Recently in Integrated Marketing Category

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 

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/ 

You can't do any better than the Pew Internet & American Life Project research reports on how people are using the Internet. The most recent report on "Adults and Social Network Websites" was just released on 14 January.

After reading the report, some elements that seems to stand out for higher education marketers recruiting adult students and wondering how to best integrate social media into their recruitment communication plans.

• 75% of adults 18-24 have social network profiles somewhere, as do 57% of adults from 25-34. Expect that last percent to grow steadily as some people age and others continue to join for the first time.
• Participation falls off rapidly past age 34, declining to 30% for people 35-44 and less than 20% for anyone older than that.
• As of last spring, MySpace was the place of choice for 50%, with Facebook at 22% and only 6% at LinkedIn.
• Men and women participate at about equal rates.

Some possibly unexpected findings:

• African-Americans (43%) and Hispanics (48%) participate at higher rates than Whites (31%).
• Based on income, the participation rate is highest among families with annual incomes of less than $35,000.
• Based on education, the participation rate is higher for people with less than a high school education (43%) than for those who have completed college (33%).

Twitter fans take note: the survey data is from spring and fall 2008, so it started well before the "boom" for Twitter. And the impressive growth rate for Twitter is based on a leap from a small beginning. LinkedIn still has far more users than Twitter.

Marketing notes from this report:

• If you want to reach adults on the social networks, consider MySpace as well as Facebook. Demographics differ so this one depends in part on the profile of the person you are trying to enroll. According to a November report, Facebook has now passed MySpace in total users, but both are in the 14-15 million range.
• MySpace users are more likely to be women, African-American and Hispanics without college degrees, while Facebok users are more likely men with college degrees.

Most adults use their social networks to stay in touch with the friends they already have. There's nothing in the Pew report about how open people are to advertising on the social network sites. Like any other form of advertising, done correctly you should expect good results.

LinkedIn is worth a special test to advertise to upwardly mobile young professionals looking for online degree opportunities. About 4 million people are using LinkedIn now and many if not most of them are very interested in advancing their careers.

My sense is that higher education marketers hold Facebook in higher regard than MySpace and thus don't pay quite as much attention to each as they should. Given the origins of Facebook, that's understandable. It might also be a marketing mistake. DIOSA Communications is one of the better places for frequent updates on both these sites and others as well.

That's it for now. Explore the Pew Report and you'll no doubt find more information of special value to your own adult recruitment plans.

In the last couple of weeks, interesting new ad campaigns have come from Kaplan University and University of Phoenix. Today's comments are for the Phoenix effort.

In a nutshell: strong up-front creative but weak integration of what follows with the original marketing theme.

The new online campaign first appeared on my LinkedIn page... a good placement given that Phoenix is in search of professionals who might need more education to advance their careers. The creative theme in the ad also is strong... portrait of an individual person's success story with the prompt to "Be a Phoenix." For some, that just might mean rising from the professional ashes of a career damaged or destroyed in today's economy. Or it might just mean becoming a Phoenix alumnus. Either way, it works.

Following the link in the ad brings you to a strong landing page at http://tinyurl.com/9j5492 

The landing page repeats and reinforces the "Be a Phoenix" theme as it should. And there's an important message that Phoenix has 15 years experience in distance learning. Nice to know when some schools are just starting out.

And so I completed the inquiry form. In doing that, one element appeared that I haven't seen before... a place to indicate my agreement that since I had given them my phone number (I always use a false number and that part of the response plan is not included in this review) and it was OK to call me. 

An email response came just seconds after the inquiry form was submitted. That's about as fast as it gets. Great response time. And that's also where things started to fall apart:

• There's nothing in the email about the "Be a Phoenix" concept. If I click on one of 6 student images, I get to a curious page that isn't quite right. It does offer video stories based on the "Be" theme, but this page wasn't created just for people moving on from the email. It includes an opportunity to inquire again (is this a landing page for another campaign or for an online search?). It gives me a path to information about available programs and campus locations... but I already gave a program interest and a distance learning preference when I completed the first inquiry form. All in all the page at http://response.phoenix.edu/ just doesn't fit as well as it might. The stories are good; much of the rest isn't relevant at this point.
• The email is personalized by name but everything else is generic for any inquriy. This email should link me to more information about the program of interest that I told them about when completing the original inquiry.
• In the center of the email is a link to a "Quick Start Guide to Becoming a Student" that leads to an 11-page PDF that has no content about how to "Become a Phoenix." I'd bet major dollars that this hard-to-read PDF existed before the new ad campaign and was first prepared as a printed document. For sure, the people doing the campaign creative didn't have anything to do with this. The PDF appears at 103 percent of the page size. You can't see an entire page at one time until shrink the page to 75 percent. Not everyone visitor will know how to do that.
• A link at the end of the email also leads to http://response.phoenix.edu/

So what do we have here? A campaign with an impressive new creative approach to introduce people to the University of Phoenix brand. The message of "Be a Phoenix" seems strong. But like many online advertising campaigns, not enough time, energy, and money was spent on the follow-up to get maximum conversions from the initial effort.

The primary rule is simple... if you ask for and get important personal information like the name of the degree program I'm interested in and how I want to study it, then send me an email that builds on what I've already told you. Connect me directly to that program. 

And don't, for heavens sake, use the email to connect me to an 11-page "Quick Start" PDF that's hard to read, has background information of no interest, and gives me no chance to connect from that document to anywhere else at Phoenix. That's not a Quick Start to anywhere except maybe to another university. 

Reading through my email newsletters this morning and found a valuable entry from DM News reporting the successful use of email as part of an overall marketing campaign. The goal was increasing participation in fund raising events for breast cancer research sponsored by the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and the National Philanthropic Trust Breast Cancer Fund.

The complete article is at http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/e-mail-marketing/41350.html

Note these highlights:

• Email was part of an integrated "multichannel" campaign that included direct response TV, radio, billboards, newspaper, direct mail, lead generation, and search.
• Email recipients were selected according to demographic and geographic criteria to build as accurate a target audience as possible of people who were likely to take part in fund-raising walks.
• A preliminary email was sent (that included an opt-out choice) announcing people would receive "a few marketing messages over the next few weeks."
• Emails were then sent every second week over an 8 week span.
• Results of the email component were tracked every two weeks by matching email registrations and requests for information against the master file of people receiving the email messages.

All of these steps can of course be used for email campaigns by colleges and universities, particularly that first step announcing the campaign and giving people a chance to opt-out right from the start.