Are you still trying to convince your Director, VP or President to jump into Admission Marketing 2.0?
If — despite your best efforts — your admission office still relies exclusively on traditional marketing tactics (brochures, print advertising and traditional PR), you might need a bit of help to convince everybody to try blogs, podcasts and other new media that have started to shake up the higher ed admission world.
I might have just what you need as supporting materials from third parties can work wonders to help you make your case.
My Internet Technologies columns for University Business (podcasting, PR 2.0, RSS and the upcoming one about admission blogging to be published in August 2006) will probably help. If your VP or President is really just into tarditional marketing, try to find out if your library has a subscription to the magazine and prepare a folder with hard copies of the articles (you can also print the online versions) – sometimes, paper can be powerful.
You might also want to add a copy of this pretty good online white paper (link via Diva Marketing Blog), written by Alex Brown who has been teaching Internet Marketing since 1997 at the University of Delaware, a 7-page white paper available as a PDF file:
You should definitely give it a read.
Here are 3 excerpts to get you interested:
“Some of the content published via blogs, discussion boards and wikis is positive; some is not. But, more importantly, the content is real and a reflection of the thought processes and user experiences of the applicant community at large. This content is considered to be “free marketing†because it is offered freely to others. But it is also considered free because its creators are free to express themselves in any way they choose—and are therefore beyond the realm of control of any school’s public or media relations department. Because it is created independently by third-party sources, free marketing content typically conveys an authenticity that could never be achieved in-house by a school or its marketers.”
By choosing to use free marketing instead of social media, new media or web 2.0, Brown probably makes it easier for traditional marketers or budget-minded executives to embrace the new trend.
Later in the paper, he advises admission offices to get their own blogs or link to their students’:
“Consider your blog an alternative to e-mail newsletters, which are becoming less relevant in the age of spam. Promote your blog on your Web site and in other marketing material, and encourage your applicants to subscribe using a news reader program. By subscribing, they will be alerted, in a spam-free environment, each time you publish a new entry. If they are no longer interested in your program or are denied application, they can unsubscribe.”
“By the same token, if a blogger writes a positive entry about, for example, a school visit, take a moment to post a comment with your thanks. You may wish to link your program’s Web site to the blogger’s post. This will provide the blogger some traffic, while directly publicizing the blogger’s experience with your program to the rest of your applicant pool. This can have a pretty strong impact within the blogging community, as well as within the applicant pool in general (blogs have strong “Google juice,†meaning blog postings show up in search engine results).”