Aha! :: Elliance Blog

Whether you’re an association, a non-profit organization, a university, a bank, or just an occasional blogger with delusions of grandeur, the communications landscape today is fascinating, challenging, fast-paced and, above all, complicated. The standalone monthly magazine is becoming a thing of the past. Email newsletters have long since ceased to be the answer to 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. […]

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 […]

Anyone who has ever spent more than a few hours in Pittsburgh has probably seen it: the view from Mt. Washington. Rising above the city on the south side of the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio Rivers, the steep hill provides a breathtaking view of Pittsburgh’s skyline. Far below are the city’s many modern and historic […]

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 […]

Here we go again. Today, a link was being shared around our office and in my Twitter stream. It was a link to an article .Net Magazine ran Wednesday, featuring expert opinions on the content of another opinion piece it had run back in May. The upshot of the first piece is that social buttons […]

I just returned from a vacation where I was reminded that my mobile apps are only as good as my cell provider’s data coverage. Before heading out on vacation, I downloaded a very popular trails app because it had great location information: a compass plus your latitude and longitude, weather, wind, sunrise and set, and […]

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 […]