Marketing of Christian colleges is a nuanced art. It requires a sensitive touch and storytelling that answers two big questions. The first one is a burning question that haunts all of us at some deeper level: how do we reconcile Scriptures/faith with modernity? The second question is an institutional one: how can we define our […]
In the era of declining college applications, how does a college gain an outsized share of a shrinking market? Here are 10 strategies that visionary college presidents and their teams are continually deploying to fortify and turnaround their institutions: 1. Invest in Branding. Babson has positioned itself as THE college for entrepreneurship, American University as […]
Because I present and visit so many conferences in higher education, many people ask me what’s hot right now in higher education marketing world. Here are a few trends that I am seeing these days: 1. Responsive website design is picking up steam, after the launch of Notre Dame and UC San Diego responsive websites. […]
How do you know when people are really engaged with your brand? Certainly one way to tell is if they stand in line for hours on end for a chance to buy your latest product. But how do you measure it when you are a small, regional college in rural central Pennsylvania? In 1998, my colleagues […]
If you’ve ever written a pay-per-click (PPC) ad, then you know how hard it is to cram an eye-popping, attention-grabbing, conversion-cranking message into a tiny, little space The 25-character headline and 70-character description space doesn’t seem so small until you try to insert your text into Google and run over the character limit! Writing successful […]
Your brand already exists. Your brand is the foremost expression of your college or university. It’s the lens through which you invite the world to view your work, your product, your significance. Many colleges and universities struggle to create a distinct brand. In truth, brands are not created. They exist, and it’s just a matter […]
Colleges and universities are rebranding themselves at an increasing rate. Here are a five common reasons for a brand makeover: 1. “We need to reach new frontiers.” We want to widen the nexus, expand our reach, grab new markets, seek new revenue streams. 2. “The world has changed and we are still relevant.” The world […]
At the last AMA Higher Education Marketing conference, President Mark Putnam of Central College, profoundly claimed that he could know the health of any college by looking at just two metrics: yield and retention rate. This led me to a hunt for other metrics that college presidents consider indispensable. Here is what I have found […]
One of the main values we add to our clients is to help them make sense of multitude of marketing strategies and dizzying channel options. Here is one framework to view all your marketing strategies: 1. Know Thyself It was Shakespeare who said “To thine own self be true”. All higher education marketing strategies begin […]
This morning I was reading a post on the Travel 2.0 Blog that hit home. Troy Thompson wrote: “Recently, I was asked to critique changes to an advertising campaign from a well-known tourism destination. While the creative was fine…amazingly not touting anything and everything…the call to action seemed, cluttered. Perhaps that was because it featured […]