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Colleges, universities, and independent schools are under increasing pressure today. With financial, societal, competitive, demographic, and global forces roiling private education, most institutions need to reassess their marketing strategies. These decisions have profound effects on your admissions, retention, and advancement campaigns.
Do you have a strategic marketing plan? Are you using the data from your website, email, and social media to discover what's of interest to your readers? Do you use personlization, benchmarking, and testing to develop and analyze your marketing campaigns?
Services
Marketing Plans
* Communications
Audits
Web Management
* Content Marketing & Blogging
Data-driven Marketing & Analytics
* Lead Gen & Nurturing
Campaign Integration
Digital Marketing
* Video Marketing
* Social Media
Direct/Database
* Personalization
Market Research
Campaign Integration
Do you ever feel like your marketing programs are not in sync? You are not alone. Many educational institutions, and even many businesses with reasonably sophisticated marketing, find themselves missing opportunities to align their themes, programs, stories, and successes, often leading to a inconsistent messaging, confused constituents, and branding challenges.
What is campaign integration? It is the connection between your printed, electronic, social, and human (e.g. Admissions and Development) resources that ensures you are emphasizing the same key points about your school, college, or university. Think of it like the common phrase, "we all have to be on the same page." Some of the areas in which you want your emails, website, newsletters, magazines, print and digital ads, and your own social media to be aligned are:
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Goals
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Language
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Branding
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Strengths/Points of emphasis
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Weaknesses/areas to address
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Statistics/data
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Timing
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"Why" our school/college/university
No Silos
The relevant phrase I hear most often about management and communications in education institutions
is "silo thinking." This is often most pronounced in organizations with long histories, and ironically, success,
because of the "it works, why change" mentality. When admissions, development/advancement, and
communications people work in a vacuum, there may not be immediate problems, but there are often
insidious, long-term effects that gradually change constituent perceptions and tangible results in
enrollment, retention, and fundraising,
If you are integrating your primary messages effectively across all your marketing channels and within your
groups like Admissions and Development that work with your external audiences, congratulations! If you
are struggling, there are many potential areas of your culture, organizational structure and even basics
like your meetings and shared projects that could be at the root of the misalignment.
Does this sound like your institution? Let EdChanges share lessons from our 30 years of silo-busting experience in complex organizations. William Bullard has helped align groups such as communications, admissions, and development in schools and marketing, sales, and product management in the business world.
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