Developing a successful content strategy with a small team and budget

Leading a small marketing team and budget can be difficult, but with a little creativity, strategy and resourcefulness, you can still see some impressive results. In the summer of 2021, the small marketing team at the Michigan State University College of Nursing created its ‘Neighborhood Nurses' series to spotlight students and alumni practising in their hometowns. Despite occurring during an ongoing, worldwide pandemic, the campaign, which shared why these nurses chose to go back to their hometowns to practise, significantly increased web traffic to the college website, generated nearly a quarter of a million reach on paid social, injected positivity during a trying time for those in the healthcare industry and helped the university's government relations team meet one of its goals. The multi-channel content marketing strategy featured written stories, videos, graphics, photo galleries, webpages and more over the course of a seven-week campaign, which ran through the summer and up until the beginning of the autumn admissions cycle and focused both on the subjects and their hometowns. All of this was done on a budget of roughly US$5,500 and a team of 2.5 marketing-communications employees. This paper analyses the result, which was that the marketing team was able to embark on future campaigns and even saw an increase in marketing budget and team size due to its successes and senior leadership's new, larger goals.