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:
- Defining your objectives: identify the needs and expectations of your members
- Targeting the audience: adapting your communication
- Choosing your communication channels
- Developing your content strategy
- Planning the publication
- Evaluating the results
#1 - Defining 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 - Targeting 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 for help you build your own ?
#3 - Choosing 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 the majority of 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 - Developing your content strategy
This is the most important point. By compiling all the data from the previous points, you can now make a list of content to create to achieve your goals.
The key word remains "regularity". 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 recommended 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 a list of contents to promote 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 partners with Welcome to the Jungle and provide our partner networks with all their content on life at work?
#5 - Planning the publication
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 - Evaluating 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 click-through rate on links included in communications
- Conversion rate (e.g. the percentage of people who buy a ticket for an event as a result of a communication)
- 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.
