Transformational marketing on a budget: ensure your institution wins even with limited resource

This course is only available to premium members of ContentEd+. For just £1,999 per year your institution will get access to this CPD course and a whole online learning platform of many many more excellent resources.

You can add as many colleagues as you wish to your institutional premium plan, making it one of the most cost-effective CPD and training solutions available for content, communications and marketing professionals in the education and skills sector.

What you will learn…

Week 1: 
Creating a winning brand narrative fast

When we all look and sound the same, we aren't creating the conditions to stand out and win. This module is not about leading an entire brand strategy or redesign, but instead looking at the narrative positioning and changes that you can make at pace to really make your brand stand out immediately. 

• What makes a distinctive brand narrative?

• Generating yours at speed using agile development techniques

• Identifying what you can change and prioritise for the greatest impact

• Creating a simple framework and toolkit to have distributed content owners embrace the narrative and embed the change in their content.

Week 2: 
Embracing organic content marketing

The days of relying on big advertising spends are over. Digital algorithms and click-farm activity are causing significant wastage in precious marketing budgets spent on advertising. With a marketing-savvy audience, and with limited resources, smart organisations are investing their resources into organic content marketing. 

• How does content marketing differ from traditional marketing?

• Impactful SEO and email marketing tactics

• Embracing social media advocacy to generate organic reach

• Building trust with audiences by creating useful and usable content, and sharing relatable stories that have them feel understood.

Week 3:
Prioritise like a pro

In week 4 we'll show you how to train a custom AI assistant to help you create more with less. But even with all the help in the world from emerging technologies you will still win by making some clear decisions about how to prioritise your time - and sticking to them. This week we'll consider what to prioritise and how to build the confidence to say no. 

• Stop people pleasing and overcome the fear of saying no

• Building prioritisation criteria and a framework for your organisation

• Prioritisation by assessing effort and impact

• Enrolling stakeholders and senior leaders in your prioritisation plan, and dealing with dissenters and naysayers who might try to overrule you. 

Week 4: 
Building a custom AI assistant to ideate and create high quality content for your organisation

NOTE: This week also deliberately coincides with our AI in practice online conference. We highly recommend that you attend, benefitting from your premium member discount. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are available at our fingertips, ready to support us to become far more efficient and productive. Their timing couldn't be better as we're asked to operate with limited resources. In this module we'll take you through the process of building an on-brand AI content marketing assistant in a way that is effective and ethical. 

• What is an AI content marketing assistant?

• Creating prompts for free generative AI tools that ensure ideation sessions and content created is on brand for your institution

• Building a customGPT or custom workflow tool to create even more powerful AI content marketing assistants for your institution

• Using AI ethically and responsibly.

Week 5:
Measuring impact and iterating on your approach

You're going to want to know what's working and what's not. This can be done through digital reporting tools, building custom dashboards, and seeking audience feedback on your approach. In this module we'll explore how to measure how well it's working, how to iterate on your approach, and how to report on your progress to others.

• Changing our perceptions of "success", shifting from metrics that focus on quantity to those that evidence quality of engagement

• Designing goals and approaches with measurement in mind

• Iterating on ideas that aren't quite driving the results you hope for

• Reporting and sharing the impact of your work with others.

Week 6:
Managing overwhelm and avoiding burnout

When you’re being asked to do more with less resource, or even the same amount of work with less resource, overwhelm is a very high risk. But overwhelm and burnout aren’t just caused by being busy or overworked. They can equally be caused by the pressures that we put on ourselves, needs not being met, or just the mental exhaustion from having to be “always-on”.

• How to spot overwhelm and burnout in ourselves and others

• How to get ahead of ourselves with our ways of working and having our needs met so that we don’t burnout

• Prioritising team wellbeing and self care when the pressure is on

• Developing the capacity, resilience and tolerance to work with senior leaders who are exhibiting signs of overwhelm and burnout.