By now, you are probably becoming comfortable using the word “customer” due to the prevalence of discussion around customer experience (CX). Design thinking as a discipline places high value on shaping satisfying customer experiences that influence purchasing, loyalty, interaction, recommendations—in truth, CX encapsulates everything about our relationships with those whom we exchange anything (services or products). How will you evaluate the experiences that relate and connect your institution with your customers?…Read more
Author: Rick Bailey
Your Party Is Not Your Brand
Celebrating marketing and promotional efforts is a rather new phenomenon on college and university campuses. Higher ed has come a long way (at least for those of us in marketing) in adopting the practicality of well-executed marketing efforts. We still see many signs of reticence to jump on board the marketing train, particularly from the…Read more
What Your President Expects: Insights for Higher Ed Marketers
As a marketer in the higher ed arena, you have multiple challenges and an array of clients who need (and sometimes demand) your intelligent solutions to keep your institution afloat. It’s your president, however, who likely needs you most. From our research and experience with more than 130 colleges and universities, we offer the following suggestions of what she expects of you…Read more
How to Make Your Upcoming Board Meeting a Success
Besides the fact that my wife and business partner Tammy is a trustee of our alma mater, I can always tell when it’s board meeting season. Our clients hunker down a bit and you can often hear the tension in their voices. With good reason. Board meetings can be tense. You’re preparing to put your…Read more
The Best Recipe for Success in Higher Ed: Equal Parts Resilience and Innovation
Can your institution hang on for seven more years? Most-if any-growth will occur because you are offering something more than what you are doing now. The alternatives: you might consider what it could mean NOT to grow or what it might mean to get smaller in ways that allow you to improve quality in some way or shape your incoming class differently. If you are not planning in ways that match the reality of population shifts, you are not planning well…Read More
Rolling Out the (Authentic) Welcome Mat
It’s that time of year…already. You are welcoming in your Class of 2022. You are stuffing big envelopes, creating excitement and ensuring that every admitted student knows you want them to be on your campus next fall.
But as you know, sometimes it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. So it should come as no surprise that the way you say “Welcome” will influence a student’s—and parent’s—decision to pay a deposit in a few months. As you begin this important process of yielding a new class, here are four things to keep in mind when crafting the right “Welcome” for your prospects…Read more
When Objectivity Knocks: Facilitating Change in Higher Education Marketing
While you may acknowledge the benefit of an outside, objective look at your situation, you may find difficulty in welcoming an outsider’s perspective. To begin, an outsider’s ability to “get” your institution and circumstances may be suspect. After all, how could someone without the benefit of full engagement in your mission, deep knowledge of your history or political understanding of your community possibly suggest workable solutions? That’s precisely the benefit; without the weight of those factors, an outsider can objectively assess the circumstances that may lead you to fresh and creative thinking…Read more
Winning Through Customer Experience: How to Create Successful Campus Visits (With or Without the Campus)
A prospective student’s visit to campus (particularly when accompanied by family and friends) has long been the indicator of ultimate engagement. Campus visitors yield at substantially higher rates than those who do not visit. Most of our clients report yield rates of admitted students who have visited at more than twice the rate of the…Read more
The Truth About Focus Groups in Higher Education
Focus groups have been a long-standing favorite in higher ed marketing as a means of acquiring valuable qualitative data that may help solve a marketing challenge. So it’s no surprise that, early on in our history as higher ed marketers, RHB employed focus groups as a go-to means of collecting in-depth marketing data about significant…Read more
Here’s What the Marketing Department on Your Campus Should Look Like
One of our takeaways from the 2016 Survey of Independent College Presidents we conducted in collaboration with The Lawlor Group was the limited perspective or understanding of marketing’s value to institutions. Carole Arwidson of The Lawlor Group summarized the findings in a post concluding “institutions must embrace how marketing can advance the institution beyond simply…Read more