4-Step Marketing Engagement Approach for Higher Education to Improve Efficiency

Step 1 - Know Your Students

Do you know who makes up your student body? I mean REALLY understand their lifestyle, what they consume (watch and read), and why they picked your institution? Did you know that prospective students are more interested in the makeup of the student body (culture) when making a college decision, than in your offerings? Early on, students create a short list of schools based upon geography, offerings, and extracurricular activities, however, a school’s culture and learning environment are the most important factors in making a final decision.

In order to understand the makeup of your student body, we recommend appending lifestyle segmentation data to your student list to understand the lifestyle clusters of your student body To do this, you would simply need use an analysis tool that uses a prospective student's address (zip code and/or zip+4) with a key field so you can append the information back to your core list. In other words, you do not need to provide names of your students (no privacy issues), rather, just the addresses and way to link the socio-economic cluster assignment for each back to your database. With this information, we will return back to you a report showing who your students are, what they consume (radio, TV, print), and their socio-economic status.

Step 2 - Know Why Students Choose You

Once you have established the key socio-graphic and demographic criteria (clusters) of your current student body related to a given program, the next step is providing a clear understanding of why your college or university was selected. Analyze primary groups of like-minded “clusters” and identify the key apprehensions and triggers that turned the final decision in your favor. With this information, you can purchase lists of prospective students fitting the same profiles (predictive analytics), and develop personalized marketing materials that touch on points that are proven to be important. This is the approach companies like Sears®, Verizon® and other well known b-to-c companies take to eliminate marketing waste and maximize the chance for a program’s success. Additionally, the approach provides you with a much deeper level of understanding of your marketing activities to enable more accurate predictive analytics.

Step 3: Build the Link between You and Your Prospects - Social Media is King

With the information from your lifestyle segmentation analysis and research in hand, you can provide connections between prospective students and current students through cost effective social media programs and mentor groups. Prospective students will be able to virtually connect with like-minded ambassadors of your school who we know engage in activities and having a similar socioeconomic/ethnic background as your prospective student.

Step 4: Leverage Your Resources!

Baseline, Automate, Capture, Profile, and Adapt. There are powerful marketing tools now available to save money by automating your existing marketing tasks while providing enhanced transparency into your prospecting process to maximize “yields” and return on marketing investment (ROMI). Here are a few examples of how many schools are streamling marketing tasks using automation to achieve marketing BPO.

· Web-to-Print and Print on Demand – is your internal graphics department struggling to keep up with internal custom requests? If so, you can set up self-service variable templates of common jobs (postcards, posters, formal invites, etc.) that will allow each school or program to drop in personalized information and imagery (that you provide, OR that the end-user can upload) in order to free you from daily request, while assuring your everyone “stays in brand.”

· Automated Lead Management Systems – Using ECM software (like Eloqua, Marketo, Portrait, and others), your should establish standard outreach programs for one or multiple customer “types.” These tools anable you to standardize and optimize outreach procedure including email templates, response forms, voice and rich media, and other integrated marketing activities. Not only will this take fulfilling individual request off your shoulders, the solution will automatically develop a complete prospect profile based with 100% managerial transparency into your prospecting process in order to predict response levels.

The largest benefit to automating your lead management activities is that you can re-use your marketing materials, easily test new offers, and continually improve your ROMI (return on marketing investment). Over time, lead management automation provides a true strategic advantage because success is achieved though micro (week to week), rather then macro (year to year) testing and improvements. The fact is that over 81% of top performing companies use some kind of lead automation solution (Aberdeen Study of Top Performing Companies, 2008). It’s not surprising, because those companies who have transparency into their lead management process quickly build knowledge which is immediately applied to enhance success.

For a complete with over 120 hours or the most recent research pertaining to the state of Higher Eduction, industry trends, marketing best practices, lifestyle cluster analysis tools, social media marketing management information, automated marketing set-up documentation, 2009 articles and much more, please email me, and I'll send you my "Excellence for Higher Education Marketing" toolkit. email jward@nugraphics.com for the kit (be sure to include your address!).

Social Media - The Dinner Party Approach to Getting Started

Getting involved in social media is like attending a dinner party.

First, find the people or groups discussion interesting topics related to your industry. Try to pick groups that are as specific to your areas of expertise as possible. For instance, rather than picking "marketing professionals" with 23000 members. Try to find a group of marketing professionals discussing topics you are not only interested in, but ones that you have insight into and that you can derive business from. My background is in b to b marketing, with a specific focus on printing, high tech, and marketing automation consulting. Therefore, my groups include business to business marketing groups around printing, high tech, marketing automation and the like. I listened in first, and only comment when I know I can add value and insight not already found in others comments. Opening your own blog (free) using a tool like Blogger (Google Product) or the like, will allow you to write articles on a particular subject and then drive people to your blog for more of your writings. We are all now publishers of content, so make it quick, interesting and if possible a little humorous. We all like to be entertained.

My blog can be found at http://jonward7.blogspot.com/ for examples. I try to only write articles on topics I'm either passionate about (personal, even), or know in-depth. And always, I keep to my personal brand as a marketing communications and branding expert.

You'll find when you make thoughtful postings, people will reach out to you and try to link to your content and/or follow you. Over time, you'll find that people will often just find you for help in your area of expertise...

Social Media - What it is, What it Isn't, and How Companies are Using It (or Should!)

Social Media is a marketing tool that provide companies with an opportunity for not only band extension, but also is unique in its ability to form a 2-way dialogue with prospects and customers. Companies are presented with the opportunity to achieve the following marketing goals:
1) Positioning your company as an expert within your space of vertical markets
2) Extend your brand personality or traits
3) Build end-user and prospect communities around products or solutions
4) Overall, it's a conduit to drive interest in your brand on a one-to-one basis

Social media can be broken down into two major "types" or categories:
1) Corporate or "Owned" - This includes corporate blogs, user groups, and other two-way communication channels on the web. Your company's social media activities provide you with th ability to offer thought leadership (blog articles - which is a LOT like PR, but should be shorter with the goal of driving a discussion), encourage customers to comment on solutions, and even drive product innovation. There is no room for trying to jump up on a pedestal. Your goal here is to provide valuable insight and information to the target audience, or even ask questions of the target audience to build peer-to-peer knowledge (i.e. shared knowledge). Try to image the topics (and depth of topic) you might share at a industry cocktail party or meeting. What would you discuss? What do your prospects and customers find interesting or challenging?

2) "Third Party" Social Media Outlets - community sites where users can comment on a subject, discuss what's on their mind, complain, contribute and provide accolades and recommendations around certain products or subject matters. Your company needs to track the various sites, see how people communicate, what they are saying, how they are saying it, and once you have a solid grasp of a given community you can start contributing and responding to topics or discussions. 'Third Party" social media sites (like LinkedIn's Groups Tool (business-facing), my3cents.com (consumer-facing), and others) is much different than any other media conduit we've ever seen as marketers. Companies need to know where their customers are visiting, what they are saying, and join the conversation WITHOUT selling. Be sure to offer value and also that you are extending a documented brand personality (i.e. brand traits) in every communication.

The "Owned" Category can be much like PR -although your postings cannot simply be press releases. Blogs and the like provides you with the ability to publish articles, ideas, and even take controversial stances in order to spur conversation.

On the flip side, "owned" customer or user groups provide a forum for and access to customers' thoughts, ideas, issues and (if done right) product and customer support innovation. Corporations are just need to be "thick-skinned" enough to listen to honest feedback, as well as have a plan for responding to both positive and negative discussions or comments. I recommend that customer social media groups be for customers only (not the general public) to there is some accountability and so that you can respond to any crises that may and will arise.

Crisis Management:
We've all seen the bad side of social media. Because customers can post anything they want whenever they want, you need to have a crisis plan in place should should negativity around your brand spiral out of control. Here are a couple examples of the dangerous side of social media:
1) Dominos Pizza - employees placed a YouTube video showing them breaking about 100 health violations to the food they served to clients. In response, the president of Dominos posted his own video illustrating what they were doing to rectify the problem.
2) United Airlines - a customer's guitar was damaged (badly) by the baggage handlers. After a year of trying to get the $1200+ back from the company to fix the $3,500 guitar, the singer/song writer and FORMER customer has kept to his promise to customer service. He's written a song and published a video on YouTube called "United Airlines Breaks Guitars." http://tinyurl.com/l8vznc

A warning... much like many people in 1995 who thought the Internet was going to replace their sales staff (a slight exaggeration), social media needs to be right-sized, balanced and planned for as one of the many communications tools marketers have at their disposal. It's very different from anything else we've seen, but nothing is better for creating a dialog with prospects and especially customers and/or customer groups in order to allow people to see what you do, and especially to show your corporate personality (i.e. a direct line to your corporate culture and brand personality). Using the dating analogy, social media provides an opportunity to show "what your like as a person" along with providing a opportunity to show how you think/feel about issues - much like a blog.

Bank Marketing - How you can succeed as a marketer!

I've worked with many banks, and the correct answer to the question of how to succeed in marketing banking products is tightly linked to bank location, local competition and especially psychographic and demographic profiles. What I normally do, is apply Claritas' system for customer profiling to a given bank's customer base (i.e. tag customer records in a banks MCIF system) and track attrition rates by branch within profile.

Having analyzed and executed research studies for 5 different banks, you'll find:
1) 80% to 90% of a regional bank's customers come from only 8-12 different profile clusters (out of 66 total cluster profiles that make up 100% of the population).
2) The number of products per customer will average 2.5 - 3.5
3) The rate seekers will average 1-2 products
4) People don't change banks because of rates! In a study I completed including 500 banking customers, 90% of people change banks due to a personal change (new job in a different location, or new residence) or bad customer service (bad experience). Changing banks is simply to much of a hassle for people to worry about a .5% (or less) change in checking interest.
5) The only rate seekers are for mortgages, HELOCs and CDs. Very few people will change banks for more checking account interest (really, none)
6) When people do change banks, they are more concened about convenient location first, and fees second. Not much else.
7) The only real way to add deposit customers is to have top of mind awareness when a trigger happens (4, above). The only other way is to grab them with a low rate on a product listed in 5, above, and then cross sell the other products to the new customer.

Overall, the best way to achieve customer success in banking is to maximize the number of products per customer through cross-selling, establishing strong brand awareness, and wrapping every customer engagement with stellar customer service and support - so your customers don't leave you.

I've had many banking clients since 1994 (10+) and with each one, these rules held true.

Poetry & Word Power

This was in response to a Newsletter article I read that highlighted a workshop that she attended that focused on writing poetry to help improve communications skills... My response...

Amy - I am a frequent reader of poetry and I found your article quite appropriate. I read poetry to my children – especially if we a discussing a certain subject. I even introduce them to the power of Haiku’s! As an adult the Haiku is simply amazing (originated in the 1600s in Japan as a way of helping warriors balance the mental with the physical) – Basho is the best known and here’s his best known Haiku.

Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water

With these few words, look at what he conveyed! You can picture the pond, the time of year, the frog, the sound – it’s amazing!

I read this to my 7 year old (and others) and asked:
What time of year is it?
How big is the body of water?
What is the temperature outside?
What time of day is it?
What is in the water?
What does it look like around the pond (trees, birds, flies, etc.)

Continuing on down this path, think of songs we take for granted and review their beauty and simplicity – as well as their ability to convey a great mental picture with words.

Twinkle, twinkle little star
How I wonder what your are
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky.

Applied to what we do today, it’s important for us all (as business writers) to be efficient AND to continue to paint emotional pictures that are passionate and moving. The latter is often forgotten in business writing, however it’s essential to convey feeling through the use of more powerful and emotional words (adjectives & gerunds). This is the premise of the “Word Power” system you might have heard about, which teaches us that every word that we use has power and meaning unto itself.

For example, rather than writing a bill called “Breakfast Subsidy Program for Underprivileged Children”, the system would instruct you to pick a name that legislators would feel proud to vote for (or afraid to vote against) like “The SmartStart Nutrition Program for Children.” Same bill, same benefit, yet the latter makes legislators think twice before voting against it. Again, it all comes down to transitioning your writing from product facts without emotion and powerful words, to adjectives that affect a more positive and personal emotional connection in order to achieve a desired result (like voting for a bill, in this sample).

The word power system is being used in Washington and at the state level to help get programs approved. You might enjoy looking into the system (not buying it, but just understanding it) if you have not already done so. It’s really helped my business writing!

Pinewood Derby...

Over the past 2 months, my two sons and I have been working on preparing racers for the Cub Scout's Pinewood Derby. What a great tradition! In talking to other fathers and scouts, nearly all shared fond memories of working on the cars together. This got me thinking about how great these generational activities are! And conversely, how so often we often look to the next best thing rather than allowing ourselves to find comfort (and even excitement) in tradition.

Weigh-in was last night, and it was crazy, fun, and exciting to see everyone getting his car ready for the big race. Plus, nearly every person was feeding of the nostalgia and history of this event. You could see how close building the cars brought father & son. Quite touching!

All for now - time to head out!

Jon