Stamats Integrated Marketing Conference - Take aways

There were many more presentations at the Stamats Integrated Marketing Conference than the four I highlighted last week. I tried to present here those that I felt were most worthwhile for DU.

There was repetition during the three days - which can be good or bad, I suppose, and there were breakouts I didn't go to, of course, plus a couple of things that just plain didn't pass my 'who cares?' test.

If you read nothing else here, do read these takeaways from the conference.

• Davenport has owned the adult market in the past - we need to sharpen those recruiting skills and get back into it. The economy, especially in Michigan, and the demographics demand it. One immediate 'fix' - help adults find what they need on our website.
• We have a good brand position, but we need to strengthen it. Careers is the word we own, and we need to aggressively run with it.
• We'd do well to invest in some strong, memorable (award winning wouldn't be bad, either!) creative to help cement our brand promise in the minds and hearts of our audiences, internal and external.
• We must strive to create our brand as experience in the minds and hearts of our audiences. We have a very good start with our new employee orientation - we need to build on that across the university and extend the promise of that experience to external audiences as well.
  

Brand lessons from Fritz's brand presentation

• Strong brands are built on research, character, and vision
• Strong brands require an enduring commitment
• Strong brands get everybody excited
• Strong brands are built on strategy that works for you
• Strong brands tell strong stories
• Strong brands need equally strong communication vehicles
• Strong brands build strong relationships
• Strong brands evolve over time: your marketing should evolve with it
  

Statmats Integrated Marketing Conference: Building Brand

Building a Brand for Colleges and Universities in the 21st Century
Why it still matters

Fritz McDonald
Stamats

Prospects are tuning us out -

• Information overload - Average consumer is exposed to nearly 3,000 commercial messages a day
• People are leaving traditional media - newspapers are dying, loss of messaging with TIVO, iPods, pop-up blockers, etc.
• The web is becoming traditional media
  

Marketing efforts seem more and more futile

• Target audiences more fractionalized - parents, adults, grad students, etc
• Spending more, getting less
• Technology is the future - but how do we leverage it?

... And there are problems

• Prospects are going to the competition
• Enrollment declining; applicant pool shrinking
• Competition for best adult students is fierce
• Alumin involvement/giving is flat - young alumini harder to reach
• Graduation, retention and satisfaction rates fallin
• Not attracting best employee candidates
• Negative word of mouth is leaking out
  

A strong brand can break through these challenges

• Strong brands bring people together - create contagious passion
• A strong brand can last forever - has enduring impact on everything we do

A brand is -

• Intangible—not just a look, letterhead, or logo
• Action—a promise that an organization makes to its most important external and internal audiences
• Signifier—tells the world who you are and what you stand for
• Expectation—delivers a feeling through experience

Brand = position = your name

• Goal of all branding - own a word in your marketplace. What is DU's word? Careers
• Preparing students for careers is our most valued position
• When someone thinks careers, DU's name should be first in their minds
• The essence of brand marketing and positioning is in the power of your name

Higher education brands

• Usually involve clarifying/strengthening, rather than creating a brand
• The most effective brands are built from your institution's core values

Challenges

• Successful brand marketing is more than anything a function of institutional will
• Must focus outward toward customer rather than inward

Build a brand

• Make a brand promise that matters
• Communicate the promise (internal communication, training! DU's employee orientation is an excellent start; internal communication is strong and needs to get stronger)
• Live the promise
  
• Strengthen the promise
  

Your brand promise must be

• Understandable
  
• Important
• Believeable
• Distinctive
  

Your messages must be

• Relevant (understandable, important, believable, distinctive)
• Repeated
• Remembered
• Noticed!!!
  

Brands tell stories

• Distinctly
• Emotionally
• Creatively
• Convincingly
• Consistently
  

Advertising isn't enough - you must be memorable

• Stand-out creative is a MUST
• Creative must arise from your strategy
  
• Creative must operate on multiple levels of integration - think everywhere, everything
• Creative must work through traditional and non-traditional touchpoints - those we haven't thought of before
• Work from digital out - not the other way around
• Creative must deliver an experience
  
The experience delivered through the creative must match the experience delivered on campus (Don't try to show that you're something you're not)

Launch internally

• Make it a show - to build support with internal audiences, help them own it, too
  
• Present brand portfolio, including the rationale and creative
• Provide guidelines on how to communicate the brand, how to live the brand
  

Launch externally

• Launch it - don't just leak it.
• Do the easy-obvious things first, celebrate early successes
• Communicate success - especially those that impact bottom line directly
  
• Show outcomes - not just the output
• Stay in it for the long haul - tweak where you need to, keep it going; don't quit or change course

10 brand domains - places your brand needs to be seen, heard, advanced and lived

• Mission and Vision (Your brand begins here)
• Finance and budget
• Academic affairs
• Student recruiting and financial aid
• Student development/retention
• Advancement and alumni relations
• Facilities planning
• IT
• Marketing
• HR

In other words, the brand is not just Marketing's domain, so ...

• Help people understand their role through communication, training and development
• The entire university experience must deliver on our brand promise
• Enlist others across the university in brand stewardship
• Review regularly to maintain, freshen, strengthen the brand

Building and maintaining your brand is the same type of long-term commitment that we make to building academic quality or our campus master plan.

Our goal is to build brand equity among internal stakeholders and external audiences.

Over time, a successful brand strategy will become
the central organizing purpose for the institution
and will be indistinguishable from a successful
strategic plan.

Stamats Integrated Marketing Conference - Creating a Web 2.0 Plan

Still here at the Stamats Integrated Marketing Conference in Chicago. Blogging a few things I find particularly of interest.

Creating a Web 2.0 Plan
Fritz McDonald and Lara Marsh
Stamats

Note: For the purposes of this presentation it seems, Web 2.0 is defined in terms of its social media aspects.

Web 2.0 foundational principles

Participatory culture

• Active vs. passive users
• Millennials are highly skilled web users.
• Content creates community
• Content belongs to everyone
• Open platform vs. closed portal

It's about making and sharing content

• Creating content is a social act.
  
• 64% of teens online are content creators
• Primary function is to display user content.
• Attracts users and creates traffic.
  

Three institutional approaches to social media

1. Build your own network

• Develop and support a network people will want to join. Create something different. Model success of other social media sites like Twitter. Create value – what can you give, what service can you provide? Example: Financial Aid advice. Build a community around something you already started. – comments on DU's Virtual Tour for example. Don’t think gimmick, think value
• Map your audiences: where are they, what do they care about most? Design for their content consumption preferences
• Define foundational content: informative, engaging, build sustained relationships. How will you share? User-generated/institution-generated mix - enabling user generated content is key.
• Build the site: who leads the community (community management team), what size will you take on, features, look and feel
• Recruit community members – internal, external ambassadors, invite target audiences inside and out, be transparent/don’t manipulate. Promote your site to generate traffic, participate in at least 5 social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. Visit forums, make announcements to friends, send to email lists. Direct marketing, advertising, collateral also
• Link content to content sharing sites – bookmarklets, etc. (we have sharing tools on www.davenport.edu: email this, Del.icio.us, Facebook, Digg, Technorati, Google, Yahoo!, Reddit.
  

2. Join in and participate on a network

• Understand the community ground rules. Study dynamics, language, styles. Listen to the conversations – most important. Fit in. Share your institutional character
• Decide platform – blog, social network/combination. New Facebook Platform is specifically for institutions.
• Avoid traditional marketing pitches
• Work with the community – add value, offer advice, service, knowledge. Be transparent. Avoid institutional jargon – talk to them in their language. (Sees Target’s corporate Facebook page as one of most successful.) Don’t just put up photos and say "Call us." Offer discussion or Q & A on "Why go to college?" for example. (Note to web team: The NEXTERS!)
• Participate in forums and message boards - discussion thread to create brand ambassadors.
• Commit – time, resources (community manager is a must), link outward, guide, respond. Rules: members are advisors, encourage candor, pay attention to what members initiate, keep experimenting/innovating

3. Employ other 2.0 technologies/approaches

• Blogs – most popular choice. Try not to censor. 70% of social networkers say they read others’ blogs. You don’t have to respond to trolls, but you must respond to legitimate questions and concerns (use moderated comments)
  
• Photo posting on sites like Flickr – 73% of teens upload photos. You get comments, a chance to join in the discussion. Davenport's Flickr site is here. We could do much more with this.
• Video – key is enabling comments. Keep authentic as possible. DU has posted our TV spots and a few other videos on YouTube, also embedding the videos on our website. This needs further attention, too.

Conclusion: Davenport has done a few scattershot things, none of them particularly strategic. We need a concerted, sustained effort toward our social media strategy this year (and we will!).

Stamats Integrated Marketing Conference: Marketing in the Age of Engagement

The Stamats Integrated Marketing conference, Chicago, day two: Monday morning's keynote by Tim Williams, founder of Ignition had some good nuggets.


Marketing in the Age of Engagement without spending a fortune on advertising
Tim Williams, Ignition

Marketing in the "Age of Engagement" is not about shouting at strangers. It’s about building connections with friends.


By 2011 the internet will become the #1 advertising medium in the world.

• Last week more people watched YouTube than watched the top 10 network television shows.
• All media except magazines are in decline. Internet is up – fastest growing medium. Search is fastest growing segment of the internet

The new reality

• Mass vs. One- to -one communications
• Mass media channels vs. Everything as channels
• What vs. where and when
• Brand as perception vs. Brand as experience
• Exposure vs. Engagement
• Controlled communications vs. Open conversations
• Long-term campaigns vs. short-term measurement (visitors, clicks, time-on-page, for example)
  

Your relevant message must occur in a relevant time and a relevant place. Move beyond the big creative idea to the big media idea. Example: Milk gallon with Cheerios label

Think of Google and/or YouTube as your home page - it is where people are looking for information about you.

You need to engage in the online conversation. Do not offer defense or positioning/marketing messages - offer helpful information. (Check out the conversation going on at Urban Planet about DU. How do we engage with that?)

Treat consumers as the new media. They’re out there telling stories, talking about their experiences to such a degree that it transcends traditional media.

• 1/3 of all adults have created content for online.
• How do we harness this enthusiasm for the consumer to be a content creator?
  

4^th dimension of advertising = ambassadors. That’s what you want to create

10 steps to creating a social media plan

• List Keywords and search phrases that describe your organization, brand, competition and industry. Resource for this: AdWords
• Define size of social media universe for your keywords. How many are searching for those terms? Check using Google Blogsearch
• Determine the size of your brand’s social media footprint
• Diagnose your brand’s online reputation. Watch with Google Alerts, Technorati
• Identify the purpose of you social media program: build positive brand awareness, manage brand’s reputation, improve search engine rankings, drive relevant traffic
• Select right tools: blogs, videos, widgets and gadgets, profile pages on social sites
• Create contact strategy for key influencers – engage the evangelists, neutrals, detractors. You want especially to engage the evangelists (student blogs)will be a good way to do this)
• Listen, participate and engage in online conversation. Make useful comments, provide useful information, provide useful links. STOP selling/controlling. Participate
• Constantly measure and refine. Nielsen BuzzMetrics, ,BuzzLogic, Umbria. Dedicate time to it - at least 1/2 day a week devoted to monitoring what's out there.

Just start somewhere, but start now.

Conclusion:

Move from broadcasting to narrowcasting.

• Broadcasting: A little content for lot of money reaches a few people.
• Narrowcasting: Alot of content for a little money reaches many people.

Stamats Integrated Marketing Conference - How to Reach Adult Students

Well, here I am at the Stamats Conference in Chicago, today through Wednesday. I'll be posting notes from sessions as I'm able. I won't be live blogging as I'd planned, since, inexplicably there is no wireless internet available in the Marriott's 4th floor conference rooms. It's only in the lobby and the 2nd floor conference center. Go figure.

How to reach adult students and nail down what they want from an educational experience
Brenda Harms, Ph D.

The college recruiting marketplace is a perfect storm – 3 ‘gales’

• Changing demography
• Rising cost to attend
• Increased competition for students and donor dollars

Colleges traditionally are slow to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

Marketplace realities

• Half the populations lives in the south – 10 states
• Youth population in MI will decrease until 2010
  
• 9% decrease in HS grads in MI to 2018
  
• by 2015 36% will be students of color. Many students of color are uncomfortable at private school

Predictions

• Increased enrollment among: Students of color, adults, seniors, commuters, part time students, women
• Public school enrollment is on the rise; privates are in a tough spot
• Globalization of higher ed. is on the rise
• Erosion of US as world education leader
• More US students are going abroad to study

For-profits have things to teach us

• Customer service is key. Probably the biggest single thing you can do at your school
• Career placement
• High-demand curricula – need to be able to change on a dime. New curricula – most institutions can’t roll out new programs very quickly
  
• Flexible academic calendar
  
• Pricing and cost – financial aid availability/marketing
  
• Scale economies and operating efficiencies
  
• Online programs. Business and industry across the country are comfortable with online degrees, vs. 20 years ago. Only higher ed still turns up their noses at online

Students increasingly don’t get the difference between public, private and f0r-profit institutions.

Students don't understand the meaning or implications of accreditation. Neeed to educate prospects on that.

Who are adult students?

• No clear definition – blurry line. What is DU definition?
• If you’re not 18, living residentially, and going full time, you are an adult – one definition.
• Only 16% of students are 18-22 and attend fulltime.
  
• The over-25 population is the fastest growing population for the last 30 years.
• Today's student: 40% are part time, 40% – two year school, 47% are 25 or older, 58% are 22 and older

Motivators: Why do adults enroll?

• Major life transition
• Career change
• Career advancement
• Educational requirement for job
• Second or third career
• personal achievement/fulfillment

What they look for

• Flexible schedule
• Convenience (in and out parking, one-stop – make it easy through the entire enrollment/financial aid sytem) Adult students will leave easily if you make them jump thru hoops … btw, adjuncts (real world experience) faculty a plus with adults
• Credit for Life experience
• Accelerated completion – time is money.
• Valid learning experience – not here for the social life
• Multiple learning alternatives – nights, weekend, online

Top 4 considerations

• Flexible schedule
  
• Cost to attend
• Transfer in credits
• Convenient location

Major concerns

• Paying for school
• Managing time between family and school (postcard ‘to the child of …’ says ‘we understand your life’)
• Managing time between work and classes

How are they finding you?

• 96 % are looking at your WEBSITE - needs to be something on your site that says “adult learners” see Ivy Tech’s site – half traditional/half adult.
• 89% are contacting admissions office directly
• 78% general web search
• 70% word of mouth

How to use this info

• leverage adult student motivators (above) in marketing, program creation, services
• Pull heart strings (tell stories - marketing)
• Discuss potential income (be program specific)
• Graduate level – market position, authority and power
• Educate students on actual costs
• Personal success stories that address the issue of time and work
• Promote top considerations (above)/ desired attributes
• Promote that 'other thing' that makes you better – everyone lists costs, convenience, flexibility. Example: DU could tell individual faculty stories as a way to promote academic excellence
  

10 ways to get it right

• Recognize differences in adults learners vs. traditional students in recruiting, programs, services
• Invest in human capital and training – staff, faculty. It’s about service.
• Leverage personal enrichment factors.
  
• Explain the great mysteries of financial aid. Consider adult student-only scholarships (a few hundred dollars works wonders – shows person someone is interested in making an investment in them.)
• Website – you need an adult student presence there! Address the adult student’s key concerns.
• Examine/reconsider your institutional policies toward adult friendly policies for giving credit for life experience (even 3 credits is something - you don't have to give away degrees!) and for transferring in college credit
• Leverage Personal Enrichment in marketing. If it makes you cry, use it. Tell stories - they get a lot of mileage. The ‘what are you waiting for?’ angle. “where do you want to be x years from now?”
• Take lessons from the for-profit world: Recruitment – immediate and next day call backs. Retention – personal, individual advising
• Make sure you can deliver on what matters most to adults: Flexible scheduling, cost, convenience
• Take a hard look at your internal processes: financial aid processes, advising, phone service, website.
  

Final note: DU has a good marketing budget for adult recruiting, plus good, adult-oriented customer service in some areas, most notably in locations away from main campus. We have in the past been very good with the adult learner market. But by not have an adult learner section on our website, we are losing the advantage of our biggest single marketing tool