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At Elliance, a Pittsburgh-based digital marketing agency, we create unique ad creative for paid campaigns for each of our higher education marketing clients. There are several factors that we take into consideration as we develop this ad creative. Keeping the client’s brand in mind, the target audience and the goal of the campaign helps us come up with a one-of-a-kind strategy for each client. Here are some best practices that we follow to develop high-converting ad creative for every client campaign: Use authentic photography: As all paid marketing platforms have become more and more visual, using the right image is really important to creating the right ad.The use of client images of actual students helps us develop a more authentic look and feel for prospects. It gives a realistic feeling of being on-campus and brings out the individuality of the brand. Following are some examples of ad creative that we used for our higher education clients marketing campaigns: Chatham University’s … Continue reading
Higher education enrollment marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. Continual monitoring, measuring, analyzing, and optimizing are necessary ingredients for successful higher education enrollment campaigns. They are critical in building a qualified prospect list that is responsive to nurturing — from lead to application, and ultimately, to enrollment. As a higher education leader, you’ll want to know which key factors will provide your marketing team with the guidance and clarity they need. While there is an array of technical details, metrics, and data points every month, focusing on these five factors will help keep your marketing team on track. 1) Prioritize your most important performance metrics. To keep the most impactful measures as a top priority, be clear about your north star metric and communicate that often and consistently to your marketing team. For most colleges and universities, the goal of digital marketing is lead generation. While metrics such as impressions, clicks, click through rates, and bounce rates are informative and … Continue reading
Posted in: Higher Education Marketing
At Elliance, a Pittsburgh-based digital and paid marketing agency, we create unique landing pages for each of our higher education marketing clients as part of our paid digital campaigns. Along with distinctive elements for each landing page which give it an individual flavor, there are common features which consistently work very well in attracting and engaging prospective students. Here are some best practices that we follow when creating these higher education paid landing pages for our clients: Clear and Concise Argument Construction: The argument construction for each landing page depends on the client’s situation and target audience. We consider who we are trying to attract, such as undergraduate students, adult students, first generation students, or graduate students, etc. A one size fits all approach does not work. Examples of landing pages from 3 of our clients which show how different audiences are addressed: Maker Culture at Capitol Technology University: The culture at Capitol Technology University is focused on providing a … Continue reading
This checklist is designed for new deans sizing up a marketing department and prospective vice presidents for marketing as they evaluate a new job opportunity or performance of their marketing department. 1. What’s Your Brand? In the sea of sameness, brands win. A brand is the sum of all experiences. It attaches a memorable idea to your school. It creates expectations and a core promise while creating strong to impenetrable differentiation in the marketplace. Can you articulate your brand and its core promise? Do you speak with your distinctive brand voice, striking different notes for each segment of students, alumni, donors, partners and influencers? Are your website, social media, print materials, brand anthem video, and campaigns curated with the same brand voice? What is the meaningful societal cause your brand stands for? 2. What are the First Impressions of Your School? First impressions matter. What message is conveyed by your architecture, entrance, grounds, signage, classrooms, admission office décor? Do your key … Continue reading
Posted in: Higher Education Marketing
This guide was written to help under-resourced, small to medium colleges and universities who can’t compete in the marketing arms race and yet need to out-wit and out-smart the deep-pocketed Goliaths. We call them small giants. As one of the leading higher education marketing agencies, we learned the strategies and tactics presented here from serving several small giants of higher education. We salute them. Higher education marketing is a sacred art for a noble cause. Its primary goal is to grow enrollment, endowment and reputation for colleges and universities. Colleges are literally spending billions on marketing and advertising. The first threat that private and public colleges faced was from t he meteoric rise of for-profit colleges who invest more than 20% of their revenue (equating to hundreds of millions of dollars) on marketing. The next threat has arisen from within their own ranks. Now there are more than twenty private and public universities that are investing over $100 million in … Continue reading
Posted in: Higher Education Marketing
Marketing, like ecology, is a complex ecosystem of reciprocal relationships thriving in a network of mutuality. Parts grow, interdependence begins and symbiotic relationships form. It adapts to each new season. Mutual Reinforcement in a Marketing Ecosystem On the organizational or micro-level, marketing is a highly interconnected, mutually reinforcing and complex ecosystem of paid, owned and earned media tactics – part digital and part traditional. Examples include: Brand strategy and strategic plans build strength upon strength. Magazine stories lift program/service offerings; in turn, program/service offerings imbue the stories with context and relevance. Tightly aligned page content and SEO meta-coding persuades humans and influences the Google bot alike. Content marketing creates a rising tide of website visitors, and paid advertising lifts the site visitor volume disproportionally. The presence of the brand in both Google organic and Google paid results creates a four-fold increase in click-throughs. Billboards and the website tango to enhance brand reputation. Lean print pieces and advertising complement smart websites. … Continue reading
As one of the top higher education marketing agencies, we are frequently asked to share our thoughts on emerging trends in this space. Here is what we are seeing. The past two years have seen a historic decline of more than one million students in US colleges and universities. Racially and ethnically diverse student populations continue to grow. The number of International students shrank during the pandemic but are growing again. College endowments surprisingly grew at first and then took an inflationary hit. The race to win the marketing and enrollment game is on. Colleges are battling to win an outsized share of a shrinking pool of domestic students, and facing stiffer competition for international students. Here are the top twelve higher education marketing trends for 2023 that we are sharing with our clients and partners: 1. Merchandising of Hope and Support Services The Covid pandemic has precipitated a crisis of mental health and a need for support among young … Continue reading
I recently came across an article from Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor, discussing the success and failure rates for new products. He shared that about 30,000 new products are introduced every year, and a whopping 95% fail. This made me wonder about the success and failure rate of new academic programs at colleges and universities. After some digging, I found a study by Burning Glass, a market research firm, titled “Bad Bets: The High Cost of Failing Programs in Higher Education.” They analyzed graduation data for the 10,536 new undergraduate and graduate degree programs that were launched in 2010-2011. In 2018, they took a snapshot of graduates to assess the success and failure of these programs. Sobering Data This is what they discovered: about a third of the programs weren’t graduating any students; roughly half were graduating fewer than five students; and two thirds of the programs produced fewer than ten graduates. That’s pretty sobering considering the estimated cost of … Continue reading
The pace of spinning out new academic programs at colleges and universities is increasing. Over the years, we’ve helped clients launch and market several new degrees. Some have been wildly successful, some mildly so and others just sputter along. What’s the difference between success and failure? In my view, God is in the details. Everyone knows that the overall process is pretty straightforward: you assess the opportunity, plan the rollout, and execute the launch. I’ll share a story of a program that applied this logic and almost didn’t take off. And how we turned it around to become a runaway success. This is the story of Carnegie Mellon’s MS in Product Management. Assess the Opportunity Most colleges hire a market research firm to analyze data from the Department of Education and the Department of Labor to assess the competitive landscape and the demand for graduates. Carnegie Mellon approached it differently. Carnegie Mellon’s former Dean of the School of Computer Science … Continue reading
Welcome to your new adventure. You may have been invited into this presidency as a change agent or a strategic visionary. Either way, get ready to liberate new growth for your college by focusing on the 3 R’s of prosperity: Revenue, Reputation and Rankings. These three currents flow under the sixteen best practices for managing and running a successful college, gleaned from working closely with more than twenty college presidents and reading more than a dozen books written by them: 1. Winning Strategy: Winning, not playing and optimizing, is what successful college presidents focus on. To create an inflection point, they sometimes deepen their competitive advantages and at other times disrupt and challenge the status quo. College presidents lead strategic planning based on thorough, objective assessment of institutional strengths and weaknesses in the context of societal shifts. They involve board members, faculty, alumni and corporate partners in their strategic planning process. To enact change, presidents must be keen observers, strong persuaders … Continue reading