Content marketing for higher education: The psychology of the click

Previous posts on higher education content marketing:

1) Using content marketing to support higher education online marketing campaigns
2) Paid interactive marketing—a tactical example of content marketing for colleges
3) Six steps for effectively packaging content you already have 

In my prior blog posts, I’ve discussed using an e-deliverable (e.g., a PDF e-brochure that can be emailed or downloaded) as a content marketing “carrot” in online marketing campaigns, something a prospective student receives in exchange for submitting their contact information on a landing-page form. When discussing these approaches on campus, I often get the question: “Why not just put the e-deliverable PDF link or the content within the e-brochure on the landing page, instead of making it available only following a form submission?”

This is a great question, and in this post I’ll offer two answers to it.

First, you want to ask your respondents to take an action to demonstrate their interest in your institution. This approach is rooted in the marketing psychology that the prospective students who request e-brochures have—without expressly realizing it—increased their emotional commitment to the school. By accepting your offer and completing the form’s required fields, they have entered into somewhat of a “social contract” with your campus.

Put simply, the transaction goes like this:

Step 1: The landing page for your campaign has a call-to-action offering an item (in this example an e-brochure) that provides informational value for the prospective student.

Step 2: The prospective student considers the offer and decides (within just seconds) if they agree it is of potential value to them.

Step 3: They fill in the form, click submit, and then (reasonably) expect that you will complete your part of the transaction and deliver what was offered, consistent with the promises you made in the language of the offer’s call-to-action or the social contract.

This line of marketing thought even goes a few steps further, suggesting that from the first click on a search engine ad through each subsequent click to the landing page or microsite’s top links, the level of subconscious commitment increases.

As you might logically conclude, adherence to this marketing philosophy also then heightens the importance of accuracy when describing the items being offered (an e-brochure, video, infographic, etc.) on the landing page when seeking to entice someone to fill in the form. It is critical that we avoid misleading characterizations of what that content will include—for instance, creating a false promise that your e-brochure answers every question a student could possibly have about attending your campus, paying for college, choosing a career in a certain field, and so on. When we oversell, we risk creating false expectations that then cause the student to feel disappointed or misled when they take the time to explore the e-deliverable and find that it does not match our description of it, thus violating the social contract.

In our work with campus partners on interactive marketing consultations, we nearly always recommend that an e-brochure offer be emailed to a person’s in-box—even if it is made immediately available on the “thank you” confirmation page the student sees after submitting their information.  The reason is we want campaign respondents to have a reminder of the school sitting in a location that will periodically put the campus high on their radar again. And, given that many student email users may have full inboxes, a well positioned subject line and email from name can have a powerful follow-up, residual marketing effect.

I mentioned above that I had two answers to the question: “Why not just put the e-deliverable PDF download link or even the content within the e-brochure offer on the landing page, instead of making it available only following a form submission?”

Put simply, the second answer is that it’s very good practice to test in your own campaigns whether or not “gating” the e-brochure behind the form with the approach described above yields better results than “ungating” it and making it freely available, i.e., without needing to complete a form submission.

This answer will need to serve as a bit of a sneak preview to my next blog post, where I will dig into the measurement aspects of content marketing and how testing the efficacy of gated versus ungated content marketing raises the bar on complex campaign measurement approaches.

Until next time, I invite you to share your questions and opinions in the comments box below, or email me. I also will be discussing how you can get students to those landing pages at a free webinar, Expanding Student Recruitment Through Paid Search and Online Advertising (April 9). I hope you will join me.