2 October 2026 Gaia Lapomarda
Journal of Experiences
How to plan visibility for a complex brand, reaching diverse audiences through different channels, content, and territories
Telling the story of IED means engaging with a brand that has grown over the years in terms of campuses, disciplines, educational offerings, and target audiences. Founded in Milan in 1966, the European Institute of Design has built an international network in the fields of design, fashion, communication, and the visual arts, while maintaining close ties with the professional worlds for which it prepares its students.
This complexity also extends to the way IED communicates: different audiences have different interests and needs, and require different content, channels, and communication methods. The challenge is to build a recognizable and consistent presence capable of reaching the right people in the most relevant contexts.
We have been working with IED on this complexity for several years. The collaboration began with SEO and content activities and later expanded to social media. Today, we handle the strategy and planning for the visibility of the corporate channels and Italian campuses on Meta and TikTok.
The main goal is to build awareness: to increase knowledge of IED and reach people who may be interested in its offerings, even when they are not yet actively seeking a training program.
Visibility planning
The visibility of content depends not only on what it communicates, but also on who sees it, where, and how often. For this reason, in our work with IED, content distribution is planned with consideration for the disciplines, geographic areas, and diverse audiences the brand targets.
Corporate channels and those of individual campuses have different needs and audiences, which guide our targeting decisions. Starting from this point, we define who to show the content to and analyze reach, frequency, views, interactions, and audience composition to understand how campaigns are performing and where to take action.
The analysis of these results then informs subsequent planning, allowing us to progressively refine our activities and build familiarity with IED among different audiences over time.
TikTok: 100,000 followers in one year
In 2024, we launched IED’s TikTok channel, which reached 100,000 followers in its first year.
Launching on TikTok meant building IED’s presence from scratch on a platform with its own unique language and dynamics. Our work on the channel accompanied the profile’s growth, gradually introducing IED’s content into a new context for the brand and helping to build a dedicated community.
The results of the first twelve months reflect not only the channel’s numerical growth but also IED’s ability to carve out a space and gain recognition on TikTok as well.
Corporate and campuses
Telling the IED story means working on two complementary levels. On the one hand, there is the corporate channel, which provides an overall view of the Institute; on the other, there are the individual campuses, which are closer to their local communities, the people who live there, and their respective educational offerings.
The goal is not to make these channels identical, but to give each its own space while ensuring that IED remains recognizable as a whole. For this reason, we assess on a case-by-case basis where content may be most relevant and what role it can play within the overall communication strategy.
In this way, the corporate and local dimensions can highlight different aspects of the same brand, without overlapping or operating as separate entities.
A sector that evolves alongside people
IED is one of the clients we work with in the world of education, a sector we also observe through research activities dedicated to understanding how students change and how they approach training.
The choice of a course of study is in fact constructed over time, through research, content, comparisons and various points of contact with the institutes. Understanding what people are looking for, what aspects they consider, and what contributes to shaping their perception also allows us to better understand the role of communication in this journey.
It is with this perspective that we also work with IED: not only to build its visibility, but to do so by taking into account how people inform themselves, evaluate alternatives, and orient themselves towards a choice.