Marketing in Academics

Marketing in Academics

I work in student affairs and get to work closely with marketing. I get invited to meetings with the head honcho of marketing at the state level, who I am admittedly not impressed with. As far as I know he does not have a background in marketing or communications. I believe he took a crash course in marketing and throws around words like “digital marketing” and “branding” so that we know he is in fact the marketing guy. But, in the years I have been here nothing revolutionary has ever happened. In fact, my own team has caught some major mistakes.

When it comes to any sort of advertising you have to pay attention to every single detail. You also must look at things from every angle and perspective. Last year our school did a photo shoot of one of our fundraisers. We raise scholarship money every year through a skeet shoot tournament. The photographer took a great shot of a man in action and the shot was used for flyers, emails, websites, you name it. There was one major problem. On the back of the man’s shirt, it read “rehab is for quitters”. A proof was sent to one of my colleagues who forwarded it to me. She was too afraid to say anything, so I immediately called marketing up. They had already printed hundreds of copies, but they had no choice but to destroy and reprint them.

They had actually noticed the message, but because they didn’t have a personal connection to it the words didn’t mean anything to them. Fortunately for my colleagues and I, we knew better that if that message got out to the masses that somebody in our community would find it highly offensive. When it comes to marketing and branding in academics, it is not about who you as an individual person is. It is about who you as a college is trying to reflect.

Student Engagement

Another hat I get wear is working as a recruiter for the college. Initially when I heard that I would be recruiting for the college I thought I would just show up to certain events for the college, but it has turned into much more than that. For me, its starts with student engagement first. How do we get students interested in the first place? Where are young people getting their information from? Traditional medial, emerging media, social media or a combination of everything? Or do I just walk around and shout at them? At first, I thought that none of these methods would work and that I was doomed.

Getting parents to talk was the easy parent. It was getting them to stop talking part that was difficult. Our college created a Facebook page with information on our programs and anytime we would have an open house and would invite potential students to come out, and they would. But their moms and dads would come in droves. And while I love the support, it is hard to start an authentic conversation with mom hovering around. So, then we wanted to try Instagram, but some people might not know but getting college use social media accounts approved is not easy. Or the entire college has one, but every single department must use it and posts are limited and must be planned a month ahead of time. It’s not able to used in “real time”. A few more years as my time as a recruiter go by and now Tik-Tok is a thing. Well, Tik-Tok is banned on government phones so I definitely can’t engage with students that way. So what am I to do to get their attention?

I decided to a mix of nontraditional, traditional, and social media. I created a student fair where I brought the college to the students. I brought professors, deans, admissions, financial aid, you name it, we brought it. With permission we set up outside of the high school’s auditorium at different tables, so each instructor had their own table to present their program. Hundreds of students filled the auditorium, and we went over a quick and painless presentation with them. After that was over, they were able to visit each table. Aside from flyers, I ordered plenty of T-shirts, cozies, pens, and lots of giveaway items with our logo on it. And since we couldn’t directly post on social media, I was still able to purchase a Snapchat filter for students to use the entire day and post themselves.

I think we did a successful job using a variety of media especially on a budget. The event itself ended up getting posted in the local newspaper which I was not expecting either. I don’t have the exact number, but I do know our transition rate (number of students graduating from high school to college) was higher this year so I believe our use of media is helping to grow our college. It’s still a struggle to connect with younger students, but our college is starting to show interest in geofencing or geolocation. Geolocation determines your geographic location based off your cellular device and can then be used for marketing purposes. Geofencing is a defined parameter based on your location. The marketing guy I mentioned earlier describes geofencing as a football field text. Say you are at a football game. You want everyone at that football game to get an ad about your college. You set the parameters to be the coordinates of that football field. And when it’s game time and everyone is there, they will release the ad campaign. Voila.