Author Archive

HomeAuthor: ulmer

Pinpoint what’s hot on campus

Posted by:


Pinterest is growing up. The showy image-sharing social media site is not just about pinning pretty pictures anymore, says higher ed marketing specialist McKenzie Coco. Now colleges can measure user engagement thanks to a new built-in analytics tool. pinterest

“Pinterest has taken social media by storm, already catching up to Twitter in its short existence,” says Coco, founder and president of FSC Interactive, an online marketing agency that specializes in social media strategies for higher education. “The addition of metrics solidifies its place in the online marketing sphere. This is not a shiny new toy, but rather a formidable and results-driven online marketing tool.”

The addition of data-mining means colleges can now answer such ...

Continue Reading

Categories: College Recruiting, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, Student Recruiting, Tracking

Into the cloud

Posted by:


Amazing how quickly things can change in today’s digital world. In a survey of Americans seven months ago, one-third said cloud computing literally has to do with clouds and one-half said that bad weather messes with the cloud. More than half said they don’t ever use the cloud even though it turns out 95 percent of them do. Got Cloud?

Compare that to last month when USA Today, the newspaper that prides itself on giving Americans only what they really need to know, published a testimonial to cloud computing, highlighting how it is revolutionizing corporate computing.

“Cloud computing is exploding and growing faster than a swirling funnel crossing the Oklahoma plains,” wrote ...

Continue Reading

Categories: Change, Cloud, Cloud Computing, College Recruiting, CRM, Student Recruiting

Lessons from the NFL

Posted by:


As someone who has worked in both the corporate and higher-ed worlds, I have always been impressed with the willingness of admissions officers to share their successes and failures with colleagues. While corporate marketers operate in secrecy as if they’re Cold War operatives, admissions folks stand up at conferences around the country, telling their competitors and anyone else in the room what worked for them this year, even providing details in case people want to replicate their successes while avoiding their stumbles.

There’s an openness and collaborative spirit that makes higher education unique among industries. That’s why it’s intriguing to hear an expert on enrollment policy suggest that colleges follow the model of the National Football League, and establish rules that ...

Continue Reading

Categories: Change, College Recruiting, Student Recruiting

If you’re not content marketing…

Posted by:


If you’re not content marketing these days, you’re not marketing. That’s the battle cry of Joe Pulizzi, author, speaker and content marketing evangelist.

Six years ago he launched a marketing services website that has evolved into the Content Marketing Institute, aimed at helping organizations move away from interruption-based marketing and toward the creation of a content-centered strategy. Content that is relevant and valuable to readers, likely to generate a sense of trust, and perhaps over time, prompt them to buy from you.

“Basically,” says Pulizzi, “content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering ...

Continue Reading

Categories: Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, College Recruiting, Communication, Content Marketing, Marketing, Student Recruiting

Put the emphasis on social

Posted by:


Building an arsenal of social media to reach prospective students? Got your Facebook page, Twitter handle, YouTube channel? Maybe Pinterest and Instagram accounts and Tumblr too?

It certainly makes sense, since research indicates that two-thirds of high school students use social media to research colleges and more than a third of those students use the sites to help decide where to enroll.

But a recent article in Inside Higher Ed offers this advice: “The number of social media accounts might not be nearly as important as what colleges and universities do with the technology.”

Reporter Alexandra Tilsley talks to some of the people behind the research, and they recommend that you delve into the findings and perhaps reconsider your social media strategy. While ...

Continue Reading

Categories: Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Facebook, Online Experiences, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter

All digital all the time

Posted by:


The country’s advertising elite just got a lesson on the dominance of digital.

Ad Age magazine hosted a conference in San Francisco devoted to the rise of digital marketing tools and techniques. On the opposite coast, Advertising Week filled five days of a New York conference with digital, mobile and social media marketing events.

There were several common themes that are worth remembering whether you’re recruiting students, engaging alumni or cultivating donors.

Digital is transformational. The many tools of the web don’t just represent another communication channel. They are a transformational force that requires organizations to rethink their entire marketing strategies.

Authenticity is paramount. It’s more important than ever to be honest, candid and authentic. It’s better to show ...

Continue Reading

Categories: Authenticity, Branding/Marketing/Recruiting, Communication

How to connect with prospects

Posted by:


Here’s someone who seems to understand college-bound teens, respects them, treats them like adults and assumes nothing when it comes to their understanding of the often bewildering process of choosing an undergraduate institution.

Catherine Sloan is a former enrollment officer at Washington State University who now works for student-coaching company InsideTrack. She offers one of the better collections of best-practice tips for engaging — and eventually recruiting — traditional-age students.

“The key to turning prospective students into enrolled students is to form early and meaningful connections,” she writes, “and to let them know you have their best outcomes in mind.” Here are some of her 13 suggestions:

Leverage a student’s own momentum. When students engage with you, make sure that next steps are ...

Continue Reading

Categories: College Recruiting, Millennials, Student Recruiting

How’s your ROI?

Posted by:


It’s one of those terms that fills most of us with dread.  ROI.  Return on investment.  Justify your existence.

The pressure on higher education seems to be coming from all directions these days, including internal.  And one of those internal pressure points is a growing emphasis on showing where, how and how effectively you’re spending marketing dollars and resources on student recruiting.

The American Association of Community Colleges has recognized this, and is devoting much of its professional development this year on helping members measure return on investment.

Kathy Corbalis, who serves as executive director of college relations at Atlantic Cape Community College, notes that higher-ed marketers “are being asked to demonstrate the value of their work,” and she offers some suggestions for ...

Continue Reading

Categories: College Recruiting, Communication Plans, Marketing, Return On Investment

Presidential wisdom in 140 characters

Posted by:


Babson College President Len Schlesinger extended an invitation to his campus: “Hope to see you tomorrow at 10:30 AM to Meet the Sharks..watch two Babson students pitching their best ideas to Daymond John and Mark Cuban!”

In case you didn’t notice, that invite to a taping of “Shark Tank” is 140 characters long.  It’s a tweet from one of the few college presidents who regularly shares his thoughts via Twitter.  And Lauren Landry, who covers higher education for a Boston news site, can’t figure out why Schlesinger is the exception and not the rule.

“I’m able to follow students, professors, deans and student newspapers, gathering all that I need into 140-character snippets,” she writes.  “The one group missing? College presidents. I follow ...

Continue Reading

Categories: Social Networking, Student Recruiting, Twitter

Ready for your Facebook facelift?

Posted by:


SUNY Cortland believes in looking at the big picture. At least when it comes to Facebook.

So the central New York campus is inviting students, faculty, staff and alums to submit photos for the new cover image that will dominate its Facebook page starting on March 30th. That’s the day the social goliath has set for its worldwide switch to “Timeline,” a redesigned interface that emphasizes photos, especially the one that spans the top of the page.

Many colleges have already converted to the new design, posting everything from breathtaking campus vistas, to inspirational taglines, to depictions of their athletic mascots. Others — like SUNY Cortland — have at least a strategy in place, if not an actual image. But there are ...

Continue Reading

Categories: Authenticity, College Recruiting, Facebook, Social Networking

Facebook without the whining

Posted by:


“I would have written this article sooner,” says business journalist Lydia Dishman, “but I was busy on Pinterest.” Turns out, she wasn’t alone.

In her recent story in Fast Company magazine — entitled “Why Pinterest Is So Addictive” — Dishman explores the reasons this relatively new social networking site is attracting so many people, including, perhaps, students you’re trying to recruit.

Launched in 2010, Pinterest has suddenly exploded in popularity, with nearly 12 million unique U.S. visitors last month. The site is a virtual bulletin board that enables you to create online image collages, then easily share those collages — called pinboards — with other users.

Part of Pinterest’s appeal is that it is visually beautiful and overwhelmingly positive (“like Facebook without the ...

Continue Reading

Categories: College Recruiting, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking

How to redesign a website

Posted by:


When Marketing VP Adrienne Hamson decided to redesign the TargetX website, she immediately thought about making it faster and simpler to navigate.  She knew it had to be more interactive.  And she vowed to make all the product information easily digestible.

But the real challenge, she realized, was to build upon all the best-practice advice that TargetX has become known for — and make the site a place where admissions professionals can go for content that will make them better recruiters and marketersShe succeeded, and TargetX just launched a new website that offers:

  • A video library consisting of the company’s popular “Free on Friday” webcasts aimed at admissions officers.

  • The iThink Blog, a compendium of posts about student recruiting from a variety of ...
Continue Reading

Categories: Campus Visit, College Recruiting, Websites

Writing your school’s resume

Posted by:


You’ve heard it a thousand times — Be distinctive; stand out from your competitors. You can’t do that with your faculty/student ratio, no matter how impressive. Or with your small class sizes, no matter how important. Or with the personalized attention your professors provide their students, no matter how beneficial.

Start your story with something that cuts through the college marketing clutter, say all the experts. But perhaps no one has said it quite like advertising executive Angie Jones.

“I have a Bachelor’s degree in business administration with an emphasis in marketing,” Jones writes in a recent blog post. Pretty good, but unfortunately millions of people in America have the same degree and emphasis, she says. “Education-wise, I don’t stand out from ...

Continue Reading

Categories: Authenticity, College Recruiting, Communication, Marketing

Marketing is the future

Posted by:


American universities are not the only ones struggling with change these days. Sharply rising tuition and increasing competition from abroad have schools in the UK relying on marketing like never before.

For a higher education system that has hummed along since the 12th century, aggressive marketing was something other industries had to worry about. But that is changing, says Britain’s William Annandale, and he offers five predictions for the future of higher education marketing that may have relevance for those of us in the colonies:

Differentiate or die. “All HEIs [higher education institutions, as they're known in the UK] need to think clearly about their proposition and how they differentiate themselves. Importantly, this should be addressed from the perspective of target audiences: ...

Continue Reading

Categories: Change, College Recruiting, Communication, CRM, Marketing

And the winners are…

Posted by:


As one of the leading change agents in higher education, Jeff Kallay is always looking for kindred spirits. Especially when it comes time to select winners of the X Award, the annual prize from TargetX that goes to those who did the most to “overthrow dead culture” in college admissions.

Kallay lobbied hard for two of the top private colleges in the South for their innovative approaches to recruitment marketing, and his colleagues at TargetX agreed.

As a result, Saint Leo University in Florida has received the 5th annual X Award in recognition of an institution that has made great strides to overthrow dead culture, the phrase adopted by CEO Brian Wm. Niles to represent the company’s philosophy of modernizing student recruitment.

And ...

Continue Reading

Categories: Change, College Recruiting, Marketing, Overthrowing Dead Culture

In pursuit of the best-fit student

Posted by:


Numbers no longer have the same appeal for admissions officers at the University of Tennessee. They’re moving away from the SAT, ACT and grade-point average in favor of a more complete view of their prospective students, according to reporter Joan Garrett.

It’s a familiar goal among the nation’s colleges — go beyond test scores and other statistics to get a fuller picture of a prospect to help determine if he or she will be a best-fit student. Increasingly, Facebook and other social networks are serving as allies in the search.

The number of admissions offices using Facebook to learn more about an applicant has quadrupled in the past year, reports Garrett of the Chattanooga Times Free Press. While schools are sensitive to ...

Continue Reading

Categories: College Recruiting, CRM, Facebook, Social Media, Social Networking

Social media marketing IQ

Posted by:


Getting more and more excited about marketing your school via social networking? That’s great, says interactive marketer Heidi Cohen, but first you need to check your social media marketing IQ.

“Here are 30 questions,” she writes in a recent ClickZ article, “that will help you assess where your organization is in terms of social media marketing maturity and where you may need to improve effectiveness.”

Cohen divides her questions into such categories as goals, strategies, content, metrics, budget — and the all-important “listening” factor. Included among the 30 are:

- Do you have brand monitoring and/or other analytics in place? These can range from professional social media monitoring to free options such as Google Alerts and Twitter Search.

- If you are listening as ...

Continue Reading

Categories: College Recruiting, Communication, Social Media, Social Networking

Campus tours are important, why?

Posted by:


News reporters seem fascinated by the campus visit — sometimes because their own kids are in the middle of the whirlwind process and sometimes out of journalistic curiosity. “Why so much attention to such a low-tech endeavor?” asks the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jeff Gammage.

As many reporters have done in recent years, Gammage ended up interviewing Trent Gilbert, one of the nation’s leading authorities on the impact of the in-person experience on student recruiting.

“I get that for students or parents who are going to spend $30,000 to $50,000 a year, it’s crucial to see the place before making a final decision,” Gammage said to TargetX’s Chief eXperience Officer. “I’m less clear on why it’s important for colleges to stage a good tour.”

After ...

Continue Reading

Categories: Campus Visit, College Recruiting

Persuading the parents

Posted by:


Beware the parents, says popular thought leader Jeff Kallay. They’ve morphed from the relatively benign helicopters to more savage stealth bombers, and you’d better be prepared to make a good case for why they should pay all that money to send their kids to your school.

Today’s college-bound students are the offspring of Generation Xers, who are more cynical, skeptical and stealthy than the parents of your previous classes. So forget the hype, be authentic, demonstrate your return-on-investment, said Kallay in a rousing conclusion to TargetX’s Xpert Summit — the company’s annual event for users of its technology and consulting services.

Kallay’s concluding keynote was not the first time many of the attendees thought about parents during the two-day conference. In fact, ...

Continue Reading

Categories: College Recruiting, Communication Plans, CRM, Email Recruiting, Generations, Millennials, Parents, Xpert Summit

Don't forget to test

Posted by:


Email marketing is so economical, it can make us lazy. Many marketers who work hard at testing their direct mail so they can roll out the best offer, headline or creative, don’t bother to do the same with their email.

“Email marketers all too frequently ignore years of direct marketing lessons,” says Jared Blank, an analyst at JupiterResearch. “They won’t or can’t or don’t test aspects of their email messages. They think, ‘Email is so inexpensive, why bother testing?’”

The answer, says Blank, is that email carries a different kind of cost when it is not as relevant or effective as it could be. “Email is very expensive when its irrelevance drives prospects away. Or when recipients delete your message at first ...

Continue Reading

Categories: College Recruiting, Email, Email Recruiting

Measuring online sentiment

Posted by:


One of the newest marketing challenges is keeping up with your school’s “online chatter” — that is, how your students, prospective students, parents of students and other key groups are treating you on the social web.

“Monitoring and responding to online chatter is becoming more important as customers take to the Internet to voice praise and complaints,” says Sandra Fathi, president of public relations and social media firm Affect. “Today, for almost any company, online sentiment is absolutely critical. It affects their sales, it affects their employee morale, and it definitely affects their customer and prospect base.”

With the nearly religious devotion that young people have for their favorite social networking sites, you know they’re saying a lot about you online — ...

Continue Reading

Categories: Cloud Computing, College Recruiting, CRM, Social Media, Social Networking

Irresistible subject lines

Posted by:


For level of scrutiny and intensity of debate, there are few marketing topics that generate as much interest as email subject lines.

Do a quick Google search and you’ll have your choice of over 6 million references — advising you to keep your subject line to 45 characters or less…or be purposefully vague because that intrigues people…or ask a question since that’s sure to draw your reader in. Or not.

A recent subject-line advice column questions conventional wisdom that shorter is better, and backs up the claim with some research results.

Brad Bortone, an editor with online publisher MarketingSherpa, posted an entry to the Marketing Experiments Blog. He reminds readers that most people aren’t looking for a reason to respond to your email; ...

Continue Reading

Categories: College Recruiting, Email, Email Recruiting, Subject Lines

Making email mobile

Posted by:


If you’re like most marketers, you work hard to understand good email design. Then everything changes.

A few years ago, email design needed to adjust to the increasing use of preview panes and to images being blocked by default, says marketing researcher Chad White. Now you have to adjust again — to the wave of HTML-friendly smartphones and the exploding popularity of tablet computers.

“Sales of smartphones that render HTML email well are booming thanks to the iPhone and a mega-slew of Android-powered phones,” he writes in MediaPost’s Email Insider. And contrary to the common belief that email readership is languishing, these smartphones are driving increased use of email — especially among teens.

White offers several recommendations for adjusting your email design to ...

Continue Reading

Categories: College Recruiting, Email Recruiting, Facebook, Millennial Generation, Mobile Marketing

Helicopter Grandparents

Posted by:


If you’re still hosting an event called “Parents Weekend,” you’re behind the times. The Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson suggests you recognize a growing force in the college-choice process: Grandparents.

Increasingly, admissions staff at Marymount University are finding themselves entertaining grandparents who aren’t up for the walking tours of campus, writes Johnson in her higher ed blog.

“I have never seen so many grandmothers,” said Michael Canfield, director of admissions at the Virginia school. “In many families, higher education has become a core value, so the families are congregating around it.”

What’s happening at Marymount reflects a trend that is prompting many campuses to change “Parents Weekend” to “Family Weekend,” writes Johnson, whose coverage of higher education for the Post includes frequent contributions to ...

Continue Reading

Categories: Campus Visit, College Recruiting, Free on Friday Webcasts, Generations, Parents

College for colleges

Posted by:


There’s a good chance you’ve heard some of them present at a conference or workshop on student recruiting. And if you have, you probably noticed the room was packed and the energy level high.

Adrienne Bartlett noticed, especially when people approached her after her sessions and remarked that she and her colleagues at TargetX consistently give the most informative and entertaining presentations. She began to realize that TargetX is viewed as more than a technology provider, more than a source of admissions consulting. “First and foremost, we’re educators,” she says. “People rely on us for our industry expertise — our webcasts, weekly tips and trends, workshops, conference presentations.

“All of that expertise goes into our products and services, of course, but it ...

Continue Reading

Categories: College Recruiting, Email Recruiting, Generations

Page 1 of 13 12345...»