You’re talking to yourself, not the student

You understand what you’re saying. Your colleagues understand it. But does the 15-year-old reading your website?

It’s a question I come back to regularly when working with education providers on their content.

Having spent many years in education marketing, I understand how it happens. A course page starts with information from curriculum, marketing edits it, different colleagues add their requirements. It goes through approval, perhaps several times until eventually everyone is happy.
But somewhere in that process, the person it was written for can get lost.

The information might be accurate. It might cover everything the college wants to say. Yet a prospective student can finish reading it (if they even get that far) and still be unsure whether the course is right for them or whether they even understood it all.

Knowing the sector can make it harder to see the problem

When you work in education, the terminology becomes second nature. Progression pathways, qualification levels, employer engagement, industry-standard facilities, Ofsted outstanding, cutting-edge, word class ….we’ve heard it all and probably said it all. But what does it mean? And does it matter to your prospects?
“Excellent progression opportunities” sounds positive, but where could they actually go?
“Industry-standard facilities” tells them very little about what they’ll get to use and wouldn’t they expect your facilities to be industry standard as a given?
Even “practical learning” could do with an explanation of what they’ll spend their time doing.
This is where content development needs to go further than tidying up sentences and formatting.
We need to make the information meaningful to someone who doesn’t already understand the institution, the subject or the qualification and why they should do it.

What is the prospect trying to find out?

A prospective student might arrive on a course page wondering:

• Will I enjoy this?
• What will I actually do?
• Do I need to be good at it already?
• What could it lead to?
• What happens if I don’t get the grades?
• Will I fit in?
• Will I meet people like me?

Some of those questions are practical. Others are harder to ask out loud.

If we only describe the qualification, we leave a lot unanswered. And if we lead with how impressive the college is, we’re asking the reader to work out the relevance for themselves.

Take a phrase such as “strong employer partnerships”. A prospect needs to understand what those relationships could mean for them. Will they work on a brief from a local business? Visit a workplace? Hear from someone doing the job they’re considering? Build a network? Find a graduate job?

Where those opportunities are genuinely part of the course, describe them. Give the reader something they can picture, something they can connect with.

Content has a job to do

In my Marketing Made Human presentation, I ask people to consider what they want their audience to think, feel and do.

It’s a useful check for education content.
A course page might need someone to think, “I understand what this involves.”
Feel, “I could see myself doing that.”
And then take a next step, whether that’s exploring the course further, booking an open event or applying.
That means looking at the whole page. The opening words, the order of information, the photographs, the videos, the student stories and the next steps all matter.

A student explaining what helped them settle in can answer a question that a photograph of a building never will. A short film showing a practical session can make the experience clearer than another paragraph about facilities.

The choice of content should follow the question we need to answer.

This is why we start with understanding

Much of our work with education clients involves getting beneath the existing content.Who is it for?

• What do they already know?
• What are they unsure about?
• What might stop them taking the next step?

We bring that understanding into the structure, the tone of voice, the writing and the creative brief. We also work with the people who know the courses, so the content stays accurate and reflects what students can genuinely expect.

We know the pressures marketing teams are under. Content often has to be developed alongside campaigns, events, recruitment deadlines and everything else happening that week. An external perspective helps you step back and notice the assumptions that have become familiar.

Before you approve your next course page, try reading it as someone encountering the subject for the first time.

• Can you picture what you’ll do?
• Do you understand where it could take you?
• Do you know what to do next?

If those answers are difficult to find, that’s where the work starts.