Content Strategy/Design

Selling experience with a side of learning

Higher education, and especially post-graduate education, is as much about learning as it is about the experience. Prospective customers, prospective students, are “buying” the promoted experience for the next four (or more) years of their lives, with the added benefit of improving their potential careers.

The examples below are marketing an orthopaedic surgery residency program. Residency and fellowship programs must offer prescribed experiences, defined by accreditation agencies. Consider it a pizza recipe. Even though the ingredients and instructions are essentially the same, differences in quality and quantity result in dozens of variations, from thin crust New York to deep-dish Chicago to West Coast pizzas. Residency and fellowship programs have a similar spectrum, for the same ingredient quality/quantity reasons.

This institution exists in a crowded, highly competitive market. Its brand is middle-market: they do not have the brand-name recognition of the top players.

We level the playing field, as much as possible, with the content strategy outlined below.

Even though this is an education site, the techniques are germane to the full spectrum of content marketing.

My content team for this project, a writer and photographer, produced all of the written and visual content.

I provided the information architecture, explicit content strategy guidance and final copy editing for every page in the site.

Don’t skip the research

This project is informed by prior stakeholder research with school leadership, department chairs and program directors. Stakeholders were in full agreement that the school and department websites should focus on marketing education and training programs, highlight research grants and outcomes and encourage research collaboration.

Stakeholders also identified primary audiences of prospective trainees, prospective faculty and prospective collaborators.

I conducted interviews with this department’s chair, program directors and other leadership to confirm the baseline and determine additional organizational goals. I also asked leadership to identify parallel and aspirational competitors.

I used our existing user research, which included our primary audiences, for this project.

With the stakeholder research, department research, assessment of competitor programs and a comprehensive user mental model, I was able to set the bar for the site content and goals.

Start with the customer (user)

The first premise of all my work is “you are not your user.”

I have lived this aphorism for decades. I first learned it in IT; it became even more profound in developing websites.

No matter how open-minded and experienced you are, you cannot know everyone’s lived experience.

You have to do the work of learning about your customers, the people who will use your products.

I’ve found the path to a successful product is comprehensive understanding of customer and client needs and delivering at the intersection.

My focus on product success requires being a powerful user advocate.

Address the user’s concerns

Based on our user research, using Young’s mental models process, we know the prospective resident’s problem space: the questions, concerns and anxieties they have about the entire match process.

In our sites, we attempt to make part of that process a little less stressful by answering all their questions up front so that when they are interviewed, they can ask intelligent, informed questions.

On a page that could be a prosaic listing of training experiences, we use a photo and caption as a testimonial.

Drill a little deeper and you’ll see what could be dry recitation of clinical experiences is instead presented as an individual’s learning path, with detail about how the prospective will interact with and learn from faculty in the department. All the questions (who, what, why, when, where) are addressed in concrete terms. Our prospective student can see herself in the rotation, learn about where it takes place and, when the time comes for an interview, she isn’t asking basic questions.

The program staff surveys program applicants each year and feedback is consistently positive. Prospectives state that this is the most comprehensive and best orthopaedic residency training program site they experienced in their match process.

You can’t address all concerns and that’s ok.

In this context, those concerns are along the lines of “what will my friends think of me for moving to Buffalo?” We can address misconceptions about Buffalo, sell the city and its surroundings, but there’s not a lot we can do about opinions in a prospective’s peer group.

Talk to one person

For a long time, academic websites were written like learning objectives, couched in third person. “The student will learn…” or “students engage in …” That language is distancing and dehumanizing.

I often recommend second person (you) when there’s no direct action for the reader. Second person positions reader in the content, and by extension an owner/user of the product, service or experience. The orthopaedic residency site is second person as far as the eye can see.

When the experience requires the user to take an action, we prefer to use first person. “Create my account” and “Add to my basket” have higher click-thru rates than the second person alternative (“Create your account,” “Add to your basket”).

Speak as one person

As much as possible and makes sense, I prefer first person plural (we, our) for the product owner. First person demonstrates pride of ownership, authority and accountability: it humanizes content. It helps establish a personal relationship between the company, program director, head of admissions or other figurehead.

In our case, there’s always a person who can act as a virtual tour guide for the website. We present that person right up front and use first person to build that voice in the reader’s head.

Active voice, present tense

We use active voice to engage our readers in a conversation. The reader becomes an actor: it helps them see themselves in our training programs (or as a potential product user or owner).

Passive voice, by comparison, describes things that are done to a person. Few people like having things done to them.

Where possible, we use present tense to describe activities, situations or environments. Present tense puts the reader in the moment. The product, service or experience isn’t in some indefinite future: instead, it is now. Now makes it easier for the reader to picture themselves as an owner/user.

Future tense is appropriate to describe the prospective trainee’s activities and experiences in our training programs. For instance: “You’ll apply what you learn in these practical seminars as you train on-site at your family medicine center.”

At the top of the information architecture is the Message from the Program Director. The program director is the single most important person in a residency program: he or she makes the decisions about who to interview and who to recommend for a match.

We use this page to describe the residency program from his point of view, in his voice. He tells the story of the prospective‘s learning, training and experiences in the program, marketing it directly to the prospective.

Our goal is to establish the voice the prospective ”hears“ throughout is the program director‘s. Every word on every page is not from an anonymous person: it is coming directly from the PD.

In essence, the site becomes a conversion: as the prospective reads through the site, asking questions about specific training opportunities, research, training environments and more, they hear the PD answering ”this is how we‘ll train you to perform specific procedures,” ”here‘s where you‘ll learn how to triage and treat traumatic injuries, in our Level 1 facility,“ and ”you‘ll be fully supported in our program.”

I’ve read a lot of research about how we interact with photos, from academic to in-person eye-tracking studies.

Below are a few examples of how we use content strategy tactics for photos and images.

We look where they look

Don’t waste a good caption

Go low angle for authority

The future looks “right”

Social proof is important

Testimonials (social proof) are effectively reviews. Research by Forrester and Jupiter Research found that 77% of customers read reviews before they make a purchase, so the effort is clearly worth the investment.

Customers respond especially well to testimonials that include the reviewer’s name and photo. Even where the reviewer might not have a photo, platforms often provide a small graphic in its stead.

We use testimonials from current trainees and alumni to allay our prospective’s concerns about the program and provide important, third-party validation.

Turn a limitation into an advantage

I am the final editor for all content in the site. Before launch, I review every page and all the content to ensure we’ve:

• stayed true to our voice
• remained consistent with the university’s overarching brand
• hit all our content strategy points

Once a site is handed over to the local content owner, all publishing requests are routed through our editorial and review process to ensure that content quality is maintained.

But wait, there’s more

Obviously there’s a lot more to content strategy and design than what I’ve discussed on this page: I’m happy to discuss those areas, and more, at length.