Old blog. New branding.

No content strategy.

Savannah College of Art and Design—located in Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia; Lacoste, France; and Hong Kong—offers many degrees for creative careers. The university blog, previously called “Thread,” was managed within the public relations and marketing department. I joined the team as a PR writer shortly after the blog’s managing editor left the company.

As the department busied itself with promoting one of the university’s biggest signature events, the blog sat idle. It was undergoing a rebranding, but no new content was being created. Knowing how valuable a marketing asset a blog can be, I volunteered to take over its management. With the blog's relaunch under a new name, I built a content strategy more closely integrated with the department’s overall marketing efforts.

Client

Savannah College of Art & Design

Brand

SCADworks

Timeline

Aug. 2015 - May 2017

Challenge

The university blog needed a content strategy to reflect its new image and reach a wider audience. With the previous managing editor gone and no strategic documentation left behind, I had to start from scratch and collaborate with the social media team to determine what content would drive the most engagement. Additionally, I had to fill the role of managing editor by writing, soliciting, and editing articles from other writers.

Result

The content and guiding strategy I created contributed to a 63% increase in blog content from 2014-2015 to 2015-2016, resulting in a 10% increase in traffic. Additionally, the department permanently adopted my method of documenting analytic data analysis as a standard reporting procedure.

Eight years after its inception, the foundational content strategy I built is still in use.

Process

1. Redefine Purpose and Target Audience

The purpose of SCAD’s blog had always been to serve the larger marketing goals of the university related to expanding brand awareness and recruiting prospective students. For a fresh approach to these goals, I recommended redefining the blog’s target audience. In addition to appealing to high school students, the content should appeal to their parents by highlighting both the student and alumni experience unique to those attending SCAD.

2. New Categories, New Content

With a new audience established, the next task was to develop a content strategy to reach them. The first step was to define what topics would have the most appeal to prospective students and their parents. From that list, I came up with six categories for the blog to focus on: alumni, recognitions, events, faculty, students, and insights.

These categories allowed a high degree of flexible options for providing value to readers while still aligning with the university’s marketing goals. To further increase the blog’s effectiveness, I created a rigorous editorial calendar to publish 2-3 new articles every week. This was made easier by batch-producing and scheduling evergreen content, including the weekly “5 Things I Learned at SCAD” alumni feature series I created.

3. Reporting

Following every signature event, the PR and Marketing department needed a thorough analysis of their marketing strategy. Prior to my employment, there was no standard for this analysis and no long-term records were kept. Using my weekly blog and social media analytics reports as the framework, I established a new standard “coverage report” for recordkeeping and analysis.

These reports included all mentions and citations by major media outlets and high-profile social media accounts, including their print circulation, unique monthly online visitor data, and social media follower metrics. These coverage reports combined the collective efforts of all the department’s branches into a condensed document used for presentations to the university president and year-over-year comparison. Key performance indicators were determined in close collaboration with the vice president of PR and Marketing. In addition to compiling and formatting this data into an attractive document, I provided written analysis to interpret the data for effortless understanding.