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Content marketing is in a state of constant flux. To reach potential students, best practices in higher education marketing dictate being everywhere; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and SnapChat, right? Well, no. Yes, the number of ways consumers can access information, and thus make a purchasing decision, has grown exponentially. The days when a university only bought a billboard, some television commercials and used direct mail are long gone. Websites, email, digital ads and sharing content on social sites are used in addition to the older forms of marketing. But, that doesn’t mean you should just throw the same content everywhere. Instead, universities must make their content interesting, useful and at times, entertaining. This only happens if you focus on your customer’s needs rather than your own interests. That’s where John Deere enters the picture. They published a magazine, called The Furrow, in 1895. The goal was to sell farm equipment and they did this by sharing stories farmers … Continue reading
Posted in: higher education inbound marketing agency
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A new year is always the perfect time to evaluate personal and professional goals. Which explains why the article, 10 Resolutions Marketers Should Make —And Keep — In 2017 caught my eye. I thought this article included some good advice: Marketers should resolve to prioritize the mobile customer experience. Marketers should resolve to stretch and exercise more. Marketers should resolve to stop combating ad blockers. Marketers should resolve to create seamless experiences. Marketers should resolve to partner more closely with the startup community. Marketers should resolve to spend more time actually interacting with customers. Marketers should resolve to leverage mobile location data. Marketers should resolve to invest more in video. Marketers should resolve to truly get to know their customers. Three of these resolutions, prioritizing the mobile customer experience, investing more in video and getting to know customers are topics Elliance often discusses with our clients. Instead of making resolutions at work or in your personal life, consider focusing on … Continue reading
When I was eighteen, I joined the United Auto Workers Local 677 to earn money for college. I wore a hard hat, safety goggles and steel-toed shoes and was paid three times more than the current minimum wage. Coming home sweaty, smelly— and if I worked on the axel line, covered in grease —was well worth it. Manufacturing paid very well. It was on that Mack Truck assembly line that I saw the value of teamwork—what I did or didn’t do directly affected my co-workers—something essential for every employee, in every type of work setting. This important lesson stayed with me in the decades since, but so did my misconception that manufacturing is still a boring, dirty profession. This all changed last year, when one of our clients, Aerotech, gave me a tour of their facilities. I was shocked. The place was clean and quiet. And, as they told me the tasks the workers performed, it became clear that this was … Continue reading
Posted in: manufacturing myths
Two months ago, I brought home an eight-week-old miniature schnauzer named Ellie. She only weighed four pounds. She needed to go outside in the wee hours of the morning. She prompted me to ask myself, “What have I done? How will I get through this? Will this get any easier?” Since this little bundle of cuteness is consuming a lot of my time, it’s only natural that she’d be the inspiration for my blog post. After all, I am sure there are many professionals – from owners of smart manufacturing companies to newly hired marketing directors – who occasionally ask themselves the same questions I mentioned in the above paragraph. With Ellie as my marketing muse, here’s some food (or kibble) for thought. Be yourself. If you search Google images for miniature schnauzers, you will find adorable dogs who are black, gray or salt and pepper. As you can see, Ellie is brown and white. She is called a liver … Continue reading
Posted in: b2b marketing
The statistics are rather unsettling. The National Cancer Institute estimates that 1,658,370 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States in 2015 and 589,430 people will die from the disease. I wrote about my own cancer scare years ago for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and I always thought I could only fight cancer on a personal level. I eat veggies, stay active, slather on sunscreen, get a mammogram and donate money. What else can one person do? That all changed when I was asked to work on the website redesign for the Oncology Nursing Certification Corporation (ONCC). Now I had a chance to use my writing talents to help nurses who care for cancer patients, which in turn, helps those battling this disease. At Elliance, a website redesign doesn’t just mean put a few pretty pictures into a new layout. We ask questions. We think. We ask more questions. Then, we combine what we’ve discovered about the client … Continue reading
Posted in: Website Redesign
As a writer who spent the first 10 years of her professional life as an agency copywriter, I approach writing with two specific questions: Who’s the target audience? What’s unique about this client? I had a creative director once who often quoted David Ogilvy and I still remember this classic: “Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.” As a mother whose daughter is a junior in high school – prime time to be inundated with higher education marketing materials – it saddens me to see that many universities don’t take the time to write something truly unique about their school. Surprisingly, my sixteen-year-old daughter noticed the same thing. Her assessment of the brochures that keep filling the mailbox is this: “They all tell me I’d be perfect for their school but they don’t do a good job at explaining what they can … Continue reading
Posted in: Higher Ed Marketing