Growing the consortium through Academic Marketing Services.

CareerFocus magazine became a staple of Washtenaw Community College’s marketing strategy during Larry’s tenure as president. Its success soon drew interest from other Michigan community colleges who wanted to emulate its success.

Because community colleges rarely compete for students, Larry realized they had more to gain from sharing content than by operating independently. Accordingly, he began the CareerFocus Consortium as a loose federation of community colleges, united in their mission to grow student enrollment through thoughtful, timely marketing campaigns.

In 2010, the consortium had grown enough that it became necessary to establish Academic Marketing Services to better manage the marketing and production of the CareerFocus magazine, and to create new marketing tools for community colleges.

Academic Marketing Services continued to innovate, developing more targeted content and campaigns while offering an expanded range of digital marketing services to promote CareerFocus. Nevertheless some colleges viewed it as a print magazine only. Therefore we began to consider how to  clarify our customers and better demonstrate the potential of our marketing concepts to community colleges.

Dismantling the Obstacle Course: How Community Colleges Can Use Content Marketing to Help Students Negotiate Enrollment Barriers

Aperture Content Marketing: new brand, same mission.

The addition of SmartStart in 2016, as well as the new EditionBuilder tool for publishing online versions of both SmartStart and CareerFocus content, brought home the need for a rebrand.

Furthermore, SmartStart expanded our vision for which communities might benefit from a shared content strategy. We knew community colleges could share content because they weren’t in competition with each other. However, we also realized there were other organizations that could similarly benefit from a shared content strategy, and that to reach these communities, we needed a more encompassing brand.

Aperture Content Marketing is our response to this shifting need. We hope that by broadening our focus, we can provide content for more communities interested in sharing marketing resources.

Read More About CareerFocus

From print to social media, now you can quickly assemble high-quality, customizable content marketing programs to promote your institution through whatever channels best suit your needs.

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