Career Center: 6 essential steps to create your communication plan (and maximize your returns quickly)

Knowing how to communicate effectively about the opportunities your career offer provides is crucial to making an impact and achieving results with your community. Here’s how to build your communication plan and achieve your goals:

1. Define your objectives: identify the needs and expectations of your members
2. Targeting the audience: adapting your communication
3. Choose your communication channels
4. Develop your content strategy
5. Plan the distribution of content
6. Evaluate the results

#1 – Define your objectives

What do you want to focus on in your career area? Student guidance, job placement, career development or reorientation?

Defining these goals will allow you to build your plan to truly meet the expectations and needs of your community. This is also the time when you choose what to highlight in your Career Center. Make sure that it is consistent with what you post on your platform!

#2 – Target your audience

Once you have set your objectives, it is now time to consider who you want to reach. This is especially important because you don’t address a student, a recent graduate or an alumni with 10 years’ experience in the industry in the same way. This is the “persona” stage as we say in marketing, an imaginary character representing a target group or segment in the context of a communication campaign for example. Here is an example of an article to help you build your own ?

#3 – Choose your communication channels

Now that you know the topics to be covered and your targets, you need to look at the most relevant communication channels. They will vary according to the persona you have built and their habits.

To remain general, the most effective channels in most cases are:

• Emailing to reach a maximum number of people directly and quickly
• Social networks that allow interaction with your audience and especially the sharing of information
• Events, which are more costly in terms of time and energy, but which guarantee a much stronger commitment

#4 – Develop a content strategy

This is the most important point. By compiling all the data from the previous points, you can now build a list of content to create to achieve your goals.

The key word remains “consistency”. While there is no ideal frequency (as it depends on the channel and the target audience), it is generally recommended to publish regularly to remain visible in an environment where competition for consumers’ attention is strong.

It is therefore advisable to find a balance according to the objectives:

• Social networks: 2 to 3 times a week
• Emailing: maximum once a week, minimum once a month

Here is also a list of content to enhance your career offer:

• Presentation of the services offered by the Career Center: job search training workshops, CV and cover letter reviews, job interview coaching sessions, mentoring…
• Testimonials from former students on the professional opportunities they found through university and how the university helped them in their careers.
• Information on industries and career opportunities in the university’s fields of study
• Presentation of the proposed mentoring programme and the benefits for students of being mentored by experienced professionals
• Invitations to networking events organised by the university
• Presentation of the companies present on the job board
• Directory of former students of the university with their name, field of study and current profession
• Blog posts on current trends in the world of work and how students can prepare for a successful career

We are also partnered with Welcome to the Jungle and provide our partner networks with all their content on life at work ?

#5 – Plan the distribution

There are many tools available for scheduling posts on social networks. These tools allow you to schedule posts in advance, so that they are posted automatically at the times and days you choose, without having to post them manually. This can be particularly useful for organisations that need to publish content regularly on multiple social networks and may not have the resources to do so manually. Popular tools for scheduling social media posts include Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social, and many others.

#6 – Evaluate your results

There are many indicators that can be used to measure the results of a communication plan. These indicators depend on the objectives of the communication and the communication channels used, but some common indicators include:

• The number of views of the website or content published on social networks
• The rate of clicks on the links included in the communications
• Conversion rate (e.g. the percentage of people who buy a product ticket after seeing an invitation to an event)
• Engagement rate (e.g. number of likes, shares or comments on social media posts)
• The number of participants in the events organised as part of the communication plan
• The results of satisfaction surveys or polls conducted among the recipients of the communication

It is important to measure the results of your communication plan in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the various actions implemented and to make adjustments if necessary. This can also be useful for justifying communication investments to the organisation’s decision-makers.