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31 October 2007 Fall greetings to everyone on a Magnificent Michigan day in late October. Best wishes that your marketing strategy is working as we move into the month of Thanksgiving and that your campus visits and admissions applications reflect that success. I’m looking forward to meeting many of you soon at the 18th annual AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education in San Diego, the premier event for college and university marketers. This week I’m updating my presentation on “Branding and the Web: Create a Good Experience or Kill Your Brand” for Carol Aslanian’s December “Everything Online” conference. Online programs are in great demand (see the Sloan Report feature below). This program will help you take advantage of that. Visit www.aslaniangroup.com/events/default.asp for details. Read my prologue to a new AACRAO book, “The SEM Imperative: Taking Enrollment Management Online” here when you scroll down past the table of contents. Editors Craig Westman and Penny Bouman have done a masterful job gathering articles that will help everyone in this essential and continuing transition. It was a pleasure to work with them on this project. Look below for News & Notes that range from Facebook and TV advertising to online program marketing, YouTube storytelling, higher education pricing and more. 11 Tips for Marketing on Facebook If you’re thinking about taking the plunge into marketing on Facebook, spend a few minutes to review “How to Market Yourself & Your Company on Facebook: 11 Steps & Strategies” at www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30182. A first group applies to individual people while a second and shorter group is aimed at organizations, with special attention paid to advertising. Note that Facebook now allows targeted advertising with information included in members’ profiles. Your choices include education and keywords included in the profiles. Access is open on the MarketingSherpa site until November 7. Online Enrollment Growth: New Sloan Report Online enrollments continue to grow much faster than overall college enrollments, according to this new report, “Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning,” from the Sloan Foundation. Last year the difference was substantial, with a 9.7 percent growth rate online compared to a 1.5 percent overall growth rate. That translates into about 3.5 million students taking at least once course online. Community colleges are leading the way. Interest is greatest among non-traditional students taking continuing education and professional education courses. The report also details barriers to ongoing growth, including the need for higher self-discipline by students and continued opposition from faculty. Read the detailed summary and download the full PDF report at www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/survey07.asp. For growth details at several Michigan colleges, see the Crain’s Detroit Business article here. 112 Best Colleges for Merit Scholarships US News lists the 112 colleges and universities with the highest percent of students receiving merit scholarships here. The list starts with Denison University and Hampden-Sydney University tied at 51 percent and closes with 10 others at 22 percent. Of the group, 104 are private institutions and 8 are public. Merit prospects are quite good at the 14 colleges providing merit awards to 40 percent or more; another 14 fit between 35 and 39 percent. Is this an outbreak of the benevolent spirit? More likely, this is an effort to maintain a desired market position in the fact of strong price challenges a nd competition. New Outcomes Emphasis for Online Programs Some higher education institutions are moving toward a greater emphasis on the outcomes of educational programs. That, at least, is the hope one has from reading about the “Transparency by Design” initiative sponsored by the Presidents’ Forum at Excelsior College. At present, 10 schools offering online degree programs have agreed to work toward common measurement of their success, with a special focus on individual academic programs. That last point is important as most people are far more interested in the outcomes of the specific programs that interest them than in consolidated information for an entire institution. The list of 10 schools is at presidentsforum.excelsior.edu along with a template outlining the criteria for the assessment. Capella University, Regis University, and Franklin University are participating. So far, University of Phoenix isn’t listed. For a mix of comments about the approach, visit “College Accountability Movement Moves Online” at www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/17/adult. Limits of Web 2.0 Mark Hurst is a valued observer of the online communications world and his “Good Experience” newsletter has long been a favorite of mine. In his October 30 newsletter, he casts some needed cold water on what he considers excessive expectations about “Web 2.0” online activities. No, Mark isn’t predicting the end of social networking sites. Indeed, he notes he’s a fond user of Facebook and Flickr. At the same time, he’s suggesting that there is likely a limit on just how much people are willing to share about themselves and how much they want to know about others. Above all, people have to believe the social networking experience is useful to them. Read the column and add your comments at goodexperience.com/blog/archives/010138.php#comments. Joost, 15,000 TV Shows, and New Advertising Formats Many people today are watching TV shows today online at their computer rather than on their TV screen and that means advertisers are puzzling out how to follow along with new advertising formats. To keep up with how that’s unfolding, visit the “Joost Forum” for comments on what people like and dislike about the experimental ad formats. Joost lets people download software and watch their favorite TV shows at their computer screen. The software is free but the TV shows come along with advertising to pay the bills. One recent suggestion: Joost should capture more personal information when people download the software so that ads are more targeted to their interests and therefore less irritating. Visit www.joost.com/forums/f/ads/ to become your campus expert on online TV ads. Branding, Story Telling, and YouTube If you have a special brand story, the best thing you can do is to have students tell your story for you. That’s what Walden University is doing on YouTube with a series of “Be Inspired by” videos that are an extension of content at the main website. Visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHgFRoVItTA for Sharon Freeman’s story. Look to the left when you arrive for three more stories by Sally Lorbach, Judith DeVries, and Tim Bolton. Each one focuses on the primary Walden brand theme of helping others to lead a better life as the result of a Walden education. Video story telling is moving rapidly forward as a key component of college and university marketing. Be sure to visit YouTube every week and check what your competitors are doing. Don’t fall behind in this new game. Better yet, get out in front with video that reinforces your brand in the marketplace. 32 Taglines for Distance Education Do you need a tagline for your program? If you already have one, does it set you apart? And how well does it make an emotional connection by focusing on benefits for your students? Visit www.distance-education.org/Schools/ to quickly review the taglines used by 32 online programs. As you scroll, you’ll also see that three schools, including Boston University, don’t use taglines at all. Once upon a time, it didn’t make a difference if taglines at colleges in Maine and California were pretty much the same. Today, when distance learning recruiting has no geographic limits, the effort to be distinctive is more challenging than ever. Brand Authenticity on the Web Mark Spiegal has comments that might help you sway people on your campus who don’t yet believe that a bad website experience can kill your brand. The focus here is on “authenticity” or how people come to believe and trust the brand claims you make. If you claim to treat people as individuals and not numbers, for instance, have you examined how well your website puts this claim into action? Read more at searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3627420. Masters Programs Boost Enrollment Are enrollments in masters programs helping your enrollment grow? In Seattle, they are contributing to enrollment increases at several schools. Read the details, including the most popular programs, at here. Congress Pushes for Higher Endowment Spending on Financial Aid Congress continues to focus attention on the relatively small number of high-visibility institutions with “billionaire” endowments and high tuition levels. Special attention is on the percent of endowment funds, usually less than 5 percent, being spent each year. As a result, we are likely to see more pressure to spend more endowment resources to reduce future tuition increases. A recent AP story notes that moving average endowment spending from 4.6 percent to 5 percent would increase available financial aid funds by $1.5 billion. Read the details about the new political interest in Congress here. Net Tuition vs. Sticker Price You’ll find a detailed 28-page PDF on “Trends in College Pricing” from the College Board here. The introduction to the report puts an emphasis on “net price” rather than “published price” but also notes that many parents still don’t understand the difference and continue to believe that their cost is what’s published by each school. Think about that for a minute. To the extent that this is true (and the report also notes that “many” students indeed pay the full published price), an entire segment of higher education marketing and public relations efforts has failed to make the desired impact. And in this Web 2.0 era, we’ve seen remarkably little progress in letting prospective college students estimate the “net price” online before applying for admission, being accepted, and filing for financial aid. Exceptions exist. See the examples by Bradley University (admissions.bradley.edu/ssl/estimator/?status=viewtab1) and University of Toledo (www.financialaid.utoledo.edu/estimator/) as possible indicators of the future. BU Strategic Plan: Invest in Faculty Competition for status and prestige in higher education remains intense as schools strive for higher positions in the market place. Boston University is launching a new strategic plan that is similar to the approach started in the 1980s at New York University. BU has just announced plans to invest $1.8 billion over 10 years to attract more prestigious faculty and reduce the student to faculty ratio. President Robert Brown said this about the plan in a Boston Globe interview: “It’s moving Boston University to be in that list of the elite, large, private research universities of America, an NYU, a Penn, a Northwestern.” Details, including relative amounts invested in different academic areas, are here. New Guide to Internal Marketing Internal marketing is too often neglected and yet failure here can have serious consequences when your students send out negative word-of-mouth reports, whether online or in person. Internal marketing expert Sybil Stershic sent word Monday that her new book “Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care” is ready for online purchase. Learn more about the book and Sybil here. 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! 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. November 29-30, San Francisco, CA: The Aslanian Group, “Recruiting and Retaining Adult and Graduate Students.” Program and registration details are at www.aslaniangroup.com. December 5-6, Miami, FL: The Aslanian Group, “Everything Online.” Register now at www.aslaniangroup.com. December 10, Chicago, IL: CASE District V Conference, “Writing Right for the Web: Engage Your Visitors and Improve Your Search Engine Visibility.” Read the session description at www.casefive.org/conference/2007/web.cfm. 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. 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 Six key services can help you improve your online marketing success:
Marketing Communications Website Review Gerry McGovern’s Customer Carewords Research Content Copywriting Services Competitive Website Reviews Writing Right for the Web On-Campus Workshops Learn more about each service at www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/whatwedo.html. Newsletter Archive
2 December 2008 |