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Over the past 25 years, I’ve been a prospective college student, a student, a young alum, a not-so-young alum, a donor, the daughter-in-law of a university faculty member, and the wife of a college staff member. My professional life has also revolved primarily around higher education, including enrollment marketing, for the past seven years or so. I think it’s safe to say that I’m fairly immersed in higher education. Every single day I spend at least some of my time thinking about how colleges and universities can get their messages out to the world. I’ve become accustomed to thinking about higher ed communications from a professional point of view. I think about key audiences, tactics, user experience, and the admissions funnel. My time as a prospective student was a long time ago (longer than I’d like to admit!), and I’ve been doing this job for many more years than I spent browsing college catalogs. I bet the same is true … Continue reading
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Let’s talk for a minute about the word “online” in the world of SEO. Online education isn’t what it used to be. Students, parents and educators alike are embracing the benefits of taking classes online, at a distance, as scheduling allows. More and more universities are offering the very same courses at a distance, with the same paper diploma at the end. As a result, millions of working adults are able to pursue a quality higher education. Enrollment is booming, profits are up. Even employers are shifting towards indifferent acceptance when it comes to what method a person used to receive his/her degree, according to a recent study. With this sea change toward legitimacy in online learning, I pose a very simple question: how has search behavior changed for the search term “online“? Let’s look at Google Trends: Take a search like “online criminal justice degrees”. This is a term similar to one we optimized a couple years ago for … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics, Search Marketing
…isn’t taking data from research reports and discovery sessions to come up with creative ideas for a campaign or a tagline. Honestly, that stuff is quite easy. The hardest part is letting go – of forgetting all the old notions, perceptions and sometimes predictable ways a client has communicated in the past; and replace it with a language, a tone, and a lens for the future. A single brand lens that all can shared by all – from prospective students and their parents to the college community to alums and future donors. But this isn’t easy to do. When we allow ourselves to forget old models, we create spaces for new ones to rise. Old vestiges are replaced with new tones, and a new language is created – a new focal point that raises the perception floor for a client, and helps them forever see themselves in a new light. I’m not speaking of tactics here, I’m talking about implanting … Continue reading
Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail! Anyone who remembers watching the Super Bowl 29 years ago this week may recognize that speech from the now iconic “1984” TV spot that introduced the Apple Macintosh personal computer. Apple officially aired the original commercial just once, during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, about the time that Los Angeles Raiders running back Marcus Allen broke the hearts of every Washington Redskins fan with a 74-yard-long touchdown run. Apple and its agency, Chiat/Day, created … Continue reading
With a very small project, there’s every likelihood that you can gather a couple of brief proposals, make a quick decision, hit the ground running, and finish up by the end of the month. Voila! You have a new landing page for your website. Or a new set of images for your slideshow. Or the text of the speech your president needs to give. Let’s call the small project a speedboat. Major projects — a complex website, a custom app, a branding initiative or a major identity program, for example — are more like container ships. It takes time to put together buy-in for a larger budget, there are lots of complex pieces that need to gathered and brought on board, it takes a bigger crew to run the ship, and changes are likely to be burdensome. As a result, this ship is very slow to get started. Letting go of the shipping metaphor for the moment (because I actually … Continue reading
I’m writing from my small town in Vermont, where schools are closed for Superstorm Sandy, but the sun is shining and it’s as pretty a fall day as we’ve had this year. The lights stayed on. My thoughts go out to those millions of people who have been less fortunate. Like the rest of the country, I spent a lot of time yesterday searching for information about the storm. Were my friends and family safe? Was it headed my way? Were there D batteries available anywhere in Addison County? Now that the threat has passed, I find myself thinking about how I seek, access and evaluate information online in a crunch. Perhaps there are some lessons for us here when the storm clears: 1) New Media. While I’m a loyal fan of print, I bypassed traditional media completely yesterday. Even the evening news (yes, I still watch it religiously) wasn’t up to date enough. The 24-hour news cycle has spoiled … Continue reading
I joined Elliance about a year ago with just a layman’s knowledge of SEO. The Elliance search team gave me a wonderful primer during my first week, and I’ve continued to enjoy my own learning process through the work we’re doing on behalf of our clients and in support of our own objectives. There have certainly been some eye-openers along the way. Here are some things that jumped out at me. 1) It’s even more powerful than I thought. In my personal work and life online, I search just as much as anyone else. I’ve taken a fair amount of pride in my ability to find what I’m looking for more quickly than expected. But from a business perspective, I had no idea just how important search could be. Whether for a college or a bank, I’m amazed at the number of visitors generated by effective search practices. It can add up to a significant portion of the traffic to … Continue reading
Posted in: Search Marketing
For those tracking the tectonic shift among major college football affiliations, last week’s announcement that Notre Dame University would leave the Big East and join (reluctantly?) the Atlantic Coast Conference amounted to the last big rock falling. What’s any of it have to do with higher ed marketing? While it’s easy to dismiss these front page courtships and betrayals in college football as a pure money grab, they shed light on a larger question: do we work from a narrow and outdated model of competition/cooperation in higher education broadly, and in higher ed marketing specifically? If Notre Dame and Clemson suddenly share a vague geographic claim to the Atlantic seaboard, then maybe the two schools have more to offer their representative student bodies than just a weekend road trip. And what about the higher ed marketing teams for these and other affiliated schools? Can they put down their cost-per-click metrics long enough to see new collaborative possibilities? Can Notre Dame … Continue reading
In my role as director of new business development at Elliance, I receive phone calls every week from people who are looking for help from a digital marketing agency. Sometimes they have an RFI or an RFP to discuss. In other cases, it’s purely a call for help. It’s rare that I chat with a prospective client who’s thinking about a project just for fun. By the time you get around to calling someone me, you’ve already been feeling some kind of pain. Maybe you’re not seeing the applications that you want, maybe your donor pool is light, maybe sales are down. Making an investment in digital marketing is a significant choice for any organization, and there’s bound to be a good reason for it. In other words, you’ve got a problem. Interestingly, most of the people I speak to open the conversation not with the problem, but with the solution. They know they need an SEO program. Or a … Continue reading
Posted in: Digital Marketing
When it comes to connecting with potential customers and other key audiences, your website is perhaps the most important tool you have. But no matter how brilliantly designed and well written your website is, it won’t last forever. It needs to be refreshed or redesigned to keep up with changes in design and technology trends. If you’re considering a website redesign, here are a few questions you need to ask: Does your website reflect your brand’s current reality? The visual design of your website may be one indicator that it’s time for a refresh, but dig deeper and you may find that your brand position is no longer being accurately represented or, even worse, may have never been clearly established. Is your website generating a consistent supply of qualified leads? While reversing this trend may require adjustments to your overall business strategy, it may also require a reexamination of your supporting web strategy and tactics. This could also indicate the … Continue reading
Posted in: web design, Website Redesign