As the school year begins, I’m reminding my staff of two fundamental truths about marketing. First, marketing is business. The four Ps of marketing (the basics) are product, price, place and promotion. Integrated marketing involves all four. Second, the primary function of a business is to sell. Therefore, marketing is about overcoming obstacles to the sell. And that means getting focused.
In higher ed, universities tend to focus more on what other universities are doing rather than the reasons why students aren’t choosing their school. Take Web design, for example. Colleges can spend an inordinate amount of time redesigning their Web sites. And although the university Web site is extremely important, as I’ve argued before, it can often become a detrimental distraction.
Differentiating your school based upon a tactic, like Web design, is a short-term strategy. And, as you can see on sites like EduStyle, sooner or later, institutions catch up and everyone starts looking the same, again. Even those with redesigned sites that are brilliant have experienced declines in enrollment. Why? Because they weren’t focused on the reasons why students weren’t choosing their school, which in many cases has nothing to do with their Web sites’ design.
This is why getting focused is so important. If marketing is about overcoming obstacles to the sell, then marketing success is dependent on knowing what the obstacles are before you begin your planning. And one way to begin is by getting back to basics and looking at the four Ps. How’s your product? Are your programs differentiated in your marketplace? Product differentiation generally requires less marketing dollars to be spent. Pricing strategies are also becoming increasingly important in today’s market. Are you showing students that you’re worth the price of tuition? What about your place? Do students perceive your location as a positive or negative? And when you develop your promotional strategy, do you have a clear target audience and target geography in mind, or are you spending money where you’ve always spent it regardless of who it impacts?
With fewer high school students graduating in the next several years and fewer funds available for college, competition for students will continue to increase. And the best way for marketing departments to serve their universities is to get focused.
A groundbreaking study released yesterday says display advertising is more effective than we think. “The Silent Click: Building Brands Online,” was published by Online Publishers Association in partnership with Comscore and features data published in the June 2009 issue of the Journal of Advertising Research. Below are some highlights from the 59-page report.
How Consumers Spend Time Online Has Changed Greatly the Last 5 Years
• Consumers now spend over 40% of their online time with Content, and only about one-fourth of their time with email and IM
• Community is a relatively new and growing segment
Display Impacts Search 4 Weeks After Exposure
• This dynamic is important because of the synergy between display ads and search, and because a Trademark or a Brand search is a significant indicator of purchase intent.
Display Ads Also Drive Traffic to Advertisers Over Time
• Display advertising’s ability to drive traffic is persistent
• These significant liftswould be overlooked by only considering immediate actions (e.g., a click)
Read the full study here.
Here’s an excellent insight on the power of TV advertising by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. In this 2008 interview with Bill Moyers, now in the Moyers archive, Jamieson discusses the ways the 2008 presidential candidates, particularly Obama, used advertising (TV, texting, etc.) to influence voters. Jamieson provides valuable insights on media selection that college marketers should keep in mind as they reach out to prospective students.
BILL MOYERS: What can ads do that speeches and debates and news stories can’t do?
KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Because advertising lets you speak in someone else’s voice, and speak with visuals and with audio materials and with music, ads are able to attach emotion to a story that tells voters who you are without making it look as if you’re self-aggrandizing.
BILL MOYERS: A biography?
KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: A biography. And back to the earliest days of politics, biographies– literally, print biographies were written and distributed to tell people who the candidate is who is contesting for the presidency. The biographical ad is a staple in political campaigns. And it’s important for a number of reasons.
Read or watch the interview here.
The Newspaper Association of America’s May advertorial represents a desperate attempt to convince advertisers that the newspaper industry “remains strong” and shows just how bad things have gotten for advertising’s favorite pastime. Still, this PR fluff, written by NAA president and CEO, John F.Sturm (or some PR agency), and titled, “The reality about newspapers,” screams for critique. Here’s mine, line by line.
In the past two years, the newspaper business has faced unprecedented financial challenges. The economic meltdown and advertising recession have hit our industry hard. But make no mistake about this: newspaper media – print and digital – remains strong and will emerge from the current environment an even stronger multi-platform force.
First, it’s more like the past five years that newspapers have been facing financial challenges. Maybe Sturm doesn’t read his own NAA Web site, but if he did, he would see that NAA’s own data shows that total paid circulation had fallen 16 percent nationwide from 2003 to 2008. So newspapers’ precipitous decline began well before the recession. And it continues to decline. The recent Audit Bureau of Circulation report shows that newspaper circulation declined an average of 7 percent nationally compared to the previous year. Some, like The Atlanta Journal Constitution, declined almost 20 percent. And newspapers continue to close and cut print days. Although, digital readership did increase nationally by 10.5 percent, print circulation is dying. Newspapers need to change and change quickly.
Here is the reality about newspapers today:
1. Myth: No one reads newspapers anymore.
Reality: More than 104 million adults read a print newspaper every day, more than 115 million on Sundays. That’s more people than watch the Super Bowl (94 million), American Idol (23 million) or that typically watch the late local news (65 million).
Who said no one reads newspapers? What most people are saying is that fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers, especially printed ones. But here’s something that really bothers me about Sturm’s advertorial. He doesn’t do what journalist are supposed to do, use attribution. Notice how he just asserts facts, like viewership. For example, contrary to Sturm, the Super Bowl actually had 151.6 million total viewers and 98.7 million average viewers (total number of viewers during a half hour). American Idol had 28.8 million viewers last week. I’m not sure where he got his statistic on 104 million adults reading newspapers every day. I typed it into Google and only got his quote and others citing his quote. Also, as others have pointed out, his statistic doesn’t indicate the geographic region these alleged 104 million readers come from.
2. Myth: Young people no longer read newspapers.
Reality: 61 percent of 18-24 year olds and 25-34 year olds read a newspaper in an average week and 65 percent of them read a newspaper or visited a newspaper website in the past week.
How many 18 to 24-year-olds have you seen kicking back with a cup of coffee reading the newspaper lately, if ever? According to Stateofthemedia.org, “Young people in the age groups of 18 to 24 and 25 to 34 continue to have the lowest readership levels of daily newspapers. Among readers 18 to 24 years of age, 31% say they read a newspaper yesterday, according to data from Scarborough Research.” That cuts Sturm’s readership in half.
3. Myth: Newspaper readership is tanking.
Reality: Average weekday newspaper readership declined a mere 1.8 percent between 2007 and 2008, and about 7 percent since its peak in 2002. Compare that to the 10 percent decline seen in the prime time TV audience in 2007 alone. Meanwhile, newspapers’ Web audience has grown nearly 75 percent since 2004, to 73 million unique visitors a month.
Where do I begin? According to Editor and Publisher, US newspaper circulation fell industrywide by about 13 percent, or 7.4 million, from 1999 to 2008. And, as mentioned above, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s last report, daily circulation dropped 7 percent when comparing the last six months to same period last year. I’m not sure what data Sturm is using that indicates that 2002 was a peak for newspapers. Again, attribution would be helpful here. The stats and links above would indicate that Sturm’s data doesn’t comport with the rest of the news world. Additionally, the 10 percent decline in prime time TV watching needs clarification. It looks like Sturm is mistaking the number of people who watch TV with the time during which people watch TV. In other words, with things like online TV and DVR, people don’t have to watch TV during prime time.
4. Myth: Many newspapers are going out of business.
Reality: Newspapers, as individual businesses, by and large remain profitable enterprises – with operating margins that Wall Street analysts estimate will generally average in the low to mid teens during 2009. While that may be down from historical highs, such margins would be the envy of many other industries today. As consultant John Morton said in a recent American Journalism Review article, “Overall, the beleaguered newspaper industry’s financial health has been weakened but remains healthy by most measures. In this environment, that is an achievement.”
We have to thank Sturm for providing philosophy students around the world with another perfect example of a non sequitur. Are newspapers going out of business? Yes. I agree with Sturm that newspapers can be profitable, but not as publicly held companies. Publicly held newspapers were in trouble well before the current economic situation. Read this 2005 article in Smart Money, which shows newspaper costs rising 11 percent, declining circulation and a readership whose average age is 55.
5. Myth: Newspaper advertising doesn’t work.
Reality: Google’s own research shows that 56 percent of consumers researched or purchased products they saw in a newspaper. Google also says that newspaper advertising reinforces online ads: 52 percent are more likely to buy products if they see it in the paper.
The irony of this “reality check” is that, according to his own 2008 NAA press release, the study he refers to was conducted by Clark, Martire & Bartolomeo. Google’s Print Ads division commissioned it. And when the findings came out, Google closed its Print Ads division primarily because they determined that newspaper print advertising wasn’t profitable, as I reported earlier this month. Sturm left this part out and went on to quote more from his press release. And it gets worse. The “56 percent of consumers” he cites isn’t 56 percent of all consumers, rather it’s 56 percent of those participating in the study who read newspapers. Here are some quotes from the NAA press release:
According to the study, among people who research products and services after seeing them advertised in newspapers, two-thirds (67 percent) use the Internet to find more information. Of that group, nearly 70 percent of consumers actually make a purchase following their additional research.
Then, at the end of the press release, it says:
Newspaper readers respond to ads in their newspapers. More than half (56 percent) of respondents either researched or purchased at least one product they saw in the newspaper in the last month.
I’m sure journalists everywhere are embarrassed that Sturm is representing them, but it hasn’t stopped newspapers from running this advertorial all week.
6. Myth: There are no creative options in newspapers.
Reality: Newspaper advertising options have exploded and now include shape and polybag ads, post-it notes, “we prints,” shingle spadeas, scented ads, taste-it ads, glow-in-the-dark, belly bands and temporary tattoos, as well as event and database marketing, behavioral targeting, e-mail blasts, e-newsletters and more.
I don’t know anyone in the ad business who says that there are no creative options for advertising. Just look at the average newspaper. It’s ridiculous how many different distractions there are in each issue. And this has been the case for years. There is more advertising and less news. This is simply Sturm’s attempt to pitch advertising to prospective clients.
7. Myth: If newspapers close, you will still be able to get news from other sources.
Reality: Newspapers make a larger investment in journalism than any other medium. Most of the information you read from “aggregators” and other media originated with newspapers. No amount of effort from local bloggers, non-profit news entities or TV news sources could match the depth and breadth of newspaper-produced content.
Here’s where I agree with Sturm, although I think we need to change the way we talk about this issue. We don’t need “newspapers” that are based on printed publications run by publicly held corporations. But we do need journalism and full-time journalists. And we need to pay for it, not through advertising, but through non-profits. David Simon, former Baltimore Sun crime reporter and creator of the award-winning HBO series, The Wire, presented a clear and compelling case for this at a recent Senate hearing on the decline of the newspaper industry.
This is not a portrait of a dying industry. It’s illustrative of transformation. Newspapers are reinventing themselves to focus on serving distinct audiences with a variety of products, and delivering those audiences effectively to advertisers across media channels.
I think this need to deliver audiences to advertisers is what’s gotten the newspaper industry in trouble. As David Simon so eloquently put it in his Senate hearing earlier this month, “High-end journalism is dying in America. And unless a new economic model is achieved, it will not be reborn on the web or anywhere else.” I’ll let Sturm have the last word.
For more on the power of newspaper media, visit www.newspapermedia.com.
Google announced in January that they were ending their fabulous Google Print Ads department. Print Ads began in 2006 in an effort to help the struggling newspaper industry by opening up their business to small businesses who could bid on ad space, place ads online and track them through analytics. They started with 50 newspapers and grew to 800 this year. But even Google couldn’t overcome the declining newspaper market and decided to shut down Print Ads in February, although they honored previously booked ads through March 31. This news was bad enough, but a casualty that came from the shut down was the loss of Google’s Call Reporting feature.
Call Reporting allowed marketers to track phone calls through analytics. Google assigned toll-free numbers to place in your ads (or direct mail pieces, radio ads, TV ads, etc.) and when someone called it, it registered the call on your analytics then routed it to your preferred campus line. In addition to registering the call, it also gave information as to where and when the call was made, the phone number used and the duration of the call. This was all provided for free unless you routed the call to a cell phone. Although you can still track calls through analytics, you have to use a third party company to issue you a toll-free number and it’s not free.
Although I’m not a big fan of print ads, I think Google was little hasty in shutting down its Print Ad department. Newspapers may not be in the future what they were in the past, but they are an important and vital part of our democracy and we will see more newspapers become profitable non-profits that will still be able to sell ads. Also, Google focused too much on newspapers and didn’t envision branching out to magazines and other publications. But regardless of the decline in print, Call Reporting was a feature that had incredible tracking value for marketers and should have been expanded beyond print newspapers. I hope they bring it back. RIP Call Reporting.
I love eduStyle. And I really like the addition of the eduStyle higher ed blog awards presented in partnership with Karine Joly’s collegewebeditor.com. (Karine, you are the ultimate higher ed marketing blogger.) The higher ed blog awards is the first really cool idea I wanted to share with you.
Deciding which blog to vote for (you could only vote for one) was a tough decision. Karlyn Morissette’s blog is awesome, as is Brad J. Ward’s SquaredPeg (it also has one of the coolest higher ed blog names). But my vote this year went to .eduGuru – the second really cool idea I want to mention. What a fantastic resource.
One of the things I love about this site, in addition to the great contributors (which includes Karlyn Morissette), is the EDU Checkup videos, which are brilliantly done by Nick DeNardis. What a great idea. (Nick’s Edu Checkup site probably should have been nominated, too). If you haven’t been following the episodes, check out the archive. It’s a fantastic resource. Good luck to all of this year’s nominees. I appreciate you and have learned so much from each of you this year. Thank you!
‘Administration’ is often seen as a necessary evil by some academics. Take Richard Brodhead’s chapter on administration in “The Good of this Place” (a favorite faculty read):
I supposed that the deep aim of university administration is in some serious sense to make itself disappear: that its real goal is to make it possible for most people most of the time to think about other things (page 84).
The “most people” Brodhead has in mind is faculty (although he might add students, too). Now keep in mind that Brodhead wrote these words for an article in The New Journal shortly after he first became a dean at Yale in 1993. The book republished his thoughts from that article in 2004 when he became president at Duke, so I assume he still believes this. (Yes, he was president during the Duke lacrosse rape scandal. Perhaps administration didn’t “disappear” enough during that incident?)
For Brodhead, and for some faculty, the university enterprise can be sharply divided into academics, “learning” (what happens in the classroom and during office hours, what Brodhead refers to as “the ideal”) and administration, “the support of that learning.” The problem is, this is a false dichotomy and academics like Brodhead should know better.
The idea that classroom learning and professorial relationships are the sin qua non of the educational experience is just patently false. But some, like Brodhead, see the university divided into two “profoundly different and separate and profoundly interconnected” zones. Of course, for Brodhead, the academic zone occupies the purpose of the university, which is “study, reflection, discussion, the transmission of knowledge and the interrogation of received ideas, and the building of bonds between people from different backgrounds who are engaged in these common purposes” (page 85).
What academics, like Brodhead, fail to realize is that these activities are not “profoundly different” from what occurs between administrators and students prior to the students ever stepping into a classroom, as well as during their time as enrolled students. Examples include the admissions process (where faculty play a supporting role), Student Life programs and the counseling students receive from academic advisors and departmental secretaries (who are there to serve faculty, but not exclusively) . Contrary to the beliefs of those who adhere to Brodhead’s views, students don’t see administration as a necessary evil that needs to “disappear” into the background. In fact, students don’t see “academics” and “administration” as two monolithic categories. Instead, they expect university personnel—both faculty and staff—to be there to serve them, the students. And this is the big point many administrators and faculty miss. We’re here to serve students.
So let’s not, like Brodhead, set up an academic caste system that pits faculty and administration against one another. The reality is that we’re all here to serve students and that we all have special skills and expertise that we bring to the educational enterprise, whether its designing Web sites or mentoring students. Rather than claiming privileged positions, let’s agree that we are partners (not servants or clients) who work together toward the same end, to serve students.
How many stakeholders does your university have? The answer probably depends on its size and the scope of its operations. But the truth is, we don’t actually know. Prospective students, for example, don’t always identify themselves and alumni don’t always keep their contact information up to date. What we do know is that in most cases they will visit your Web site more often than they will visit your physical campus. Some stakeholders, like alumni and donors, will only visit your Web site for the next 10 to 20 years. For these folks, your Web site is the university.
Now this raises an important question: If your Web site is the university for a significant number of key stakeholders, are you allocating enough of the university’s time, talent and treasure to support it? The answer for many universities, perhaps most, is no. Many universities and colleges operate under the assumption that the statement “Your Web site is the university” is not true. It’s likely that some campus decision makers have never even considered the statement.
Most universities will receive more visitors to their Web site than their campuses or events. For example, I work at a small university of 4,000 students, faculty and staff. And data shows that overall more people visit our Web site than visit our campus. It’s also likely that there are some faculty, staff and students who spend more time on our Web site than on our campus.
But visits are only one example of why your Web site is the the university for many stakeholders. Consider the question, “What makes something official at your university?” Is it a memo? A speech? A handbook? An event? What if something was stated one way on your Web site and another way in an official memo? Which would be more official? For those stakeholders who use the Web, they will tell you. It’s the Web site that’s official. In fact, like it or not, your about page is officially what your university is about. The mission, vision and values on your Web site is what accreditation agencies will read for their next accreditation visit. Because, for them, your Web site is the university. Sure, they will visit classrooms and meet professors. But before they come and after they leave, they visit your Web site. Because for them, your Web site is the university. It’s like a living document you can experience. It provides nuance into what the university is really about.
So what does this all mean? It means that we have to be more intentional about how we think of our Web sites in relation to our key stakeholders. We need to think twice about cutting budgets that support Web development. We need to think more about what it takes not only to create a Web site, but to maintain it. And we need to think more about how to evolve the Web experience so that we can continute to improve how we relate to our key stakeholders online.
We often plan for deferred maintenance on our buildings, but we need to start thinking about deferred maintenance on our Web sites. Just like we have developing grounds crews, we need to have developing Web crews. We have scheduled maintenance for our grounds and we need them for our Web sites. Is it expensive to keep our campuses looking nice? Yes, but it’s worth it. The same is true for our Web sites. It’s an investment in our key stakeholders for whom the Web site is the university.
AMR’s decision to change its name to Higher Ed Marketing Report signals a change in higher ed marketing from a purely selling orientation to more of a strategic marketing orientation, with an emphasis on overcoming obstacles to the sell. This is an important shift in that it acknowledges that, in addition direct marketing (which is often testing dependent), there are other critical research-based functions within integrated marketing that universities need to pay attention to. I love it!
Does this sound familiar to you? “We’d love to do online marketing but we just don’t have the budget.” Or, “Social media is so important to our students but the university denied our request to fund a new SM position.”
Even in good times, college marketers often bemoan their lack of resources. Some for good reason. University administrators don’t always understand the important role marketing plays in getting students and dollars. But this attitude is becoming less common. Marketing has never been more prominent in higher education. But given the tough economic times we’re facing, more than ever, campus leaders want to know what they’re getting for all those marketing dollars they spend.
And why shouldn’t they? After all, marketing is an investment, not an expense. And campus leaders expect a return on this investment. However, instead of ROI, what they often get is requests for more money. But these days they’re wanting to know what’s being done with the marketing money that’s already being spent.
So how much money are we talking about? According to Noel Levitz’s most recent cost-to-recruit study, private four-year colleges spend an average of $1,941 to recruit a student (and that’s down from over $2,000 in 2005). That means if an average four-year private brings in 800 new students, they’re spending roughly $1.6 million. When you think about it, that’s a lot of marketing dollars.
So where is all this money going? A lot of it is being wasted on things that don’t work. We’ve all heard the famous saying “half my advertising is working, I just don’t know which half.” In higher ed, it’s probably more like “25% of my marketing is working, the other 75% I either don’t know if it works or I’m being forced to do it.”
The truth is, in most cases, we don’t lack the resources, we lack the will to change what we’re doing. By that, I mean we lack the will to stop doing things we know don’t work in order to do the things that will work or might work. Having the will to change in today’s climate means evaluating and reallocating resources instead of asking for more.
I leave you with two of Bob Sevier’s top 13 New Year’s resolutions for campus marketers. Check out Stamats Ning network. Bob is on it, so it’s worth checking out, even if you have to give them your contact info. Happy New Year!
8. I will not let myself off the hook by saying, “I don’t have enough money.” Rather, I will work with what I have, think more creatively, and seek to prioritize, integrate, and coordinate my dollars and those of my colleagues.
9. After earmarking 10% of my marketing budget for market research and mROI (marketing return-on-investment) assessment, I will use the 70-20-10 rule to help me allocate my remaining marketing dollars. I will spend 70% of my marketing dollars on media that I know, from data, works; 20% on media that I suspect works; and 10% on new, untried media. Because of my commitment to evaluation, I will know what is working and what is not and make adjustments to how I allocate my marketing dollars.
