And not only within the university. Graduates, professionals in the labor market, are also people with an intensive use of social and digital platforms. Companies and professionals who need to keep up to date with the latest knowledge in their respective areas of work or production.
Continuing education or university professional extension is a response to the educational needs of people in a context of permanent change. But what happens when the university "falls behind" due to the technological gap or other reasons? How can we connect with connected professionals and students to bring the educational offer to them?
With these and other questions in mind, we carried out our work with a prestigious Professional Extension Center. It belongs to an important University in Caracas. The center's managers called us to help them use social networks better and communicate their academic offerings in digital media. We wanted to do this case study, to tell the summary of our story in this project.
The professional extension center: with the mission of facilitating new knowledge.
Customer
The Professional Extension Center is a University department. Its mission is: "to serve individuals and public and private organizations in Venezuela, covering their needs for new knowledge, allowing them to adapt their skills to anticipate and respond to changes in the environment, with a higher value performance in the market." This institution has a wide academic offer of Diplomas, Programs and professional training courses in areas such as Marketing, Finance, Management, Talent Management, among others.
Problem
The emergence of social media and technological gambling data vietnam adoption took many universities by surprise. And they have had to speed up their pace to join in. With more than 15 years of existence, the Professional Extension Center reached Twitter, Facebook and Instagram like the vast majority: learning along the way.
In this process, its academic offering had to be communicated more efficiently to a growing digital audience, in addition to a socio-economic context in which promotional investment in traditional media tends to be prohibitive and the marketing budget is limited.
The challenge when working with the Extension Center was to seek to attract professionals from various areas with needs for updating and training, to communicate to them the available academic offer and to do so in a strategic way.
Solution
The professional extension center carried out a selection of digital marketing companies or agencies, looking for a provider that could support it in its need to publicize its academic offering and its main differentiators. The idea was that the selected agency could collaborate with the internal team, especially in the co-management of social networks and in the creation of content.
The Center selected Mauna Media because they could perceive as a main value, the methodological seriousness in its proposal of a digital marketing strategy, designed to measure, with emphasis on the educational sector and on the mission that the agency itself as well as the University propose to Venezuelan society.
Given the needs raised by the professional extension center team, we designed a digital marketing strategy with an emphasis on social networks, which had the following fundamental pillars:
Using digital media to help achieve the center's mission.
Communicate the academic offering through digital media, providing the audience with valuable content related to said offering.
Transmit the brand's differentiators, as well as the "learning experience" that occurs at the University and is part of the professional outreach culture.
Social Media
Based on the philosophy of Inbound Marketing , we seek to attract a main Buyer Persona on social media: professionals with needs for updating or training in management areas. And who would like the endorsement of a recognized university. With this ideal student in mind, we developed a content strategy targeting the human aspect and the values of the extension center. As well as content that would add value –our own and from third parties–. And not just the mere publication of a course offer.
Unlike Facebook and Instagram, on Twitter we have achieved significant growth in reach and number of followers. This allowed us to identify, among other things, that the professional audience of the center is very "twitter-friendly." They interact more with information about Diplomas, Programs and courses on this platform than on the others. In addition, it is where they ask questions about schedules, costs, etc. This also happens on Facebook, but to a lesser extent.
