 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter |
|
31 January 2007 Greetings from Michigan, where temperatures and snow are both falling as I finish this first newsletter of 2007. Best wishes to everyone for very successful marketing this year. The New Year is off to a strong start. I’m ready to “go public” with a new venture to bring Gerry McGovern’s Customer Carewords program to colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. Read more about how this key research will add new marketing power to your website at www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/customercarewords.html. Down below you’ll find two new speaking engagements. Details are coming soon but mark your calendars now for “Advanced Internet Marketing” with the Aslanian Group in May and for the Canadian Council for the Advancement of Education meeting in June. If you missed my last web seminar on “Writing Right for the Web” in August, join us on March 5. Details are here. And now on to January’s marketing news and notes. 2007 Update on Web Marketing for Recruitment To keep your website current with the interests of the students you are recruiting, read the new report from Noel-Levitz and friends here. Right on the front page you’ll see that the two most desired items deal financial aid and costs. A financial aid estimator is valued by 88% of people answering the survey and 83% would like to see a “tuition cost calculator.” How many college websites are providing those services now? The only true college-specific financial aid estimator I’ve seen is at the University of Toledo. What’s equally interesting is the high demand for all of the 15 most valued features. Last on the list is “Email current students from the site” and 61% wanted to do that. Give yourself 10 points for each of the 15 features that you offer now. If you get to or past 100 points, let me know by email and I’ll build a list of the websites at 100 or higher on my blog. And no, I won’t use the specific scores. Just names and a link to your website. 82+ Colleges & Universities in Second Life Education Community If you haven’t yet explored what’s happening at Second Life, start by reading through the Education page at secondlife.com/businesseducation/education.php You’ll find a link to a list of 82 schools already participating in various ways in this 3D website environment about mid-way down the page. Briefly put, you can buy virtual real estate and offer educational programs at Second Life and more than a few places are starting to explore the possibilities. The list of 82 includes Harvard University and Kalamazoo Community College here in Michigan. And that first group doesn’t include others listed under different categories. Web 2.0 continues to redefine the way we “do” education. Marketers interested in the “product development” side of the mix should be tracking this one. Millennials Define Success as “Be Rich” and “Be Famous” Not everyone will like the results, but everyone should be aware of the latest information from the Pew Internet Trust on the goals of Millennials from 18 to 25 years old. A quick chart of the top five is at the USA today article at www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-09-gen-y-cover_x.htm. The top goal is to “Get Rich” (81%) and that is far ahead of the second goal of “Be Famous” (51%) and very far ahead indeed of “To Help People Who Need Help” at 30 percent. Read the details in “A Portrait of ’Generation Next’” at people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=300. Phoenix Expands in Teen Arena University of Phoenix is serious indeed about expanding downward from adults to the teen market and continuing right on down to the first time children start any type of organized learning. That’s the clear message when you read about the latest Phoenix acquisition, Insight Schools. Insight specializes in the K-12 age group. The company runs an accredited high school in Washington and also specializes in a variety of programs (Advanced Placement, College Prep and ESL) that are marketed directly to parents. Read the details here. Forbes Magazine gave the acquisition prominent coverage at www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/01/10/ap3316840.html. 55 Students Blog at the Wharton School Is that a record? I certainly haven’t found another website that even comes close. Visit diaries.wharton.upenn.edu where you can link to a list of those who blog and select ones to visit based on their area of study and home town and country. Very well done. Visit the “Become a Diarist” page for a nice example of an “application to blog” form. 20 SEO Best Practice Pointers You can easily get lost in the literature about best practices for higher search engine visibility, but just about everyone will understand at least half of what’s presented by P. J. Fusco in her list of 20 things to check for best search engine results. My favorite was listed third: Do page titles start with your targeted keywords? At least half of the college websites I visit have almost nothing distinctive in the page titles (the white text in the blue background at the top of your web page) although that’s one of the first things search engines visit when they make their rounds. Review the whole list at www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3624560. For some of these, you’ll need a friendly visit to your IT staff. But for others, access to a CMS will let you get started right way on improving your SEO scores. Email Previews Panes are Spreading DM News is warning email marketers to use smaller size emails due to the spread of email preview panes in new programs from Yahoo and Microsoft. Readers will be able to scan their email for highlights before opening, so the need for a strong first impression will grow. And the real estate available to make that impression will shrink. These systems are in beta stage now, but coming along in full force soon. Learn more about the new developments and how to best use them at www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/e-mail-marketing/39651.html. 10 Tips on Marketing to Donors Abny Santicola does a nice job of blending the old and the new in “10 Ways to Enhance Traditional and Web Fundraising” for an article in Fundraising Success. I always like to see the old and the new join together. Abny is reporting about a panel presentation at the January meeting of the DMA Nonprofit Federation that included the advice to always do a second mailing for funds soon after the first to those who haven’t responded. And the panel recommended the same for email solicitations. What surprised me was the recommendation that if you couldn’t track who had not responded to your first email, then send another one to everyone on the original list with a disclaimer. Today, everyone should know who responded to a first email round and be able to drop those from the original group. If you can’t do that yourself, then be sure to get a professional email outfit like TargetX to do it for you. Otherwise you’re just going to look inept. Read the other 8 tips at www.fundraisingsuccessmag.com/story/story.bsp?sid=46094&var=story#46094. New Social Networking Site for Teen Girls If you’re thinking about online marketing to 13 to 17 year old college-bound teens, review the possibilities at the new DayZLoop website that presents teens with a variety of serious topics from health care to financial planning and more. Read the article at www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3624610 for details on the preferred type of advertising, including sponsorships, as well as the safeguards built into the site to ward off unwanted users. Then visit dayzloop.com/cs/ and scroll down to the bottom of the page where you’ll find a link to “Partners” that will tell you more about the possibilities. Web Design vs. Web Content: Girl Scout Cookies Can Wikipedia replace your website? Before you decide that’s a silly question, read Mark Hurst’s column at www.goodexperience.com/blog/archives/001182.php. Mark describes his search for the flavors of Girl Scout cookies on the newly redesigned Girl Scout website. After spending some frustrating time on the site, he went to the Wikipedia entry for Girl Scouts and found the flavors prominently listed at the top of the first page. Hurst’s most important point is about the impact of a website visit on perception of the brand: “the brand is about the customer experience, not the colors or the logos” on the website. If the experience is bad, your brand is bad. And for many, the Girl Scout brand is very much about cookies. Before you invest in an expensive recreation of your website, make sure that you have covered two key points: you have the content people want to find and you make it easy to find. Don’t drive people to Wikipedia. But you should continue to check out what’s up there now about your school. That’s easy to do at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Wikipedia is a very popular website. How much time do you think was spent on design? My Upcoming Presentations in 2007 Share questions and answers with people like yourself who are building a competitive edge in higher education marketing. Hope to meet you in the New Year! February 15, San Francisco, CA: University Continuing Education Association, “Online Marketing Boot Camp” with details at www.ucea.edu/pages/2007mktgseminar.html. February 26, Austin, TX: Texas A & M System, “Emerging Technologies: Communicating Tomorrow in the Internet World” February 28-March 2, Boston, MA: Academic Impressions Conference on Integrating Brand Messaging Across Media, “Writing for the Web” and “Conducting a Communications Audit” with program and registration details at www.academicimpressions.com/conferences/0207-brand-messaging.php. March 5, Web Seminar: Academic Impressions, “Writing for the Web.” Registration details soon. April 3, Dallas, TX: CASE District IV: “Writing for the Web” and “Communicating in Today’s World: the Challenge of Integrating Print, Web, and Email. Registration details are at www.caseiv.org/conference/?CONTAINERID=95&CRUMB=3. July 22, Baltimore, MD: eduWeb, Keynote presentation. Follow development of the conference program and read the conference blog at www.eduwebconference.com. Expand professional growth opportunities right on your campus. Ask about creating a seminar to increase the Internet Marketing skills of people on your campus. Schedule your presentation soon for 2007. Contact me at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com. That’s All for Now Be a marketing champion on your campus.
Bob Johnson, Ph.D. (bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com) 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. Newsletter Archive
28 May 2008 |