with Kaia Swift, who is the associate director of marketing at Harvard Extension School — where continuing education from Harvard has been offered for more than 100 years.
Q: How does your approach to storytelling change, if at all, when you’re targeting different audiences?
It’s not necessarily a different audience, but we think carefully about which stories we bring in at different phases of a prospective student’s journey.
For example, most of our students are busy professionals who are balancing graduate school with working full time. Stories about career advancement or career ROI help bring prospective students in early in the journey.
But then, after they have been considering Harvard Extension School, they might need stories that reassure them that they can find a way to balance it all. Having a large bank of student stories really helps here.
We categorize student stories internally by their programs, but also by the message (is this a story about flexibility? About career? About personal transformation?). That way, when we are building out our marketing plans, we can plug in stories based on the overall messages we are communicating to prospective students.
What I love about this answer:
I am an enormous fan of developing (and maintaining) a story database, and how Kaia describes what Harvard Extension School deploys is why the idea is so powerful. Yes, it’s good to have your stories categorized by programs, but that assumes every prospect for a program wants/needs to hear the same story.
That’s not the case.
Prospects need to hear different stories, and as Kaia noted, they need to hear different stories at different points on their journey.
Now, it can be easy to get a little too carried away with story categorization, but the more granular you organize your content internally, the more valuable it can be externally.
It also is a phenomenal way to repurpose content, which I strongly encourage. A prospect looking through your most recent stories related to one program may only get a few months back into your archive. They’ll never see the story from two years ago that directly relates to them, be it their concerns about going to school or their career aspirations.
If you can keep your content organized, you can share that story with them. That way, you’re helping them answer questions they have — sometimes before they even realize they have them.
That’s the power of a story database. It can take time to put together, but it is absolutely worth it!
|
How do you make sure you stay true to your storytelling ideals when you take a new job? I’d love to hear what you think.
|
