A practical playbook for promoting your academic program
Whether you’re launching a new academic program or looking for new ways to promote an established one, you don’t have to start your marketing plan from scratch.
Academic Affairs Marketing’s Program Promotion Playbook brings together practical ideas, resources, and marketing opportunities that academic units can use to build awareness of their programs. How you use it depends on where your program is today.
For new programs, the playbook is part of AAM’s broader new program consultation process, designed to help establish a strong foundation for launch and ongoing promotion. For existing programs, it can provide a fresh look at current marketing efforts and help identify new opportunities worth pursuing.
Launching a new program? Start with a strong foundation
For new academic programs, AAM works with units through three consultations that establish the program’s web presence and help create a practical approach to promotion:
- Degree Search: We’ll work with you to develop student-centered content that explains what your program offers, what makes it distinctive, and where it can take students.
- Your in.nau.edu program page: We’ll help you determine what additional program content belongs on your academic website and how it can complement—not duplicate—Degree Search.
- Marketing consultation: In a one-hour meeting, we’ll walk through the Program Promotion Playbook with you, discuss your audiences and goals, and identify marketing opportunities that make sense for your program.
Together, these pieces help ensure students have strong, useful program information to discover while giving your unit a practical starting point for promoting the new program.
Promoting an existing program? Take a fresh look
You don’t need to be launching something new to use the Program Promotion Playbook.
An established program may have different reasons for revisiting its marketing. Enrollment goals may have changed. New faculty, research, facilities, partnerships, or student opportunities may not be getting much visibility. Or your unit may simply want to move beyond the promotional tactics it has relied on in the past.
The playbook gives you an opportunity to step back and assess what you’re already doing, explore other possibilities, and identify strategies that could strengthen your approach.
AAM can also meet with your unit for a one-hour marketing consultation to review the playbook together, talk through your program, audiences, and goals, and help you identify opportunities worth pursuing.
Find the strategies that fit your program
Whether your program is new or established, the Program Promotion Playbook isn’t a checklist—and you don’t need to tackle every idea in it.
Instead, think of it as a menu of possibilities. The playbook can help you explore opportunities such as strengthening your program’s web presence, sharing student and faculty stories, optimizing email and social media, connecting with prospective students through events and outreach, building partnerships, and identifying other channels that can help extend your reach.
During a marketing consultation, we’ll review those opportunities together and talk about what’s realistic for your program based on the resources you have available—including time, budget, and who will own and carry out the work.
The goal is to leave with a manageable set of next steps—not a longer to-do list.
Whether you’re preparing to introduce a new program or finding new ways to build awareness of one that’s been around for years, the Program Promotion Playbook can help you focus your efforts on what makes sense for your program, your audience, and your resources.