Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter

25 July 2006

Late July greetings to everyone and a special welcome to new subscribers from the LSAC summer workshops and the ACT Enrollment Planners Conference. The EPC set a new record of more than 440 people attending. Really early planners should mark their calendars now for the 2007 EPC event, July 18-20 in Chicago.

My new blog on Internet Marketing opened in July at bobjohnsonconsulting.com/blog1/ with topics that include Presidents Who Blog, Graduate and Professional Schools, Writing for the Web, and links to special value Internet marketing websites. You’ll find links to blogs for six presidents; if your president blogs at your website send me the link at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com and I’ll add it. If you’d like an email notice each time a new entry is posted, let me know at the same email address and I’ll sign you up. Look for new topics over the coming months.

More than 65 schools have registered so far for my August 10 web conference on Writing Right for the Web. Register now at www.academicimpressions.com/web_conferences/0806-web-writing.php and learn how to make your “Message from the President” and your press releases more visible to Internet search engines.

From now on, the Link of the Week at my website won’t appear in the same week as this newsletter, so you can expect about three new links each month. The first 15 including the most recent from Hendrix College are at www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/linkoftheweek.html.

And now, here are marketing news and notes for July.

Teens and the University of Phoenix

While I haven’t seen an Internet advertising campaign yet, the website for Axia College has been overhauled and is ready for recruiting a younger generation of University of Phoenix students to start college with an associate’s degree.

The primary marketing messages are clear on the front page: a degree in 20 months, the ability to take courses “on your schedule” by joining the “new generation of students online.” Degrees are offered in six areas: Accounting, Business, Criminal Justice, General Studies, Health Administration, and Information Technology. Tuition ranges from $265 to $285 per credit.

See more for yourself about this latest venture at www.axiacollege.com.

10 Ways to “Fix” the College Admissions Process

Jay Matthews at the Washington Post is back with a column on 10 changes that he believes will make college admissions better for prospective students. He went to a NACAC regional meeting in Ohio and asked the admissions people attending to vote on whether the changes were good, mediocre, or bad and whether or not they were likely to happen.

What was the result? Counselors felt that five of the changes were good (more honest search letters, separate campus tours for parents, application essays written in class, letting wait listed students know what percent on the list were likely to be accepted, and better education about the value of AP and IB courses).

How many of the 10 changes did counselors feel were likely to happen any time soon? Only one, separate campus tours for parents, was rated as “very likely” to change. Click here for more details.

New Pew Internet Report on Blogs

Our friends at Pew have came forth in July with another study on the ongoing evolution in Internet communications, this time by delving deeply into the world of blogs. Those who blog are more ethnically diverse than Internet users in general, are predominantly under 30 years of age, and are about evenly divided between men and women.

Many blogs, as you likely know, are highly personal ventures by people who share the details of their daily lives with anyone who is interested. That covers about 37 percent of the total. Politics is the next most popular topic, at about 11 percent. Entertainment and sports follow along next.

Find much more to help you plan the best way to make blogs a part of your marketing communications mix at www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/186/report_display.asp.

Blogs are a great way to add frequent new content to your website. If you don’t yet have student blogs that give a realistic picture of life on your campus, plan to start soon.

Check Your College on Wikipedia

If you haven’t already searched for your college or university on the Internet’s open source encyclopedia, perhaps you should.

Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page is the place where just about anyone can visit a subject that people are writing about and add their own information. From a brief run through several institutions, it quickly became apparent that not everything here was posted by the public relations department.

To continue the process of learning what people are saying about you on the Internet, visit soon. If you think something is missing that people should know about your school, you can add it. And if you register as a contributor, visitors won’t even know who posted the information.

Wikipedia is a popular place. You can be sure that at least some prospective students and their parents are learning about you here.

Crowdsourcing and Experience Marketing

Do you like to stay up to date with the latest buzz words and phrases? If so, jump right past “experience marketing” to the term that describes what happens after the experience.

“Crowdsourcing“ is what takes place when the brand message isn’t tightly controlled by agency creative staff or in-house marketing departments, but let loose to reinvent itself based on the experience that creates comments by the people who use a service or product. It’s another way of saying that marketers don’t control messages any more, that the best they can do is influence what people say about something. Could it be the end of the agency creative brief as we know it?

Read more about crowdsourcing and see a bit about how marketers are attempting to adapt to it at www.clickz.com/experts/brand/capital/article.php/3620061.

Hispanic Marketing Fact Pact for 2006

Does marketing to Hispanics interest you? If so, visit adage.com/article?article_id=110568 and download the 52-page “Hispanic Fact Report” from Advertising Age.

The report identified the top TV and radio stations, magazines, websites, and newspapers preferred by Hispanics. Be sure to see pp. 42-43 for information on “language preferences among Hispanics” as you plan upcoming campaigns.

High School Sophomores and College Admissions

What should high school students be doing in their sophomore year to find the right college?

Princeton Review has a list of suggestions for various times of the year at here.

In September, for instance, PR suggests that students talk to their counselor about taking the PSAT. PR advises that the score “doesn’t mean much this year.” Perhaps, but the better the result, the more likely that it will start a string of contacts from colleges.

Heard at the ACT Enrollment Planners conference this year was the news that the number of sophomores taking the ACT PLAN test continue to increase. I’ll likely report in more detail on that in the August newsletter.

The marketing strategy message is clear if the students you are recruiting are among the early PSAT and PLAN takers. If you continue your “search” efforts, you should be contacting sophomores. That’s one step you can take to get into a person’s early college review group so that you are less likely to be closed out when your junior search finally arrives.

What’s the Future for Print Publications?

You’ll find more than a hint of that in “Imagining the Day when the WSJ Print Edition Folds” at adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=110685.

A definite lesson for the traditional role of viewbooks is in this speculation. What’s the lesson? There isn’t a need for detailed news reports (read: detailed factual information) when that is easily available in a more up-to-date form on websites. If you think this is really silly speculation, note that WSJ now has 768,000 paying website customers.

What role for “viewbooks” as we know them? The writer, Scott Donaton, notes a continued role for “glossy lifestyle monthlies because there’s no better delivery system (yet) for their photos and stories.” Yes, photos and stories. Plan now to turn your viewbooks into the equivalent of a “glossy lifestyle” publication that tells interesting and real stories about your students with the best photography possible. Do that well and your viewbook will have impact no matter how long the recipient has been prowling your website.

Need Something New for Your Email Campaigns?

If you’re getting a little tired of the “same old, same old” techniques and want to explore new options, visit www.clickz.com/experts/em_mkt/em_mkt/article.php/3621456 and review the list of 9 new tech features to consider for your email. Author Jeanniey Mullen notes that not all of these are “new” as several of them are old marketing techniques updated for Internet Marketing.

It isn’t usually a good idea to try something new just for the sake of being different. But it is a good idea to keep up with what’s possible and think about how it might help you. Take a moment to read about “Heatmapping” and “Whisper Ads” and more.

Build Better Landing Pages for Higher Conversion

Visit www.offermatica.com/press-1.2.21.1.html?src=jul06nlw for the third of three articles on how to build website landing pages that will increase conversion of visitors who come calling after your email marketing campaign. You can access either of the first two stories from this page.

The series introduces you to three basic landing page types, offers tips on how to test different elements for effectiveness, and illustrates how to create effective offers. One suggestion to test: start your call to action with the phrase “I would like to” and follow that with, for colleges, “apply for admission” or whatever matches the desired result from the landing page visit.

I especially liked this reminder: your goal isn’t to get people to click on your marketing email, your goal is to “capture the click” and keep people moving in the right direction. Without that result, your email marketing campaign isn’t a success no matter how many open the email and click through to the next page.

“Dean’s List” Videos at Business Week

Interviews with deans at several business schools are online here.

The most recent is a July 12 interview with Vice Dean Anjani Jain of the Wharton School. You’ll find others with deans from UCLA, Thunderbird, Northeastern, INSEAD, and more.

Elsewhere, Business Week reports a continuing decline in MBA applications. Search out these interviews for thoughts on how to best adapt MBA programs to the changing interests of the business world. Some, you might decide, are more adept at this than others.

My Upcoming Presentations in 2006

Attend an upcoming event. Share questions and answers with people like yourself who are building a competitive edge in higher education marketing. Hope to meet you soon!

August 10, Web Conference: Academic Impressions, “Writing Right for the Web,” including a new section on writing tips for Search Engine Optimization. Details and registration are at www.academicimpressions.com/web_conferences/0806-web-writing.php.

October 16-18, San Antonio, TX: CASE Annual Conference for Publications Professionals. Details and registration link coming soon.

November 12-15, New Orleans, LA: AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education. Tutorial on Writing for the Web; Advanced Marketing session with Carol Aslanian on adult student recruiting. Details and registration link at my website soon.

Can’t send everyone to a conference? Bring great conference presentations right to your campus. Select from the topics here. Or ask about creating a seminar just for you.

Schedule your presentation at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com.

That’s All for Now

Be a marketing champion on your campus.

Bob Johnson, Ph.D. (bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com)
President and Senior Consultant
Bob Johnson Consulting, LLC

Bob Johnson Consulting, LLC

I offer consulting services personally to colleges and universities and together with the marketing experts at these partner firms:

Aslanian Group offers market research and enrollment management services to colleges and universities to increase their market share of adult students. Learn more at www.aslaniangroup.com.

Creative Communication Associates is a 22-year leader in the design and implementation of marketing communication strategies for colleges and universities. Learn more about CCA at www.ccanewyork.com.

mStoner helps colleges and universities with Internet strategies and website development to meet changing audience expectations, technologies, market pressures, and institutional positioning. For the details, visit www.mstoner.com.

TargetX brings the power of the Internet to recruit students and communicate with alumni through higher education’s only integrated suite of online tools. Explore what’s possible at www.targetx.com.

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