Higher ed social media marketing teams often have a diverse group of content creators – from internal teams to students to departments – which inevitably creates challenges in delivering consistent, high-quality content.

Morgan Campbell, Associate Director of Marketing for Mitch Daniels School of Business at Purdue University, is all too familiar with this issue. Purdue recently underwent a complete rebrand, which meant she regularly had to address inconsistent visuals, outdated assets, and fragmented messaging across 50+ social media accounts.

In a recent Social Media Strategies Summit for Higher Ed session, Morgan shared her approach to overcoming these challenges, including how to:

• Audit campus content to identify common problems
• Empower teams and student organizations to stay on-brand
• Provide practical tools like templates, checklists, and content examples

Let’s get into it.

Step #1: Defining Your Brand

Before we dive in, it’s worth highlighting the problem of inconsistent branding.

Before the rebrand, Morgan and her team were managing dozens of accounts, ranging from units to departments to student organizations. It’s safe to say they weren’t exactly 100% aligned on branding, as you can see from these examples:

“There’s no way you can tell this is all from the same school,” said Morgan. “As much as we want to give our partners a creative outlet to share their content on their own platforms, we wanted to make sure that it was still telling the story of our new business school.”

The first step to fixing the problem was to better understand the school’s brand. In tandem with Purdue’s central marketing team, they defined its core brand identity – built around STEM – and set rules around visual elements like typography and color swatches.

“It’s been a huge learning opportunity for our team,” Morgan commented. “We all have to be on the same page and telling the same stories if we are going to look like we’re one unit.”

Step #2: Auditing Existing Accounts and Content

But before the various accounts across Mitch Daniels School of Business could start communicating as one unit, Morgan and her team had to audit their existing marketing materials for consistency.

To start, they looked at their own activities: what accounts were they currently responsible for? Did they align with Purdue’s new branding? And did they make it easy for current and prospective students to find relevant information?

Further reading: Learn more in Your Step-by-Step Guide for Running a Social Media Audit

It soon became clear that there were simply too many official accounts associated with the school – yet those accounts still weren’t covering the full breadth of programs on offer.

The solution was to consolidate their accounts, such as dropping from three Facebook pages to one:

Next, Morgan turned her attention to all the other accounts affiliated with the business school. Fortunately, she didn’t have to do it all alone – she had an intern to help. They used Google and the built-in search tools on each social platform to track down “rogue” accounts, then added them to an Airtable database along with their account status (active, some activity, or inactive).

Having found an account, they’d DM it via Instagram to find out:

• Who’s running the account?
• What is the owner’s email address?
• If it’s a student-run account, who’s going to take it over when they graduate?
• Who has access and permissions?
• How often does it post?
• What was the purpose of the account?

Morgan pointed out that, realistically, you’re not going to track down every account and owner associated with your institution – and that’s fine. “It’s okay if you don’t find them all, but it’s a fun scavenger hunt to look for them.”

Step #3: Empowering Account Owners

To be clear, the purpose of the previous step isn’t to be a buzzkill and tell everyone to stop posting – it’s about providing valuable resources to help account owners create on-brand content every time.

As Morgan put it: “We can empower them to feel they can be part of the brand, while still being able to use their voice and show off what their organization is doing – without us having to micromanage them.”

After reviewing the school’s existing resources, she discovered they already had a range of useful assets, from general guidance on taking a good photo to more specific advice on topics like event photography and running an Instagram takeover.

All they needed was a central hub so people knew how (and where) to find all that valuable information – so they created a dedicated brand page. “It really helped us showcase our new brand, explain it, and have one area where our partners can go for assets and resources.”

Beyond this, they created a style guide that includes the school’s social media strategy and best practices for creating better content.

And if an account holder still needs help, they can simply get in touch with Morgan and her team through a request form that lives on the new brand page and in various people’s email signatures.

Step #4: Helping Accounts Find Their Purpose

One of the big reasons those 50+ accounts associated with the business school felt so disjointed is that they lacked a clear purpose. Without this, account owners would simply copy and paste content everywhere – so their audiences never knew where to turn for information.

The answer came from a framework called “Role, Soul, Goal.”

• Role: The job that the platform plays for you. Is it where you tell your story, recruit, build community, etc?
• Soul: The kind of content that actually works on that platform. Think about tone, format, and energy.
• Goal: The action you want your audience to take. Do you want them to follow you, sign up, show up, or just engage?

Morgan held training sessions and workshops where she ran through “Role, Soul, Goal” with the people running all those accounts. Here’s an example of what the output from this exercise looks like:

Morgan said the process was super valuable in encouraging account owners to truly think about what they wanted to achieve: “It helped them to look at their platforms and say, ‘Here is the intention, we’re not posting just to post.’”

Step #5: Promoting More Intentional Content Creation

Every social media manager recognizes the dread of staring at an empty content calendar.

Rather than panicking about what to post next, Morgan encouraged anyone running a business school-affiliated social account to be more intentional. Specifically, she simplified the content strategy process by thinking in terms of the following eight content buckets:

This helped account owners to prioritize what matters, keep their strategy aligned with the account’s purpose, and generally speed up content planning.

Far from feeling restricted or stressed, Morgan said partners were genuinely bought into the process. “They were interested in learning about our brand and how we operate as not just a standalone team, but as part of a broader strategy.”

Step #6: Looking for Signs of Success

Understandably, Morgan was eager for signs that these resources and best practices were having a noticeable impact on the look and feel of content from the business school.

As well as receiving positive feedback on training sessions introducing the new branding guidelines, she saw an uptick in units proactively requesting guidance and templates.

Significantly, these requests improved content quality. For example, check out these event invites from the school’s Business Analytics and Information Management program – the one on the left was made before Morgan’s training rollout, while the right-hand one came after:

“Seeing it actually applied helped us realize that this is needed and is something they want,” she said.

Step #7: Sustaining Momentum

Of course, there’s no point in going to all this effort, only for the various social media account holders to fall back into old habits a month or two down the line. To avoid this, Morgan took several steps to sustain the early successes, including:

• Building a process for handing accounts over to new owners, including sharing vital information and resources like passwords, brand guidelines, and content calendars.
• Ensuring resources remain easy to find by keeping them in a central hub rather than in scattered folders.
• Creating student “champions” who share best practices with their peers.
• Offering branding refreshers, including short training sessions and check-ins each semester, to maintain alignment.

Plus, she aims to continue auditing the school’s accounts every fall to see who’s active, who’s inactive, and who might need her team’s support.

TL;DR

Morgan wanted higher ed marketers to take away four key learnings from her session:

1. Start with clarity, not control: A clear brand identity gives everyone a shared north star.
2. Empower, don’t police: Tools, training, and simple frameworks help decentralized teams stay aligned.
3. Make strategy easy to use: “Role, Soul, Goal” and content buckets turn brand theory into daily practice.
4. Build for sustainability: Consistency sticks when you build structures that outlast a single workshop.

“A huge thing when we were creating all these different resources was, ‘What’s gonna help in the future?’” she explained. “Make sure the things you give them are evergreen and easy to pass along to the next person who takes over.”

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Featured image by Freepik.