Marketing your Wisr Site

Marketing Your Wisr Site

Almost as important as your program design, creating marketing plans will ensure you are communicating the value of your Wisr platform in order to give your community multiple reasons why they should use your site. The team at Wisr has templates and examples to supplement your efforts, but a successful marketing effort involves planning and partnership. The best marketing is multi-channel, drawing on a variety of delivery methods to convey relevant and personalized messaging. 

Personas

Before jumping into “how”, your marketing plan should begin with “who”. Create marketing personas for each of the member types you would like to invite to your site. A marketing persona is a sketch or archetype for a segment of your audience. At the minimum, a persona should include background and demographic information, common traits, goals, and objections you may encounter. Using your existing data and knowledge in each of these areas will position you to understand what your prospective, current students, and alumni really want, and how to effectively market a new app to them. Wisr has templates for this work and can lead your team through a conversation about your site’s audience.

Messaging

After you have completed your personas, it is time to create messaging that is focused on the value that users will receive from joining a new platform and give your audience a reason to take action. When describing the community, it is more compelling to explain why joining a community is important, why they should invest time into signing up and using it, and how you are addressing their needs. These elements are more engaging than simply saying what the network is or describing its features.

Wisr has created a full library of assets and resources you can use to market your Wisr site.

Planning and Timelines

In addition to messaging, developing three or more months of engaging content will offer a variety of ways that potential new users will find value, thus allowing you to resist the temptation to preload a ton of new content right away. Offering content is the key to getting users to open messages, complete profiles, and become highly engaged on your site. By outlining content that you will either re-imagine or create, you will be able to ensure you’re feeding your community as it begins to grow. It will be difficult to do this in real time while launching, and campus partners are more likely to contribute with a plan. We’ve created a helpful article on Sourcing and Creating Content as well as a calendar template to track your plans.

As you get started on your marketing campaign, it will be important to consider the timeline given your site’s purpose. Many customer’s use Wisr to manage a program on a restricted timeline, like Enrollment Yield or Orientation, where the goal will be to get the vast majority of users on your site very quickly. Other use cases, like launching an Alumni and Students Professional Network, will be a much longer initiative and marketing can be dripped over an extended period of time. You can choose how aggressive your marketing strategies need to be depending on your use. Your Customer Success Associate can be a really helpful advocate in determining what makes the most sense for your Wisr instance.

Channel Inventory

Your marketing plan should use all possible channels you have at your disposal. In addition to custom emails and newsletters, consider social media, texting, and potentially even print. Develop a list of platforms that you control as well as campus partners who can distribute your content through their channels. Use our checklist to help identify different marketing channels and our templates can serve as a starting place for you to talk about the platform.

Get Excited

Part of your plan should be to generate buzz before you go live, which includes outreach to your influencers (or best advocates). Having these people on board before launch will help with word of mouth, endorsing your platform, and unlocking their network. Wisr team members can conduct a community leader training to build comfort with using the site while giving your VIPs a preview.

Sending Invitations

Some customers choose to have Wisr deliver email marketing to manage the invitation process for new users, using their pre-verification codes and sending automated reminders to users who have not joined as part of a drip marketing campaign. In addition, schools should consider the following channels to build a successful launch:

• Emails from familiar university email addresses or staff
• Social media
• School website
• Events
• Classroom/faculty networks
• Text campaigns
• Individual outreach

Exclusive Launch Experience

After you’ve done all the hard work of planning, there is one final step before you go live. Consider using or developing a premium piece of content that will give your community something they can’t afford to miss. This can add another sense of urgency for your users to create their profiles and start interacting for fear that they will miss out on a great opportunity. This tactic works well to create an initial mass of users and ensures a positive first experience with the new platform.

For launch, consider re-purposing or creating:

• A welcome video for each member type
• A website or article for your students and alumni to learn more
• Exclusive events that are housed inside your site, which will require a profile to access