Ideas, insights and inspirations.

Olds College of Agriculture & Technology sits in the center of Alberta, at the northern edge of North America’s Wheat Belt, a vast swath of the Great Plains. The school’s Smart Agriculture Ecosystem — with labs, 3,600 acre Smart Farm and researchers — plays an outsized role in advancing a range of digital agriculture innovations designed to sustain Canada’s position as one the world’s largest agricultural producers and exporters.

The Olds College leadership team turned to Elliance to translate a new public-facing name and brand position into a full website relaunch focused on clear business goals:

  • Grow the number, geographic reach and diversity of its prospect pool.
  • Increase research funding, industry partnerships, major gift donors.
  • Leverage digital content as a catalytic force to secure non-branded, organic page one Google rankings

The Elliance website team prioritized the following site features and outcomes:

  • Transform oldscollege.ca from a quiet enrollment website into a true digital content platform and conversion machine, capable of expanding the reach and impact of Olds College of Agriculture and Technology across enrollment, reputation building and fundraising.
  • Animate oldscollege.ca (design, video, photography, brand voice) with verve and confidence to match the school’s new brand declaration — Break New Ground.
  • Change outdated perceptions of Olds as a regional ag college and amplify the sprawling research portfolio, faculty and facilities to supercharge the persuasive draw of the school’s innovative programs.
  • Use the power and flexibility of digital communication to sew together a more coherent articulation of Olds College of Agriculture and Technology as a dynamic, seasonally-rich, life-changing place, far greater than the sum of its disparate acreage and parts.
  • Amplify the school’s name recognition and voice across provincial, national, and global influencers.

The oldscollege.ca website was launched last spring. Transformation has begun. Recognitions have already started coming in. Recently, it was ranked #4 amongst Canada’s top 50 research colleges, #2 in college research intensity, #8 for college research income growth. In the small tier college category, Olds College made the top 10 for research partnerships and paid student researchers, and is number 11 for completed research projects.

Research Infosource Inc. also featured a five-year college spotlight on industry research income from 2018 to 2022 which highlights Olds College’s continued research success. Olds College ranked in the top five for industry research income and industry research income growth, as well as the top 10 for industry research income as percentage of total college research income.

More to come. Stay tuned.

If you are seeking a higher education marketing agency or a college website design agency, please see our work and consider partnering with us.

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Website projects are huge undertakings. What ultimately matters is not the effort you put into them but the return-on-investment you derive from it. Making a business case for investing in a comprehensive website redesign to bottom-line-driven, quant-minded manufacturers requires hard-nosed, disciplined thinking.

Remember that what you invest in a new website design will determine the returns you can expect from it. Assuming you have baked all the best practices into a redesign project, you can and should expect solid returns. Here are five ROI metrics that we have used to justify the investment in a comprehensive website redesign:

1. Increase in Inquiries and RFQ’s: Website projects should always result in quantifiable increase in inquiries and RFQs. For clients who have been re-packaged as solutions providers, the thickness of their RFP’s should grow in size. All clients should expect to see an increase in PDF downloads and event signups.

By elevating your brand during a website redesign, the increases should not just come from bottom feeders for low-margin products, but from right-fit clients for higher-margin prospects in highly-coveted markets.

2. Reduction in Time to Sale: Effective manufacturing websites surround and engage the prospective buyers at every stage of the decision funnel with unique content. They accelerate sales by building brand awareness and early brand preference during the education/awareness stage, reinforcing the brand during the consideration stage, and providing brand reassurance during the decisioning phase. As a result of these efforts, they should experience a reduction in sales cycles.

3. Stronger Keyword Rankings: Baking search engine thinking into every phase of redesign enhances a website’s Google rankings. This should result in a measurable growth in number of keywords on Google page 1, increase in organic traffic, increase in non-branded traffic and expansion in geographic reach. The result should be an increase in number of inquires and RFQ’s originating from search engines, and an increase in number of inquires and RFP’s for higher-margin solutions. You should expect to see an increase in search engine traffic by 25% to 30%. The lowest ROI we have delivered is 5X, and the highest a whopping 100X.

4. Strengthened Brand Awareness: Since industrial website redesign projects typically fortify both products/services and career development resources, they result in an increase in the number of products and job listings ranked on Google page 1. As a result, manufacturers enjoy expanded geographic footprint, expansion into new markets, and a reduction in recruitment costs. Over the years, we’ve delivered on all these fronts.

We track and create a trend line of number of times the brand name surfaces and is clicked on search engine results pages using Google search console data. Our SEO/Inbound clients should expect this to grow upwards year-over-year.The non-branded to branded organic traffic ratio should rise over time. For most of our clients this ratio begins around 20/80 or 30/70 and rises all the way up to 60/40 or 70/30. Occasionally, it rises up to 80/20 and 90/10. We’ll monitor organic search volume over time by measuring the organic traffic as a percentage of overall website traffic trended over time. We expect this to grow upward year-over-year for all our clients.

5. Increase in Revenue:  Since industrial website redesign projects increase the number of keywords ranked on Google page 1 and the overall brand impressions, the manufacturer’s geographic footprint invariably expands to new markets and new geographies. Great websites increases sales. They have created order backlogs for our industrial clients, whether they are an e-commerce client or RFQ-based. For the clients we’ve packaged as solutions providers, they have all enjoyed growth in their average order size and profitability.

Beyond the quantitative ROI, we have observed that website redesign projects are a catalyst for transforming a manufacturer, liberating new prosperity and realizing destiny. A great website redesign project energizes the entire corporation, and creates a new corporate inflection point.

Contact us if you are seeking a smart manufacturing marketing agency which can help you join the elite group of manufacturers and industrial companies growing their company’s share of mind, voice and market using our website design services.

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Today, more than any other touch point, a website is the digital soul of an organization. As one of Pittsburgh’s longest standing manufacturing website development agencies, Elliance has been delivering prosperity to regional and national industrial companies for the past 30 years. Our arsenal of website development best practices includes:

1. Start With a Smart Strategy and Plan

Revenue Strategy, Communication Strategy and Search Engine Ranking Strategy are the three pillars of a smart manufacturing website development strategy. Bake each of them into every stage of website development.

A good website development project begins with a thoughtful plan. Map out and outline all of these facets up-front:

  • Ambitious goals and objectives – for inquiries, revenue, communications and search engine
  • Target audiences – buyers, influencers, specifiers and talent of all ages you plan to recruit
  • Requirements and needs – for users (stated and unstated), business, content administrators
  • Content strategy – in service of delighting each target audience
  • Specifications – for user experience and interactive elements
  • Functional requirements – including a system of calls-to-action
  • Merchandising approach – for selling, cross-selling and up-selling of products and services
  • Integration requirements – with analytics, marketing automation and third-party applications
  • User experience requirements – including design, progressive disclosure, and navigation system
  • SEO strategy – infusing keywords in every phase to ensure Google and Bing page one rankings are secured
  • Domain architecture – for the primary website and potential campaign landing pages
  • Content-migration and URL redirects – retaining your past SEO rankings and building upon them

Despite all the planning, be prepared for some surprises along the way such as with third-party integrations and new requirements surfacing midstream.

Aim higher to meet the needs of more digital savvy users.

2. Make it Easy to Use for Content People

Content people naturally don’t have sufficient programming know-how. They are looking for easy to use, point-click-and-type interfaces on their website platform. They want the ability to view content as the website user would experience it before publishing. They want the ability to roll-back if the need arises. A sound website platform should support workflows, access control lists (ACL), the ability to create a smart page builder, create-once-publish-everywhere capabilities and development-staging-production environments.

Delight content people.

3. Make it Beautiful

Strategy is invisible. Good design makes it visible.

There is a generational change of guard underway that is affecting manufacturing. Boomers are retiring and Gen-Xers, Millennials and Gen-Zers are taking over. This is true for both industrial buyers and young talent they are trying to recruit. Manufacturers can’t expect these people to buy into or buy from a company with a tired, old manufacturing aesthetic. Younger buyers and talent are increasingly digitally savvy. To appeal to them, manufacturing websites should consider incorporating nature-inspired organic forms, cool digital design, and interactive energy. They need to convey manufacturing expertise backed by thought-leadership and a quiet, confident modernity.

Milton Glaser, the iconic designer, once said “There are only three reactions to a piece of design: no, yes or WOW! Wow is one to aim for.” We couldn’t agree more.

4. Appeal to Strategic Buyers, Tactical Buyers and Influencers.

Smart manufacturing marketers realize that not all customers are born equal. New websites are focused on converting both high-margin strategic buyers and an emerging generation of tactical buyers. Along the way, they must persuade the influencers also.

Increasingly, buying is a committee decision. Meet the needs of all members of this comittee.

5. Build Critical Features

Here are some smart features worth considering offering to your smart engineering-minded buyers:

  • Product catalog and services – as a quick reference to your offerings
  • Custom solutions – to facilitate higher-margin, complex sales
  • Project galleries – to showcase your solutions in action
  • Markets served – to reduce buyer’s risk of buying from you
  • Customer stories, testimonials and third-party validations – again to reduce their risk of buying from you
  • Auto-complete site search – to give quickest path to your products and services to repeat buyers
  • Faceted search – to show depth and breadth of product (and service) offerings
  • Configurators – to engage your buyers
  • Resource center – to provide convenient access to all your brochures and spec sheets
  • Blog – to convey product and thought leadership, and fresh content to feed the Google and Bing bots
  • Customer portal – to enable customers to find answers to routine questions about their past purchase history, warrantees, add-ons, and a whole lot more
  • Multi-language support – to facilitate international and multilingual buyers

6. Make it Search Engine Friendly

If a manufacturer can’t be found on page one of Google or Bing, its products can’t be bought. 90% of users never go beyond page 1 of Google results. Organic rankings (i.e. the top 10 natural search results) are clicked more, trusted more, and convert three-folds better than paid ads. 

Manufacturing website designers and developers must start their projects in collaboration with SEO marketers who’ll research and assemble crucial search phrases in a Keyword Lexicon. The lexicon should inform all aspects of website design including user experience, information architecture, initial website content, website development and ongoing content upgrades. Keyword categories in the lexicon should include products/services, applications, industries, reputation, decisioning, and strategic buyer questions. Keywords must include a variety of phrases used across the buyer journey and the talent recruitment journey. It is imperative for the website designers to use SEO best practices to ensure that manufacturer’s products and services, thought-leadership content as well as job postings can surface on page one of Google and Bing.

Google page one is destiny.

7. Make it Mobile-First, Responsive, Fast-Loading and ADA-Compliant

These factors are both good for business and good for search engine rankings.

Given that close to half of website traffic now comes from mobile devices, build a responsive website (i.e. auto-adjusts to various browsing devices) that is mobile first and delights people. Since page load speed is a Google ranking factor, avoid cheap hosting services, and ensure the website developers have a proven record of building clean, efficient and fast code. Make your website ADA compliant (WCAG AA 2.2) website to serve all audiences and avoid being sued by unscrupulous law firms chasing non-compliant websites.

What you can’t see can hurt you.

8. Power With Smart CMS Technology wtih a Maintenance Mindset

Google rewards fresh content. The ease of uploading new content and updating the website depends on your chosen content management system (CMS).

Depending on website requirements, the size of your organization, your need for flexibility and internationalization, availability of in-house technology talent and budgets, you must either pick a proprietary, open source or commercial grade CMS that best suits your needs. Ensure it support a “Smart Page Builder” that lets you create your entire website and custom layouts from a single interface. Ensure it is thoroughly SEO-friendly and plays well with other software components such as analytics, marketing automation software, CRM software, tracking tools, and more. Most importantly it should be easy to use for content people.

Since websites are dynamic entities, it should be coded to be simultaneously logical and easily maintainable. Documenting the code is crucial. 

A good CMS should let you operate a website with almost the same ease as you use utilities at home.

9. Test, Test, Test and Then Test Some More

Zero defects matter as much for websites as they do in manufacturing.

In accordance with quality guru Dr. Deming’s advice, ensure that quality is built into every phase of the project. However, to ensure that the end-product meets the highest standards of quality, test the pre-launch website across a number of platforms and devices to ensure that the responsive design maintains its integrity, passes the Google mobile friendly test, and adheres to Google Core Web Vitals guidelines. Test on common smartphones, tablets, desktops and laptops, as well as the most recent versions of popular web browsers whose usage is more than five percent of the total website traffic. In addition, test each website page for ADA WCAG 2.2 Level AA compliance using a variety of automated testing tools (WAVE, FAE, AXE, DubBot) as well as manual testing to ensure that these standards are met.

Aim for nothing less than zero defects.

10. Build for Security

Prepare yourself for a world where a cyberattack is initiated every 39 seconds.

Build your website code with protections from spam and SQL-injection. Use HTTPS and stay up to date on SSL/TLS versions. Ensure operating systems and CMS security patches are installed as they surface, a few times a month.

The last thing you want to experience is website downtime or to be held hostage to ransomware.

11. Host It Right

Because websites are mission-critical, people are impatient and Google penalizes slow websites with lower rankings, hosting matters a lot.

  • Ensure your website is hosted securely on a high-speed Tier-1 environment, and weekly software and security patches are deployed.
  • Protect your website hosting environment from ever-evolving malware and attacks. Apply security patches promptly.
  • Keep your uptime high with 24×7 monitoring and daily backups.
  • Automate infrastructure configuration and code deployment.

Cheap shared hosting will hurt you.

12. Implement Kaizen Principles of Continuous Improvement

In business as in life, the ground beneath our feet keeps shifting. A great website is a living, breathing information organism that adapts to the changes taking place in the business environment.

Implementing Kaizen principles for a website involves continuous improvement and optimization of various aspects to enhance user experience, increase efficiency, and achieve business goals. Improve user experience with user feedback, fortify persuasion based on what rainmakers are saying is working now, optimize pages based on what performance tools are reporting, tweak SEO meta-data and copy with newest insights, improve conversion paths based on user behaviors, and implement security patches as new vulnerabilities are discovered and announced.

After a website goes live, SEO engagements and paid advertising campaigns become the touch points where ideas are exchanged between us and our clients. These are crucial moments of change and adaptation that deliver long-term success that clients had hoped to achieve.

13. Measure ROI

You can’t manage what you can’t meausre.

Upstream ROI metrics include increase in inquiries and demand, achievement of thought leadership, and increase in brand value. Keep an eye on downstream metrics also such as bounce rates, conversion rates, time on site, growth in organic traffic, content popularity, expansion in reach, and more. Establish regular meetings to measure ROI.

What ultimately matters is not the effort but the return-on-your-website-investment.

Remember, the underpinnings of great websites are simplicity, humanity and performance. The simpler and more predictable the user experience and the more human-friendly the content administrator’s experience, the more complex your website backend will be. Great website developers lean into this paradox and love delivering joy, brilliance and satisfaction to both website users and content administrators. They prefer long-term client relationships so the website continues to evolve and perform better every month and every year.

Looking for a professional manufacturing marketing agency to design and develop your website? Review our website design and website development expertise and contact us if you wish to join the elite group of manufacturers enjoying business growth with their websites.

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Elliance, a higher education enrollment marketing agency, has built a reputation by both increasing and growing enrollment for more than 100 colleges and universities. Founded on the principle of right-fit matchmaking, our recommended strategies revolve around six core beliefs. First, if they can’t find you, they can’t buy you. Second, if they do find you, you can’t bore them into buying from you. Third, back your claims with proofs. Fourth, ensure that students are able to see themselves at your institution. Fifth, pursue right-fit students at all cost. Sixth, you must be easy to do business with. All our recommended actions for increasing and growing college enrollment revolve around these core beliefs:

1. Activate a Winning Strategic Plan

Winning, not playing and optimizing, is what successful college presidents focus on. To create an inflection point, they sometimes deepen their competitive advantages and at other times disrupt and challenge the status quo.

College presidents lead strategic planning based on thorough, objective assessment of institutional strengths and weaknesses in the context of societal shifts. They involve board members, faculty, alumni and corporate partners in their strategic planning process. To enact change, presidents must be keen observers, strong persuaders and strategic communicators. Their challenge is to effectively use key framing questions to challenge old ways, butcher a few sacred cows and tell stories that infuse new worldviews.

To become a school of consequence, you must behave like one.

2. Define a distinctive hook

Consider declaring a unique hook, like offering a graduate-in-four-years guarantee (e.g. Randolph-Macon College), a job placement guarantee (e.g. Capitol Technology University) or a tuition lock (e.g. William Woods University grad and online programs). Parents and students are attracted to colleges willing to stand behind their commitment to graduate students on time and help them get a job.

3. Invest In A Brand. Speak with One Brand Voice.

In the sea of sameness, brands win. A brand is the sum of all experiences, be they virtual, experiential or architectural interactions. It is the DNA of an institution that affirms its purpose, defines its core values and highest ideals, creates distinction, and is the foundation of its reputation. Speak with one brand voice to all audiences, but strike different notes for each segment of students, alumni, donors, partners and influencers.

All great higher education marketers engage in branding to position their colleges and universities as institutions of consequence.

4. Grow Your Reputation

Great colleges curate, orchestrate and elevate their content strategy to deftly manage their institutional destiny with flagship publications, storytelling on websites and social media channels.

They maximize their content productivity and amplify their thought leadership with a Keyword Lexicon –  comprised of high-value words and phrases you can rightfully “own” in service of both attracting right-fit students and building an impeccable reputation. They insist that each and every piece of content a college produces is infused with keywords, so it can secure its rightful Google page 1 rankings.

They widen their content reach beyond alumni and friends to influence people who aren’t aware of their college brand. They measure and communicate the economic impact of their institutions.

Google page 1 rankings are destiny. When you secure them, traditional rankings will also follow suit.

5. Offer In-Demand Degrees

Offer an academic portfolio to prepare students for the near and far future. This can take various forms.

You could become a niche college. If you are a niche college, offer an inch-wide, mile-deep portfolio of programs. Palo Alto University offers psychology degrees only, Wheelock College offers child development programs only, Capitol Technology is Washington DC and Maryland’s STEM university, and Thunderbird School of Management specializes in International business only. Inch-wide, mile deep.

You can also become a professionally minded liberal arts college. For instance, Bryant University will not let a student graduate in business without a liberal arts minor and vice versa.

If you are a broad based educator, offer a largest variety of majors and minors. Catholic University of America, for instance, offers more than 400 degrees.

6. Make First Impressions Count

First impressions matter.

  • Create a transformative website. Create an impeccable website. Make it beautiful. Invest in high-fidelity academic program pages. Make it alumni success centered. Make it outcomes centric. Make it conversion friendly. Make it search engine friendly. Make it responsive. Make it accessible. Feature institutional reputation points. Showcase groups of students in social settings. Celebrate campus life. Celebrate your star students, alumni and faculty because they, not the institution, are the real heroes of your story.
  • Make your social media about your students, alumni, faculty and experiences.
  • Claim your Google page 1 rankings – ensuring the information that appears on search engine results is persuasive and inviting.
  • Create high-impact open houses, information sessions, and campus tours.
  • Make your classrooms, admissions décor, facilities and grounds beautiful because beauty engenders confidence.

Remember you become the story you choose to tell.

7. Create a Culture of Service

Of course you ought to create an adaptive, dynamic and participative campus culture that’s inclusive, diverse and respects differences. Of course your students, faculty, and staff must reflect the emerging realities of our pluralistic culture, society and world. But what people crave most is a psychologically safe environment, a culture of reciprocity, and an ethos of giving to students, others and society.

It’s not the strongest, nor the fittest, but the most caring that flourish.

8. Build relationships with corporation and community

Higher education institutions live in an ecosystem of mutually beneficial relationships with corporations and community organizations as natural allies. Creating porous walls between the institution and these natural allies is an integral part of the job of everyone at the college. The external partner relationships are valuable in three ways:

  • Parents and community members exert considerable influence on future students’ enrollment decisions when they are choosing a college.
  • External partners offer students internships, co-ops and jobs.
  • As government research funding has dried up, corporations, civic organizations and alumni-led entrepreneurial companies have stepped in to form a new source of college revenue.

These allies can create opportunities for forming new institutional trajectories.

9. Build your athletics

Nothing builds school spirit better than athletics and intramural sports. That’s true whether a college is a Division 1, 2 or 3 sports school. Support athletics. Contrary to common belief, the athletes’ habit of achievement transcends sports into their personal, academic and professional lives. Nurture them.

10. Serve diverse audiences and support them

Explore and harvest new student streams such as adult students, online learners, distance learners, graduate students, international students, and professional development communities.

Recruit, enroll and support students, faculty and staff from diverse faiths, ethnicities, genders, and socio-economic backgrounds. Allocate budgets to fund talented teams, effective management practices and smart technologies so the college is prepared to serve and support the various student segments.

In a college, the needs of your students must come first. Care of the students will create a reservoir of life-long memories and goodwill you’ll need to create lifelong relationships. A diversified culture and revenue stream will also future-proof you.

11. Deploy enrollment practices for growth

Since the vast majority of colleges are tuition dependent, your enrollment team must achieve predictable and reliable enrollment revenue for your college by attracting increasingly robust, motivated and diverse students.

  • Embrace machine learning, algorithmic and big data driven enrollment marketing strategies.
  • Invest in CRM and Marketing Automation software.
  • Fish where the fish are (hint: digital media).
  • Attract and enroll only right-fit students.
  • Activate an effective marketing air game. Understand target audiences. Create psychographic and demographic personas. Fortify academic program pages. Deploy smart paid and SEO strategies. Conduct email marketing. Activate traditional media and PR. Deploy both traditional admissions funnel and inverted admissions funnel strategies.
  • Communicate with influencers. Because students are heavily influenced by their peers, parents, teachers, college counselors in high schools, and principals. Ensure you proactively communicate with influencers. 
  • Mobilize a strong boots-on-the-ground game plan. Foster relationships with high schools. Encourage campus visits. Provide virtual tours. Attend industry conferences and events where prospects might be competing in competitions.
  • Create feeders. Offer summer camps and pre-college programs.  Cultivate relationships with attendees and their families.
  • Follow-up on a timely basis. Activate a personalized contact strategy system by a partially automated comm-plan.

You are recruiting students who’ll be your brand ambassadors and life-long donors. It pays to invest in attracting, converting and retaining the right-fit students.

12. Build an endowment war-chest to improve student experience and rankings

Recall that 60% of the US News ranking is based on selectivity (25%) and placement success (35%). With a solid endowment war-chest, you’ll be able to:

  • Modernize your facilities
  • Contain the class sizes
  • Attract the best-fit students
  • Manage the placement of your graduates
  • Keep the student/faculty ratio as small as possible

13. Respond to trends

Adapt and refine your strategies based on the evolving landscape of education and the preferences of your target audience.

If you are seeking an enrollment marketing agency to grow enrollment for your college or university, view our higher education marketing capabilities and consider partnering with us.

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As a leading social media agency for manufacturers and industrial companies, we are frequently asked to share our best practices. This is part of a series of posts to explain how social media audit can serve their interests.

A social media audit involves a comprehensive review of a industrial company’s primary social media channels, profiles, activities, and performance. The goal is to assess the effectiveness of the current strategy and identify areas for improvement.

After gaining access to a manufacturer’s social media management software or accounts, we conduct a twelve-point social media audit to assess the following:

1. Profile Information Audit
We assess all official social media profiles to ensure accurate and consistent information is presented, including logos and colors, profile pictures, cover photos, about information, and contact details.

2. Platform Presence Audit
We identify all social media platforms where the manufacturer has a presence. This includes major platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), Pinterest, etc.

3. Content Audit
We evaluate the type, frequency, and quality of content posted on each platform. We assess whether the content aligns with the manufacturer’s goals and resonates with the target audience.

4. Engagement Metrics Audit
We analyze engagement metrics such as likes, comments, shares, X-reposts, and other interactions. We assess the level of audience engagement and identify successful and underperforming content.

5. Promotions Audit
We analyze the content promotions the brand is running to ensure they are aligned with the manufacturer’s goals.

6. Editorial Calendar Audit
We review and evaluate the existing content schedule and plans outlined in the editorial calendar for social media marketing to ensure corporate objectives are being met over a longer time horizon.

7. Hashtag Usage Audit
We review the use of hashtags across platforms. We assess the effectiveness of branded, domain and product related hashtags and occasionally identify opportunities for new ones.

8. Brand Consistency Audit
We ensure a consistent brand identity is applied across all platforms. We check if branding elements such as logos, colors, and brand promise and position are used uniformly.

9. Metrics & KPIs Audit
We evaluate key performance indicators (KPIs) that are aligned with the manufacturer’s goals. This may include metrics such as reach, impressions, engagement rates, and conversion rates.

10. Competitor Benchmarks Audit
We compare the manufacturer’s social media followers and volume metrics with that of key competitors. We identify areas where the brand excels and areas where it can improve based on peer benchmarks.

11. Followers Audit
We analyze the demographic information of the audience on each platform, including age, gender, location, and other relevant details. We examine the growth, decline and rate of growth/decline in followers/fans on each platform. We evaluate the demographics and interests of the audience to guide tailoring of future content and engagement strategies.

12. Sentiment Audit
This is included by special request only. We evaluate and analyze the sentiments expressed by the audience toward the manufacturer and its product offerings on various social media platforms. The goal is to gauge the overall sentiment—whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral—associated with the manufacturer’s products and services.

What’s typically excluded is evaluation of the performance of paid social advertising campaigns, including ad spend, reach, click-through rates, conversions, and ROI.

A social media audit provides valuable insights that can improve the effectiveness of a manufacturer’s social media strategy. It is typically conducted every few years to adapt to changes in the social media landscape and the corporate goals.

If you are seeking a manufacturing marketing agency partner who can complete your social media audit, contact us.

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Elliance, a higher education enrollment marketing agency, has built a reputation by both increasing and significantly growing undergraduate student enrollment for more than 50 colleges and universities. Founded on the principle of right-fit matchmaking, our recommended strategies revolve around five core beliefs. First, if they can’t find you, they can’t buy you. Second, if they do find you, you can’t bore them into buying from you. Third, the students must be able to see themselves at your institution. Fourth, you must pursue right-fit students at all cost. Fifth, you must be easy to do business with. All our recommended actions for increasing undergraduate enrollment revolve around these core beliefs:

1. Invest in Branding: Babson has positioned itself as THE college for entrepreneurship, American University as THE supplier of “wonks” to the political and governmental establishment, Drexel as THE university that mandates coop experience, and so on. Investing in a strong brand can lift a college from obscurity to national prominence. Brand your college.

2. Make the First Impressions Count: Fortify every touch point – including websites, social media, open houses, information sessions, grounds, classrooms, tours, and admissions office décor. Claim your Google page one rankings and elevate your search engine snippets. Make your facilities and grounds beautiful because beauty engenders confidence.

3. Define a Distinctive Hook: Become a niche college. Declare a hook like: offering a graduate-in-four-years guarantee (e.g. Randolph-Macon College), a job placement guarantee (e.g. Capitol Technology University) or a tuition lock (e.g. Assumption College). Parents and students are attracted to colleges willing to stand behind their commitments.

4. Sharpen Your Academic Offerings: If you are a niche college, offer an inch-wide, mile-deep portfolio of programs. If you are a broad based educator, offer a large variety of majors and minors.

5. Create an Optimal Website Presence: Make it beautiful. Invest in high-fidelity academic program pages. Make it alumni success centered. Make it outcomes centric. Make it conversion friendly. Make it search engine friendly. Make it responsive. Make it accessible. Feature institutional reputation points. Showcase groups of students in social settings. Celebrate campus life.

6. Lower Admissions Barriers: Offer competitive scholarships and financial aid. Offer early decision and early admissions programs. Offer job guarantees for job placement. Offer 4-year graduation guarantees.

7. Activate an Effective Marketing Air Game: Understand target audiences. Create psychographic and demographic personas. Fortify academic program pages. Deploy smart paid and SEO strategies. Conduct email marketing. Activate traditional media and PR. Deploy both traditional admissions funnel and inverted admissions funnel strategies.

8. Communicate with Influencers: Because students are heavily influenced by their peers, parents, teachers, college counselors in high schools, and principals. Ensure you proactively communicate with influencers. 

9. Mobilize a Strong Boots-on-the-Ground Game Plan: Foster relationships with high schools. Encourage campus visits. Provide virtual tours. Attend industry conferences and events where prospects might be competing in competitions.

10. Create Feeders: Offer summer camps and pre-college programs.  Cultivate relationships with attendees and their families.

11. Follow-up on a Timely Basis: Activate a personalized contact strategy system by a partially automated comm-plan.

12. Respond to Trends: Adapt and refine your strategies based on the evolving landscape of education and the preferences of your target audience.

If you are seeking an enrollment marketing agency for increasing and growing your undergraduate enrollment, consider partnering with us.

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Elliance, a higher education enrollment marketing agency, has built a reputation by both increasing and growing online student enrollment for dozens of colleges and universities. Founded on the principle of right-fit matchmaking, our recommended strategies revolve around six core beliefs. First, if they can’t find you, they can’t buy you. Second, if they do find you, you can’t bore them into buying from you. Third, the students must be able to see themselves at your institution. Fourth, you must pursue right-fit students at all cost. Fifth, you must be easy to do business with. Sixth, you must be supportive and understanding of life constraints of online students. All our recommended actions for increasing online enrollment revolve around these core beliefs:

1. Offer Online Degrees in Ideal Formats and Starts: Offer your online programs in formats that are convenient for working professionals. Online students prefer frequent starts for courses, ideally every 8 to 12 weeks, and need the flexibility to pause and restart without penalty.

2. Create a Legendary Online Learning Experience: For online programs, student experience wholly depends on the quality of your teaching materials and ease-of-use of your learning platform. Invest in online instructional design and let word of mouth spread your reputation.

3. Create an Optimal Website Presence: Make it beautiful. Make it alumni success centered. Make it conversion friendly. Make it search engine friendly. Make it responsive. And make it accessible.  

4. Lower Admissions Barriers: Don’t require standardized tests. Accept prior learning and work experience credits. Offer flexible payment options, scholarships, or discounts to make your courses more affordable and appealing to a wider audience

5. Activate an Effective Marketing Air Game: Understand target audiences. Create psychographic and demographic personas. Fortify online program pages. Deploy smart paid and SEO strategies. Conduct email marketing. Activate traditional media and PR. Deploy both traditional admissions funnel and inverted admissions funnel strategies.

6. Communicate with Influencers: Because online students are heavily influenced by the opinions of their social network of peers, co-workers and friends, remember to reach out to corporate HR departments, trade associations, and senior managers who manage working professionals in need of a degree to advance their careers. 

7. Mobilize a Strong Boots-on-the-Ground Game Plan: Hold open houses and webinars. Attend industry conferences and events. Leverage partnerships with community colleges and employers.

8. Follow-up on a Timely Basis: Activate a personalized contact strategy system by a partially automated comm-plan.

9. Respond to Trends: Adapt and refine your strategies based on the evolving landscape of online education and the preferences of your target audience.

If you are seeking an enrollment marketing agency for increasing and growing your online enrollment, consider partnering with us.

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In the age of Google and AI, a manufacturing and industrial marketing strategy is incomplete without a blogging strategy. We will first share several good reasons why manufacturers must include blogging in their marketing mix.

Why manufacturers should blog?

While a blog does require some time and effort, it is well worthwhile for these five reasons:

1. Provides the fresh content that Google and Bing rewards with page one rankings.

2. Significantly cheaper than annually paying third parties for links.

3. Conveys subject matter expertise, which buyers reward.

4. Builds topic authority, which Google and Bing reward with higher rankings.

5. Expands website real estate which grows your brand impressions and reach in the age of Google, Bing and AI.

Best practices in industrial blogging

Next, we’ll share eleven best practices we’ve seen work for many industrial companies.

1. Goals: Could be a combination of communicating subject matter expertise, reputation building or humanizing your company.

2. Name: A good blog name should be memorable and help your SEO objectives.

3. Design: Make it consistent with your website design and ensure it resonates with the target audiences.

4. Target Audience: Speak to engineers, buyers, partners and talent you are trying to attract.

5. Keyword Focus: Know the keywords you want to be ranked for and choose them carefully around your highest margin products and services.

6. Content Focus: Every post should be focused on one or two related keywords. Link back to your products and services. Here is a short list of ideas for blog content:

  • Interview of customers, subject matter experts, or employees with specialized know-how
  • A story about how you solved a challenging problem for a customer
  • Trends you are seeing in your industry
  • Industry best practices
  • Feature a partner
  • Interesting events you are planning to attend or just attended
  • An infographic you created or found that is worth sharing with your customers
  • A video you produced about your product working in the field
  • A how-to-story
  • A planning checklist

7. Voice: Be positive, real, helpful, accessible, insightful, professional and knowledgeable. Avoid jargon.

8. Length: Limit the length of blog post to less than 500 words. Break a blog post into two if necessary. Occasionally, you could write a mega blog post. Google loves and rewards both kinds.

9. Engagement: If you have the time to respond, encourage questions and comments on the blog.

10. Reach: Share your blog posts on your company’s official social media channels. Boost posts to expand reach. 

11. Metrics: Measure the number of views, shares, likes and rankings.

Until your team develops its own blogging muscle, an agency partner can be a vital resource. They can help by coaching your team, offloading some writing, SEO-optimizing and promoting your blog posts.

If you are seeking a manufacturing marketing agency partner who can get you going, contact us.

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Elliance, a higher education enrollment marketing agency, has built a reputation by both increasing and significantly growing graduate student enrollment for more than 50 colleges and universities. Following are some of the most successful strategies that our university clients have activated to unleash enrollment growth in the past two decades:

Strategies for Growing Graduate Student Enrollment Unleash Growth

1. Invest in branding. In the sea of sameness, brands win. When the University of Delaware College of Business and Economics wished to create a rising tide for its vast portfolio of graduate business programs, Elliance crafted and paid off their new brand line “Opportunity, Inc.” It worked attracting students from across the nation and across the globe.

2. Bake research about student behavior and what they value into website, microsite snd landing pages. When we reflected GMAC research findings into Carnegie Mellon’s MS in information systems management program microsite, its applications grew by 118 percent within one year.

3. Tell a better story. Romance prospects and show that the value of the degree exceeds its cost. Carnegie Mellon MSE degree was ranked on Google page one for every conceivable keyword, but its enrollment was anemic. With a photoshoot of rock star students, and new copy that emphasized value of the degree, the enrollment took off without additional marketing.

4. Fish where the fish are. Since digital now leads traditional media, promote your program on digital channels like web, Google, social and Wikipedia. When we helped William Woods transition its marketing budget from all traditional to primarily digital, its graduate enrollment grew by 25 percent and online enrollment doubled in just two years.

5. Pursue right-fit. Hunt like sharks and don’t feed like whales. Create personas with their unique motivations, be it career development, salary bump or living more meaningful lives. Increase your presence across their unique student journeys.  We helped Carlow University achieve the highest enrollment in a decade by creating marketing that resonated with their right-fit students.

6. Persuade influencers. It is well known that the recommendations of bosses carry an extraordinary weight in the enrollment decisions of their followers. When William Woods graduate educational program leaders fostered conversations with their 600+ alumni principals, school superintendents and education district leaders, the teachers signed up in droves for their MEd and EdD degrees.

7. Dominate Google page one because if your program can’t be found, it can’t be in the considered set. Tune social to amplify storytelling. This is the secret of success of each and every one of our clients. For example, Pepperdine graduate business programs grew dramatically and Carnegie Mellon MSPM enrollment grew 12X in 4 years.

8. Optimize follow up strategies. Unlike undergraduate programs, graduate students expect the program directors and faculty to reach out and discuss the passion of students for the program.

9. A/B test your way to success. Effective A/B testing lets you quickly determine the difference between winning and losing messages, ad channels and geographies. Armed with these insights, we encourage our client to feed the winners and starve the losers. For Manchester Business School, we targeted 20 cities and rapid A/B testing revealed that only 3 were converting. We pulled the budgets from the 17 non-performing cities and applied that to the 3 top converting cities. Their inquiries and applications grew rapidly.

10. Simplify application, acceptance  and financial assistance forms and processes. Your processes should not be an obstacle course. We’ve helped streamline processes for each and every one of our clients improving their applications yield and reducing their melt.

11. Engage alumni by featuring them and telling their stories of achievements. It will inspire confidence in prospective students. We routinely do this for every client. Prospective students connect with the alumni seeking their counsel and  advice on whether they should enroll. We use this heuristic for all our higher education clients.

12. Forge partnerships with employers because they are not only harvesting grounds for new students, but also for projects and research initiatives. When we created corporate relations microsites and brochures for several Carnegie Mellon masters programs, they were handsomely rewarded with increased corporate engagement and sponsorships.

13. Cultivate feeders like undergrad programs and employers. When we encouraged a number of program chairs to cement ties with various national and international undergrad programs and HR/training manager at corporations, their enrollment grew dramatically.

14. Offer new flavored, distinct degrees instead of creating new commodity, me-too programs. Distinct degrees always sell better. When Duquesne University launched its MBA in Sustainability, it gave us the fertile soil to secure dominant positions on Google page one. Enrollment grew 3X and application selectivity dropped from 90% to 10%.

If you are seeking an enrollment marketing agency for increasing and growing your graduate enrollment, consider partnering with us.

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Elliance, a higher education enrollment marketing agency, has increased and significantly grown graduate student enrollment for more than 50 colleges and universities. Founded on the principle of right-fit matchmaking, our recommended strategies revolve around four core beliefs. First, if they can’t find you, they can’t buy you. Second, if they do find you, you can’t bore them into buying from you. Third, the students must be able to see themselves at your institution. Fourth, you must pursue right-fit students at all cost. All our recommended actions revolve around these core beliefs:

1. Know that 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 and employers buy into. You must articulate your story so it’ll appeal to your right-fit students. 

2. Celebrate students, not the institution, as the real heroes of your story. The best programs realize that students, alumni and faculty — not the institution — are the real heroes of a program’s story. Celebrate their journeys and the consequential problems of humanity they are solving.

3. Prove your brand claims. Buyers are both intelligent and skeptical. Persuade them by providing proofs in the form of stories, stats and third-party validations. Gather them and go long on proofs and short on claims in your messaging.

4. Romance prospects with high-fidelity websites story landing pages. Higher-fidelity academic and story landing pages attract higher quality students. They are the “money pages” used by value-minded prospects to make their program choices. Build them with the right balance of persuasion architecture, science of conversions, and beauty. Assure the prospects that the value of their degree far exceeds its cost. Inform, persuade, engage, inspire, delight and convert prospects. 

5. Pursue right-fit students. Invert the admissions funnel by marketing your students and alumni heroes to attract more like-minded prospects. This will create admission pipes, not funnels. Expect these right-fit students to go on to become engaged citizens, brand ambassadors, recruiters, partners and donors. Hunt like sharks; don’t feed like whales.

6. Surround and engage prospects and influencers where they hang out. Fish where the fish are. Allocate marketing investments in digital channels where students roam. Invest marketing dollars in digital channels where influencers live.

7. Deploy A/B testing and AI smarts in targeting.  In your paid advertising, use methodologies like micro-segmentation, look-alikes, machine learning, big-data algorithms and affinity groups to generate high-quality right-fit leads.

8. Claim your thought leadership. Weaponize your content based on your program’s natural wellspring of ideas, innovation and thought leadership with a thoughtful search engine optimization strategy, keywords and social sharing. Insist that each and every piece of content your department produces is “juiced” with keywords, so your program can secure its rightful Google page 1 rankings. Don’t surrender top search rankings for your program to competitors and lead aggregators.

9. Measure what matters. As management guru Peter Drucker said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Create a culture of disciplined accountability with a shared dashboard of key performance indicators. Define a set of essential metrics that truly matter. Gather them and be decisive in taking action based on data.

10. Reinforce integrated marketing with boots-on-the-ground efforts. Boots-on-the-ground efforts include forging partnerships with undergraduate programs, stimulating alumni networks, cultivating relationships with corporations, giving webinars, attending industry conferences, nurture feeders, follow-up with prospects on a timely basis, and a whole lot more. When integrated marketing and boots-on-the-ground efforts mutually enhance each other, they liberate fresh new growth. It takes a combination of air game and ground game to grow graduate enrollment.

If you are seeking an enrollment marketing agency to increase and grow your graduate enrollment, consider partnering with us.

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