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Like my wife and I and a lot of other people, our friends Lindsay and Ryan have a dog. Their dog is an ancient Japanese Chin named Mikoto. Mikoto weighs maybe five pounds, yet lumbers when he moves, is completely deaf, and lives a monk-silent life. Because Mikoto is for so many reasons portable, he gets to go places. A couple of weekends ago, Lindsay and Ryan went to a spa/hotel place tucked away somewhere deep in the recesses of Appalachia. The place was known to be pet-friendly and their website confirmed as much, so Lindsay and Ryan took Mikoto. Upon check in, the hotel staff informed Lindsay and Ryan that they were indeed pro-pet, but that guests were, under no circumstances, allowed to leave an animal companion in the room unattended, ever. It’s a reasonable policy for such an upscale destination, but springing it on guests at check in is somewhat problematic. “We came here for the spa, for … Continue reading
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One of the tensions we hold at Elliance has to do with the pros and cons of specialization. While most of our work focuses on higher education marketing — where we have deep experience — we also meet a wider set of client challenges in manufacturing, banking, non profits and other worlds far from campus. Google’s search engine bot and people generally, favor simplicity. Elliance gets it — we know why many higher education marketing firms keep a singular focus. We also know first-hand the many ways that our higher education clients benefit from our broader exposure and reach. In the end, we find that higher education branding and marketing clients have plenty in common with clients in other verticals when it comes to solving the essential marketing challenge: turning awareness into inquiry, inquiry into conversation and conversion, and conversion into engagement, community and lasting brand loyalty. That premise led us recently to ask a bigger question: “What does it … Continue reading
Posted in: Branding, Higher Ed Marketing, Higher Education Branding, RISD, Umpqua
To higher education marketing pros, April & May is “yield season.” It’s the culmination of all their marketing and relationship-building efforts to convert a suspect to a prospect to an applicant to an admitted student. Yield is the percentage of admitted students who actually decide to enroll. This is a big deal in enrollment marketing – having knowledge of where the yield percentage might fall provides a target of how many students the admissions office needs to, or is willing to, accept. Tracking the tuition deposits as they begin to trickle in is a daily process for admissions, and is why the final piece of marketing communications – the admissions yield piece – is so important. Over the years I have seen all kinds of yield tactics from fact sheets to multi-page brochures. They all seem compelled to give the prospect ‘one more reason’ to consider their school. (As if two years of curated courtship through the admission process has … Continue reading
Posted in: Admissions Marketing, Admissions Yield
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
Higher education marketing professionals traditionally equate the “new year” with the turning of an academic calendar, the approach of 2013 is good reason to offer 5 New Year’s Resolutions.
No region in the world understands the countervailing forces of hope and despair related to the manufacturing economy more viscerally than Southwestern Pennsylvania. As a young adult, I witnessed first-hand the cataclysmic fall of Big Steel when the region added 124,000 new unemployed people — fathers, mothers, siblings — in a flash of economic destruction between August 1981 and January 1983. In the 30 years since, the United States remains undecided about the most fundamental questions. Can American workers and companies compete in a global workforce and market? Do our schools and education bureaucracies effectively prepare young people for advanced manufacturing careers? Will companies invest in American workers rather than reflexively seek cheaper labor? Elliance has seen the power of smart manufacturing marketing to make a difference for companies seeking bigger/better customers globally, and a stable, reliable workforce locally. We apply many of the same concepts of “right-fit” matching from our work in higher education marketing to the world of … Continue reading
Posted in: Branding, Manufacturing Marketing, Search Marketing
Like a blindfolded volunteer in an “Old Coke, New Coke” taste test, Republican pollsters and pundits seemed genuinely surprised last week to learn that their trusted brand — “USA” — had changed. Although demographers and groups such as the Pew Research Center have been charting changing US birth/death rates and immigration patterns for decades, and essayists like Richard Rodriguez have written with depth and nuance about the change, some in the political class seemed caught flat footed, if not flat stunned. Higher education marketing and enrollment professionals have watched and responded to these trends for years, and college presidents and boards have grappled with a range of issues related to student success, admissions policies, financial aid, and more. Often, the assumption in higher education circles is that institutions play a significant role in helping first generation students advance professionally and personally. While nobody would argue that case, colleges miss a huge opportunity if they fail to acknowledge a wide range … Continue reading
Here are five big ideas being talked about heavily in the web world that marketers should be considering. Create Once. Publish Everywhere. (COPE). This is the philosophy guiding NPR’s brilliant content/digital strategy which has allowed them to make the most of every story created–serving it up on any device and application. Responsive Web Design Oft understood as a coding and design solution for being able to adapt a site to the ever proliferating number of screen sizes, responsive web design is as much about one content base as it is one code base. Mobile First Mobile First is the concept that if we restrict ourselves to designing for the smallest screen size first, we’ll force ourselves to have to prioritize content and decide what’s really most important. A great way for you to separate the must have vs. nice to have vs. why do we still have? among your thousands of web pages. Storytelling All this device proliferation and talk … Continue reading
Last week, I was floored. A prospect looked at our portfolio and clustered our work into two groups: like and not like as much. Asked me if I could explain why. I looked at the two groups and quickly realized that the the ones he liked were all written by our storytellers/copywriters from scratch and had a singular voice; the others were written by a combination of our storytellers/copywriters and client’s. I have never resisted the client’s needs to collaborate with us because I want to be respectful of their budgetary constraints. However, the loss of voice integrity is the silent cost of resource mashup, despite our sharing a common brand voice guide; it’s all about how different people interpret voice guides. A sensitive ear will pick this fracture in brand voice. Wow. You decide how important the integrity of brand voice truly is. We believe it is vital.
Posted in: Brand Voice
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 and I were hired to create a viewbook (shown at right) for, then, Saint Francis College. It was our first “real” venture into the world of higher education marketing. Coming from an advertising background, we naturally began thinking beyond the viewbook – our thoughts focused squarely on branding the college itself and finding “right-fit” students. A not-too-common way of doing a viewbook back then. Okay, so this in and of itself is hardly news – or even blog worthy – but the rest of the story is, well, pretty interesting. So fast forward to 2012 and you’ll find Saint Francis University – not College. You’ll discover … Continue reading