How Clients Use Partnerships: Tracking Strategic Priorities
For marketing and communications professionals, each semester can bring anywhere from several hundred to a hundred thousand plus public online mentions about their respective campus. And yet, most marketers only report on the social and news content they produce. That’s not the case for Angela Polec, La Salle University’s Vice President of Enrollment, Marketing, and Communications.
When Angela joined La Salle, she sought to better understand the campus’s brand perceptions, and not just the perception originating from Northwest Philadelphia. But capturing the entirety of La Salle’s online conversation created a new challenge: structure. For most campuses, the majority of online conversation is related to athletics. La Salle, participating at the Division I level, is no exception. The total conversation volume and the makeup of that conversation made it difficult to find the signal through the noise.
Enter Campus Sonar and our segmentation super powers.
La Salle’s Need and Pain Point
From a brand perspective, La Salle needed to increase their understanding of how their audience perceived them. At the individual level, Angela wanted data to inform and support her decision-making and conversations with campus leadership. Additionally, she wanted to build a data-informed foundation to launch new programs and initiatives. That required a strategic approach to social listening with an emphasis on segmenting La Salle’s conversation to match strategic and brand priorities.
The Results
Our ongoing work with La Salle delivers a regular overview of the campus brand, reputation, and audience perspectives. Additionally, we’ve added four critical layers of segmentation into La Salle’s conversation dashboards. By segmenting conversation as owned and earned, the team at La Salle is able to identify important differences in campus conversation at the macro level, and connect with current students and alumni to amplify success stories, turning earned conversation into owned conversation at the individual level.
Knowing that athletics conversation was a driving force for La Salle, we filtered it out of specific dashboard views, helping them more easily spot trends and patterns in their conversation, while ensuring that athletics content reframed to align with their larger brand identity would be included in their analysis.
We then segmented mentions by priority topics and strategic priorities, helping La Salle manage short-term spikes and measure long-term trends in conversation related to the subjects that matter most.
Hear from La Salle University
Angela Polec, Vice President of Enrollment, Marketing, and Communications: “Marketers tend to report in-the-moment metrics from social media such as followers, engagement, and reach so we see what’s working for us and how our posts and our content are performing. If your brand is truly what people say about you, campus marketing leaders should be concerned with how the conversation forms around us, not just from us.”
We’re continuing to feature stories of ways campuses use our Strategic Partnership.
If these use cases resonate with your campus needs, connect with our expert sales team.