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| Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter |
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31 July 2007 Mid-summer greetings to everyone as the opening of a new fall semester grows close. Higher education marketing can expect significant challenges in the upcoming academic year, prompted in part by large reductions in state-support for public institutions, the rapid evolution of online communications, and growing dissatisfaction with levels of student debt. Amidst all of this, successful marketing programs will continue to focus on one key element: what information do students expect from colleges and universities and how can we meet those expectations? Life isn’t going to get any easier. But it certainly isn’t going to be dull. Usability testing is a new addition to the list of “What I Do to Help You Achieve Strong Online Marketing” at www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/whatwedo.html A very experienced usability tester will conduct your test and I’ll weigh in with marketing analysis and recommendations. The registration link is open now for the 2007 AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education at www.marketingpower.com/aevent_event24813.php including an outline for my 3.5 hour Sunday tutorial on “Writing Right for the Web: Key Steps to Engage Your Visitors and Increase Your Search Engine Visibility.” Plan now for one or both of two early fall web seminars I’m offering with Academic Impressions to increase the marketing impact of your website. Details are here. The slides from my keynote presentation at the eduWeb 2007 conference last week, “Marketing and the Web: Trends and Tribulations in Online Communications,” are online at www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/presentations.html and include screen shots from many college websites. Warning: if you have no interest in Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs and their impact on message control, don’t bother with this. And now to our marketing news and notes for July. Differential Pricing for College Degrees The July 29 Sunday NY Times gave front page visibility to the efforts of some public universities to generate more tuition revenue in the face of “lagging” government funding by charging differential tuition for some degree programs. Highlighted were “premiums” at Arizona State University for journalism and at University of Wisconsin Madison and Iowa State for undergraduate business. Other examples of differential pricing were cited later in the article. Details are at www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/education/29tuition.html. Everybody Loves Magazines That’s the good news in research results reported by AdAge here. From 13 years to 60+ years, respondents to an online survey reported that they enjoy reading magazines and are more receptive to advertising in print than on line. Most people are also interested in user-generated content, a strong message for the ongoing preparation of both print and online student recruitment campaigns. Let your students tell the story of their experience at your college or university. The research results speak well for the decisions of intrepid institutions like Furman University, Seattle Pacific University, and LeTourneau University that have moved their primary printed recruitment piece from a single viewbook to a series of magazines used throughout the recruitment cycle. For a more in-depth report from the sponsors of the research, visit here where you can also download a 4-page PDF of “Are You Ready for the Future of Media.” S&P Casts Doubt on Value of College Application Levels The folks at Standard & Poor’s who give out college credit ratings measured in part by demand are getting skeptical about recent increases in admissions applications as a measure of that demand. Denison, Smith, and Colgate, for instance, are cited as examples of colleges that waive fees for online applications and might therefore see an artificial increase in demand. As a result, S&P plans to also review “the fraction of students who matriculate and the fraction who graduate according to the report here. Easy Intro to 5 Levels of Marketing Dashboards Target Marketing Magazine offers a clear review of different levels of marketing dashboards that will quickly let you know how well you are doing now in using dashboards to track, analyze, and report the results of your marketing activities. Most people will want to aim at least for Level 3, the transition point at which dashboards move from the collection of statistics to the level of analysis. Of course, there’s nothing wrong to aspire to Level 5, the ability to predict future results. Each level is at www.targetmarketingmag.com/story/story.bsp?sid=69398&var=story. New Branding Role for Facebook Friends tell me that people are leaving MySpace as it becomes more commercial. Time to start thinking about where they will go next as advertising follows them along to Facebook. Certainly Facebook has grown rapidly as it changed from “college students only” to a place for anyone who wants to participate. Visit www.clickz.com/3626423 for “Advertising on Social Networks: The Third Wave.” Just what is the third wave? It is the ability to promote your brand by creating new content useful to the people who frequent these sites rather than “just” placing ads. Marketers will make the effort because Facebook is making it easy for them to create new applications for the site and because people spend an extraordinary average of 186 minutes on Facebook each time they visit. The key point: marketers will follow the crowds. Remember the old, old days when two lawyers turned the early email world to fury by daring to “advertise” their services? Marketing is one of those things like death and taxes that’s very hard to escape. And it doesn’t drive everyone to search for a new frontier. MySpace remains by far the largest social networking site and is likely to hold that position for some time to come. Planning to Redesign Your Website? If you had a better budget each year for continuous, ongoing website improvement would you need to invest time and money in a comprehensive website redesign project? Conversely, if you don’t plan for ongoing improvements on a regular basis, will your website redesign do you any lasting good? Those are questions that Gerry McGovern poses in “Web redesign is a bad strategy” at giraffeforum.com/wordpress/?p=53. If you’re thinking about the best ways to increase the marketing power of your website, reading this column posted to Gerry’s blog along with the resulting comments is time well spent. Ending Search Engine Marketing Mystery Making your website more visible to search engines and thus for people looking for something of value to them will be easier after you read “Search Engine Optimization: What It’s History Tells Us” by Donovan Baldwin. Baldwin starts back in what he calls the “Dark Ages” of the mid-1990s and moves rapidly to the present. And thus this comment about how search engines work today: “A major change came about as search engines began to rely less and less on the information provided by the webmasters and created software which could investigate the site independently and form conclusions on what it found there.” Today, we are in a search era where the importance of your content to the audiences you want to attract to your site is critical to your success. That raises the importance of audience research to a level not always incorporated into plans for new websites. Read the history at here. Video Gains Strength as Critical Online Content If you aren’t already planning how to incorporate video content on your website, a new 28-page Pew Internet & American Life Project report should help get you moving. Widespread broadband access is responsible for a huge increase in the numbers of people who watch video online, at about 57 percent of adults 30-49 years old and 76 percent of “young adults” between 18 to 29 years old. The report is at www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/219/report_display.asp. For two strong examples of how “new” video can replace text in higher education marketing, see “Learn more about Boston University” at www.bu.edu and “Advance Your Career” at here. New “Safe” Colleges Featured in NY Times Education Life The July quarterly issue of this venerable NY Times publication includes an article on “The New Safeties” that recommends steps to take to ensure that traditional age students make realistic decsions about their admission possibilities as colleges they are considering. The article is here. Don’t miss the sidebar on “new fallback campuses” that includes: Emory (for Washington University in St. Louis), University of Chicago (for Northwestern and Harvard), Dickinson College (for Hamilton, Lehigh, Lafayette, and Bates because those schools consider level of interest in making an admission decision and Dickinson does not), and Lawrence University (for Oberlin). The college counselor at the Lab Schools of the University of Chicago who made these selections notes that the schools “know they’re a lot of kids’ second choice but don’t want to be” and “have mastered the art of manipulating numbers and of aggressive marketing.” No details are given on the manipulation factor. This seems an assertion that should not be printed without more of an explanation. New Ways to Measure Internet Use Advertising dollars continue to shift to the Internet and that brings new pressure to provide more sophisticated ways of tracking who’s doing what in the online world and when they are doing it. A July 27 ClickZ article gives us reports on two new steps, from ComScore and Nielsen. ComScore is now segmenting analysis between heavy, medium, and light users. Of 177 million Internet users in the U.S. in May, for instance, 89.6 million were “light” users who averaged 3.6 hours that month. The overall average was 28.8 hours. Nielsen is placing new reporting emphasis on gamers, including the precise time that participation peaks and correlations with TV viewing. More details are at www.clickz.com/3626547. Will More College Presidents Start to Blog? More visibility was about the land in July about presidents who are blogging at their college websites. The Kansas City Star focused a July 20 article on Avila University at www.kansascity.com/115/story/198911.html that includes an interview with the president on why he takes the time to blog as well a public relations perspective on why presidential blogs in general are not a good thing. The Chronicle of Philanthropy highlighted slow growth in a July 4 article here. I’ve just added the president at Hendrix College to the list of 16 links to presidential blogs in my July 1 entry at bobjohnsonconsulting.com/blog1/. 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 at one or more of these events! September 24, Web Conference: Academic Impressions, “Improving your Website to Engage Prospects.” Outline and registration at www.academicimpressions.com/web_conferences/0907-website-engagement.php. October 1, Web Conference: Academic Impressions, “Writing Right for the Web.” Outline and registration at www.academicimpressions.com/web_conferences/1007-web-writing.php. November 11, San Diego, CA: AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education, “Writing Right for the Web: Key Steps to Engage Your Visitors and Increase Your Search Engine Visibility.” Registration details for the Symposium and the Sunday afternoon 3.5 hour tutorial are at www.marketingpower.com/aevent_event24813.php. December 10, Chicago, IL: CASE District V Conference, “Writing Right for the Web.” Link to the conference website available soon. Expand professional growth opportunities on your campus. Host a seminar to increase the Online Marketing skills of people on your campus and get a better ROI on your future investments. Schedule your presentation soon for September or later. 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. Gerry McGovern offers unparalleled expertise in customer-centric website content and the Customer Carewords research program to identify what that content should be. More about Gerry at www.gerrymcgovern.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 |