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Higher education marketing: a challenging future continues in 2011

Higher education marketing in 2010... what most stands out when I close my eyes and think about the past 12 months of continuity and chaos in higher education?

No special order to these notes, just taking a moment to share the highlights from client connections, webinar questions, conference presentations, professional colleagues and personal friends.

8 marketing points that are top of mind today:

• If predictions (see "60 Minutes" from last Sunday) about the upcoming financial stress on state and local governments is even half true, we haven't nearly seen the end of financial turmoil on the public side of higher education. More cuts coming in most states. Huge in some.
• Residential, "liberal arts" institutions that don't have enormous reputational strength (that's most of them) will continue to face price resistance. Holding enrollment levels and tuition discount rates even in the next few years will be a significant achievement. Various iterations of the "value proposition" face an increasingly difficult uphill slog.
• The tuition discounting plague continues and is spreading from the private sector to the public sector, in part from increased public university competition for out-of-state students. That's the lesson from reading that public sector discounting neared 13 percent in 2008. It can only be higher now.
• The "move to mobile" continues with the ongoing increase in touch-screen smartphone adoption that's making it easier to complete online tasks from 3 inch screens. Limited resources and the proverbial hesitance of higher education to change has meant slow development on the marketing side here (but lots of apps with campus bus schedules) but that's going to change in 2011. Two of my favorite leaders so far are the mobile website at College of Charleston and the complex "Good Old App" at University of Virginia.
• Traditional websites will adapt and change, with a new emphsis on simple design and integration with social media. Is the future showing on the Langara College home page?
• In the social media era, you really can't control what people will say about your brand. Merits of the individual programs aside, that's the lesson learned this year from "D+" at Drake University, "Makers All" at Purdue University, and "AmericanWonks" at American University.
• What future for the for-profit sector? It isn't going to vanish, but the time of super-fast stock growth beloved of investment advisors isn't returning in 2011. That's a good thing. If for-profits are genuine in changing to more careful admissions and increased attention on retention, both the stock holders and students will benefit in the long fun. The correction in 2010 was overdue.
• Online learning will continue to expand as a degree option, for "traditional" students and everyone else, as faculty come to terms with it. For-profits dominate online enrollment now. Efforts at schools like the University of Kentucky to share revenue with faculty who develop online courses may change that.

Humpty Dumpty

Higher education, of course, isn't going away. But we can expect more change to move through the system as public universities and private colleges continue to adjust to the reality that the happy resource times before 2008 are not returning.

Higher education marketing will also adapt, although there is still an undue amount of time spent talking about how better delivery of "brand" and "value" messages might restore the bounty of the past. "Brand" is important. People certainly want "value" at the right price point. But nothing is going to put the Humpty Dumpty that fell off the wall in 2008 back together again.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

2010 was a wonderful year. 2011 is primed for a fine start. Thanks to everyone, from marvelous clients to new and continuing newsletter subscribers and Twitter followers, to colleagues and friends, for helping to make that happen.

That's all for now 

·  Join me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HighEdMarketing

· Subscribe to "Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter" at http://www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/newsletter-subscribe.html 

Customer Carewords and Higher Education Marketing: Task Completion = Marketing Success

Just back on Wednesday from two days in Dublin with Gerry McGovern and Customer Carewords partners from Canada, Norway, Holland, Sweden, Ireland, the U.S. and the U.K.

Online communications are fine, but it is always a special pleasure to meet old and new colleagues in person, share Carewords experiences, and learn how to better serve our clients over the next 12 months.

For Bob Johnson Consulting, this was the busiest Carewords year since the partners first met in 2007, with Customer Centric Index (CCI) surveys completed for American University - Cairo, Ball State University, Bemidji State University, Champlain College, East Stroudsburg University, Rider University, and Susquehanna University.

Here are a few points about creating and managing websites with high marketing impact that we reviewed in Dublin:

• Most important: website management is about managing tasks, not content. To do that well, managers must first be sure they know the tasks that people want to complete on their website. Helping people complete tasks should be the driving force behind initial site design and ongoing site management.
• In Carewords surveys in any type of organization (government, private firm, higher education) it is rare for people to complain about the "visual appeal" of the website. In almost every case, the primary complaint is about "confusing menus and links" that prevent task completion.
• It is impossible to create good navigation without knowing the tasks that bring people to the website. It is impossible to know those tasks without asking web visitors what they are. Survey first, design second.
• A CMS is a mixed blessing as it often leads to content proliferation without regard to whether or not the content helps people complete tasks. Too much content is dangerous to effective navigation and search. Content creators should ask themselves a simple question: what task am I helping people complete by creating this content?
• Much content is created but little content is ever reviewed and removed. To start, use Google Analytics or a similar program to identify pages on a website that are seldom if ever visted. Why are they still on the website?

Higher Education Successes

The experience of Carewords partners over the past year makes us optimistic that web management is moving in the right direction. Consider these higher education examples:

• Gerry was "astonished" at the 90 percent positive rating future students and parents gave to the Susquehanna University website this year.
• The University of Manitoba highlights key tasks directly under the primary audience headings on the home page. Alumni, for instance, can get to "transcripts" in one click from the home page.
• The University of Oslo puts 3 primary student life tasks in a "can't miss" spot at the top of the first Student Life page. Everything else is on another page.

In the new year we'll focus even more on identifying priority tasks and improving task completion rates that will make websites friendlier places for the people who use them.

Brand Reputation and Website Experience

Brand reputation depends in no small part on the experience people have on an organization's website. People who can't easily complete the tasks they wish to complete on your site will not hold your brand in high esteem no matter the tagline used or the smiling students pictured or the video success stories told.

CCI Results at 10 Colleges and Universities

Overall CCI Results at 10 colleges and universities are reviewed in my presentation "Rating Higher Education Websites: The Student Experience" from  the J.Boye conference last November in Denmark that's available on SlideShare.

A CCI survey can help you fine tune your website. Results are usually available about 2 weeks after survey invitations are sent. Contact me at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com   

Student Recruitment: how green is the grass in your yard?

Sometimes you can't escape reading higher education RFPs for marketing services. And those RFPs provide interesting insight into the marketing challenges faced in both the public and private sectors and what people would like to do to meet them.

In the last 30 days I've read RFPs from a selective (but not Ivy League) private university and a large public university that were both planning to hire a marketing firm for assistance in meeting enrollment goals for traditional, residential students. Their problem: historically strong market areas were not producing as many students now as in the past. Their quest: where is the grass greener?

The goal: new students with more money

These schools did not want just any academically qualified students. The private university emphasized students who could afford to pay all or most of the sticker price costs. The public university wanted out-of-state students who would pay higher tuition levels.

And so with their traditional cultivation areas no longer producing the required crop, each place was about to embark on a search for greener pastures. Expand brand recognition and strength. Generate new inquiries. Enroll students from far away. Make more money.

5 Serious "Greener Grass" Problems

How many problems can we list with this "greener grass" strategy? Here are five that immediately come to mind:

• Many schools have the same idea. Will California export enough students to meet enrollment goals everywhere else, and especially in the Northeast?
• Is the budget large enough to support the imaginations at work here? More than one masterfully crafted brand campaign has floundered because the budget would not sustain the long-term effort needed to successfully cultivate brand strength in new markets.
• Is a focus on "full pay" students realistic? Whatever the proverbial "ability to pay," fewer families are willing to spend on high tuition for anything less than schools with top-tier reputations.
• Most students go less than 100 miles from home for higher education.
• Searching for greener grass might mean neglecting the home territory and leaving that open to traditional, near-by competitors.

5 steps for a "greener grass" student recruitment strategy

What elments of a "new" student recruitment enrollment strategy might work? Consider these:

• First, make sure that the yield from your primary enrollment territory is as high as possible. Strengthen what you can to increase yield without additional tuition discounting.
• Do a "pull power" analysis for your current academic majors. Calculate the percent of inquiries that apply and enroll for each major. With some exceptions (some majors are less likely to draw students from far away), programs with the highest "pull power" percents are the best bets for enrollment from new market areas.
• Make sure the high "pull power" programs have really strong website information easily available for students who visit to learn more about them.
• Starting in the high school sophomore year, conduct very focused searches for "greener grass" students around these strong majors, assuming that these are indeed the ones with open space for new students. The purpose of the search? Get students to visit the website pages for these programs. Make it easy to inquire from the academic pages. You're more likely to get students to visit your website than to become an inquiry directly from your search contact. (Keep the inquiry form simple like this one at Creighton.)
• Forget "full pay" and go for "lower than our usual tuition discount" scholarship students. Aim to improve the bottom line without creating an unrealistic financial barrier.

One absolutely essential point

Get those academic website pages in top-order for future students before you do anything else. That's likely to help right in your own backyard before you even start on your Lewis and Clark expedition for new territories.

That's all for now 

·  Join me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HighEdMarketing

· Subscribe to "Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter" at http://www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/newsletter-subscribe.html 

Higher Education Tag Lines: Does your brand really need one?

A friend forwarded to me an RFP recently posted in a CASE listserv. Among a variety of marketing communication and research items included was development of a new "marketing tagline."

The RFP nicely set out the tagline dilemma: "We have not identified a marketing tagline that both resonates with our intended audience(s) and enjoys support from campus constituents."

Mission impossible? You'll easily find more than one marketing communications firm happy to take your money and guide you on your quest.

My personal opinion is that the time, energy, and resources spent developing tag lines far exceeds the marketing rewards reaped from them. Most higher education taglines don't say anything meaningful to potential students about the schools that use them. Exceptions exist, but not many.

After scanning the RFP, I filed the email away. Reading the April 18 Education Life quarterly supplement from The New York Times brought the RFP back to life. What, I wondered, were the taglines used in the print ads from various schools?

Play This Tagline Game

And so here is an invitation to play a game in two parts: 

• Read the list below. Imagine what college or university (or even type of college or university) might fit behind the taglines. Then click on your favorites and see where you end up.
• When you arrive at each home page, do an exercise in integrated marketing: see how long it takes you to find the tag line. Hint: sometime is it quite obvious, sometimes you won't find it at all.

Here are 8 taglines from the Sunday supplement.

• The Edge in Knowledge
• Leading invention, innovation and entrepreneurship
• Founded in San Francisco 1929 By Artists for Artists
• Find Your Edge
• Lasallian Catholic Education Since 1853
• Earn a degree that matters
• The Character of Success
• A College of the Liberal Arts

 That's all for now 

What's the state of higher education in the United States?

"Traumatic change" might be the best two words to describe what's taking place right now and will continue to take place in the immediate future as available resources continue to shrink and schools from Yale University to San Francisco Community College adapt to meet the shrinkage.

Are people at your institution still whistling past the graveyard?  

Over the last two days I've made a quick "copy and paste" collection of news stories that illustrate the change. Had I started a week ago, this would be a much longer list. Here's the array that's come along in the sources I monitor, presented in the order received. No doubt I've missed a few.

• Resistance to "hefty" salary increases for presidents in Idaho at a time of severe budget limitations, defended on the grounds that they are necessary to get the best leaders. Public universities everywhere can expect increased scrutiny of how money is spent. Stories like this only increase the intensity of that scrutiny.

• The largest endowment decrease since World War II, coupled with increased spending from remaining endowment resources on financial aid and general operations. InsideHigherEducation offered another review of the problem, focusing on the differences between small schools that never had large endowments and wealthy institutions entangled in hedge funds.

• A voluntary retirement incentive program at the University of Illinois flagship campus to reduce faculty and administrative numbers. In Michigan, we remember these well as part of an auto industry effort to reduce high salary commitments.

• Williams College ended the "no loans in our financial aid packages" policy that many predict is the first of more to follow at similar institutions. Princeton started the "no loan" trend back in the 1990s to get better yield from middle class students not willing to go into debt for a Princeton degree, partly in the face of generous merit scholarships from second-tier institutions. Both reflected a resistance to debt levels in the face of higher tuition. How high can tuition discount rates go in the private sector to maintain enrollment levels?
 
• "Soaring salaries" at the "very top of the pay scale" at regional Washington state universities from 2007 to 2009, compared to large tution increases at the same time. Another example of increased public scrutiny of how higher education spends money. 

• A "financial state of emergency" in Nevada declared by the Board of Regents. Will academic program reductions be far behind? Reducing programs is underway now at many private and public institutions at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

• Yale University freezes salaries for president, provost, deans and other high level administrators as a symbolic step to help cover a $100 million budget gap.

• Cancelling an entire summer session program at City College of San Francisco to help balance the budget there. 

Shrinking Resources of Every Type

Almost everyone can add similar stories from their own states. Resisting the change underway is a foolish enterprise. Helping to shape the change is not. Cutting salary costs is underway. Cutting academic program costs is underway. The resources available to virtually every college and university, from Yale to the University of Illinois to City College of San Francisco will not be the same over the next 10 years as they have been for the past 20 years.

A New Brand Reality

"Brand strength" will not save individual colleges and universities from change. 

Careful adaptation to new financial realities (lower private giving, lower state appropriations, lower endowments, higher resistance to debt) will force higher education to focus on the "best of the best" at every institution. "Brand" might actually reflect real differences from one place to another as academic programs offered are reduced. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Social Media Marketing... the new Mass Marketing Platform?

At the AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education earlier this week, social media marketing was the hot topic at presentation after presentation. And there was strong interest in how to demonstrate "ROI" from the financial and human investment needed in this area.

ROI is a worthy topic to explore if the goal of social media marketing is to increase conversion in enrollment campaigns or to increase alumni giving rates.

But what if social media marketing isn't about immediate conversion results but general brand awareness? A story in today's Detroit Free Press positions social media as the next mass marketing vehicle. Ford Motor Company is enthusiastic about the results of a 6-month social media campaign to create pre-launch awareness of the 2010 Ford Fiesta, ready for sale next year.

60% Brand Awareness from Integrated Social Media Campaign

Ford gave 100 cars for 6 months to "mostly young, hip drivers" who were "savvy" with Facebook and Twitter and counted on them to ignite a fire of awareness. Read more about the program at the "Fiesta Movement" website. The results:

• 4.3 million video views on YouTube
• 540,000 photo views on Flickr
• 3 million "impressions" on Twitter

As a result of that activity, Ford has measured brand awareness by the public at 60 percent, a level that it projects would have cost more than $50 million in traditional media spending.

Impressive result. But not a car has yet been sold. If you only define ROI by sales results (or students enrolled or dollars raised), there is no direct "ROI" from a campaign like this. 

Note that Ford did one thing that is too often left out of budget-tight higher education branding campaigns: traditional market research that measures results after a campaign is over.

Creative Risk-Taking Needed

If higher education moves forward into social media as fast as ROI measurement allows, that move will not happen very quickly. We need creative risk taking, along with an understanding that measuring the exact impact of individual marketing elements on a final decision to enroll or donate (or buy a car) is not an easy thing. Some would say it is not possible.

What is clear is that we can measure the swirl of activity that does take place around a social media campaign. And we can do that better now than we could for traditional public relations and brand awareness campaigns back in ancient times. We can see and feel and hear the activity taking place. And that just might be all the ROI needed.

That's all for now.

• Join me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HighEdMarketing
• Subscribe to "Your Higher Education Marketing Newsletter" at http://www.bobjohnsonconsulting.com/