In an era of declining demographics and shifting applicant priorities, how does a college capture an outsized share of a shrinking market? It requires more than incremental changes. Visionary college presidents and administrative leaders deploy these 10 strategies to fortify positioning, differentiate their brand, and drive institutional turnarounds: 1. Invest in Branding. Babson has positioned […]
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 made a provocative claim that he could assess the health of any college by looking at just two metrics: yield and retention rate. That got me thinking about what other metrics college presidents should consider indispensable. Here are the metrics I […]
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 […]
Gods smile on colleges and universities that pursue and achieve top organic rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Prosperity takes many shapes and forms for colleges ranked on page #1 of search engines. e.g. 1. Prospective Students find the college, inquire, show up at open houses, apply and enroll. 2. Prospective Parents find the college […]