Aha! :: Elliance Blog

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 […]

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 […]

A ruling by Judge Rudolph Contreras of the Federal District Court for Washington, D.C. last week set back efforts by the U.S. Department of Education to deny federal financial aid dollars to the lowest performing for-profit schools. For the time being, the marketplace will decide — students and parents matched against hyperbolic for-profit higher ed […]

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 […]