Ideas, insights and inspirations.

2021 is finally here. Here are some of our predictions for this coming year. Covid’s drag on students and colleges will persist at least through the summer. The previous administration’s negative impact on international recruitment will begin to ease. Celebration of diversity will be in vogue again due to continued growth in underrepresented students. Paid media prices will continue their meteoric climb. The absence of high-school travel and standardized test-takers will continue. Due to economic uncertainty, the decline in number of high school graduates enrolling in college immediately after high school will continue. In this time of volatile change, here is our advice for higher education marketers to overcome the challenges and make the most of emerging opportunities: 1. Celebrate Diversity Gen-Z and Millenials are race-blind, faith-blind and gender-blind. As part of the most diverse generation in U.S. history, they take diversity for granted. They accept, not just respect, others for who they are – irrespective of their race, religious … Continue reading

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At last count, more than 1,100 colleges have gone test optional. This translates to fewer names that ACT can sell to colleges for marketing. As Included below are 12 proven strategies for increasing enrollment in your your college if you can’t rely on buying names of prospective students: 1. Abandon traditional student search models. Hunt like sharks. Don’t feed like whales. The era of buying prospects names, spamming them, seeing who sticks, and praying some convert is over. Embrace new methodologies based on right-fit, micro-segments, look-alikes, machine learning, big-data algorithms and affinity groups. Think right-fit, admission pipes and inverted admissions funnels, not traditional admissions funnels. 2. Energize influencers, referral networks and reliable feeders. Wholesale student streams provide a solid foundation upon which you build retail recruitment. 3. Befriend corporate and government HR & Training leaders. Many corporations and government organizations use provision of advanced degrees as a retention tool. It behooves the enrollment officers to be the provider of choice … Continue reading

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Top performing higher education marketing agencies help their clients deploy the following best practices: 1. You become the story you choose to tell. It’s how institutions make meaning from the arc of their history, and operate with a sense of destiny to create purpose that propels them into the future. This story is what students, parents, donors, funders and partners buy into. A brand rarely exceeds the size of its ambition. 2. Students, not the institution, are the real heroes of your story. Colleges and universities are generative when they feed their students’ passions to enable them to realize their personal hero’s journey. 3. Invest in brand. Speak with one brand voice. Know your core promise, values, ideals, distinctions and what you stand for. Articulate your brand value cheerfully irrespective of whether you are a liberal arts college, STEM university, research powered, experiential brand, college of access, online educator or an integrative brand. Speak with one brand voice to all … Continue reading

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College marketing and communications teams increasingly look to boost video teams and budgets. All well and good, but we should not overlook the enduring value and impact of your still image library. It’s easy to grow complacent and assume that last year’s photos will meet this year’s needs. It’s tempting to hire less qualified photographers, and to cram too many shots into a long day of shooting. Here are 5 Quick Tips on how to build, maintain and mature your campus photo library. Frequency: Many college photo libraries grow stale without anyone noticing. If you want to maintain a viable collection of photos, plan on four, two-day shoots each year. Story needs and brand understanding change — as do seasons, fashion, hair, and the campus environment. You will need to schedule multiple shoots each year for photos to keep pace. Quality: Staff photographers spend so much time shooting grip-and-grin, raise-a-glass campus events that few have time to hone their editorial POV … Continue reading

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Admission numbers are trickling in. Highly selective and less selective colleges are both missing their enrollment targets. We believe that enrollment VPs and college presidents ought to be examining their shared, but ineffective habits, instead of blaming the usual suspects: unfavorable demographics, increased sensitivity to the rising cost of college, society questioning the overall value of a college degree, reduction in international student applicants, and students applying to multiple colleges. Not that these forces can be ignored, but the real test of leadership for enrollment leaders is to claim an outsized share of an uncertain and dwindling market. In our view, Enrollment professionals share, and must break, the following ineffective habits: 1. Buying names of high school seniors and juniors instead of cultivating names of right-fit prospects. Instead of attracting right-fit prospects with inspired marketing, they are employing tired enrollment tactics from firms who buy names in large numbers, then throw commoditized direct mail/email at prospective students, hoping to snare a … Continue reading

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Enrollment managers at colleges and universities are running a machine. Whether it has a soul or not depends on the mindset they bring to their jobs. The most admired enrollment managers are running a humanized enrollment system. In serving more than 100 enrollment managers, we have gleaned the following best practices: 1. Balance Institutional Priorities and the Greater Good. Create a healthy school culture by enrolling the best-fit students. Honor institutional priorities by enrolling legacy students, full-pay students, donor students, athletes and other priority students. Create a sustainable society by recruiting and providing support for both under-served and under-represented students. 2. Invest in First Impressions. Brand your college because in the sea of sameness, brands win. Speak with one brand voice to all audiences striking different notes for each audience segment. Tell a better story. Fortify every touch point – including websites, social media, open houses, information sessions, grounds, classrooms, tours, and admissions office décor. Celebrate your star students, alumni … Continue reading

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Every year, a silent, high-stakes dance takes place in all the 4,000+ colleges and universities in the US. To meet their enrollment targets, the colleges look for the best-possible group of students who will apply, and then accept the offers extended to them. Lead generation with College Student Search is the first step in this ritual dance with a singular objective: to generate an initial list of best-fit, most-likely-to-apply-and-subsequently-accept high school students. Like everything else in enrollment management, digital has disrupted the traditional College Student Search: Traditional College Student Search Campaigns – Buy A Large Set of Names and Whittle The List Down This was the textbook strategy for student search. Enrollment professionals bought tens of thousands of prospective student names from various sources – at a price ranging from 20 to 40 cents per name. Then they sent them a series of emails and direct mail pieces with the hope of getting some of them to raise their hands … Continue reading

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Former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight famously said to an audience of newspaper reporters, “All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.” Part joke, part poisoned-tipped joust, the heralded Knight voiced an ambivalence about writing and writers that lingers within many college marketing departments and their creative agencies. Entire blog columns and books have advanced the notion that “content is king.” That idea  traces to an 1996 essay by Microsoft founder Bill Gates who envisioned an Internet buoyed by fresh, enlivening content. Google Ngram shows that phrase rocketing straight into conventional wisdom. One could argue the theory, but the eye test says otherwise — the vast seas of web content carry mostly ephemera. My first digital assignment — a 155-character meta description — began my re-education in a new hyper language, one that promised greater speed and potency. As newspaper writers, we learned a seven-second rule — the average … Continue reading

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As a leading enrollment marketing services agency in the country, clients have often asked us to share our best practices. Here they are: 1. Start with Strategy: We prioritize and always lead with strengths. We don’t try to be democratic. We bet on champion and star programs. We let the star programs create prosperity to sustain others. 2. Surround and Engage Prospects: Depending on client’s target audiences and budget, we smartly allocate budget between traditional and digital channels so prospects see our clients at every turn. 3. Game Plan for Every Stage of Admissions Funnel: We know what prospects need at every stage of the admissions funnel, and cater to their needs. 4. Create a SEO Keyword Guide: We rely on the SEO Keyword Guide to inform all our content creation. The Keyword Guide consists of keyword clusters in various buckets. 5. Fix Your Website: We know that a website is a conversion machine or your #1 lead and application … Continue reading

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Marketing ROI formula is easy enough: However, working with higher education clients for more than two decades has made it clear to us that calculating marketing ROI is challenging, especially in our current era of media fragmentation, device proliferation, and tight marketing budgets. Four reasons why: Unrealized Attribution of Incremental Gains to Marketing Efforts: Pinpointing a prospect-to-enrolled conversion to a specific marketing tactic is hard because a conversion may be the result of multiple marketing stimuli spread out over multiple marketing channels over a period of few years. Multi-touch and multi-channel lead attribution models, though available in the form of sophisticated software tools, are not well understood, are difficult to implement, and are simply unaffordable for a majority of colleges. Thus, connecting the dots across a campaign’s multiple components is next to impossible. Inadequate Support for Source Tracking: The next best alternative to attribution software is to deploy simple source tracking, where source-of-lead signals are passed from digital touch points … Continue reading

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