In This Issue
- The Convergence: How Social Media and Integrated Marketing Come Together: II-Tactics, by Fritz McDonald
- Campus Visits and Tour Guides – What You Need to Address Right Now, by Chuck Reed
The Convergence: How Social Media and Integrated Marketing Come Together: II-Tactics
By Fritz McDonald, Vice President, Creative Strategy
Although they are different in some ways, the commonality between social media and integrated marketing makes an argument for weaving them together. As I discussed in part I of this article, social media can play several roles in an integrated marketing campaign:
- It can bring the brand promise to life
- It can broadcast a unified enthusiasm
- It can build relationships
- It can expand frequency and reach/distribution
- It can reinforce brand experience
Ultimately, all of this will help improve conversion. Together, integrated marketing and social media can reinforce each other's weaknesses while complimenting strengths. Integrated marketing can balance the open messaging of social media with the consistency of the more straightforward messaging in conventional tactics like advertising. Such tactics—and the resulting reach—can also drive traffic to your social platforms. At the same time, social media's nearly unlimited distribution greatly expands integrated marketing’s reach—and more important—moves the audience from awareness to relationship.
Where it all Begins
The ultimate goal of an integrated marketing brand campaign is to own a word in constituents' minds. What better place to find out whether you own it than your key social platforms? Your brand promise should guide everything you do across all social platforms. It should reverberate through the essence and tone of your content—to do so, you will have to find ways to make it social content rather than conventional messaging. For example, what kinds of discussion topics could you generate with it? Videos designed to draw comments? Whatever the platform, your social media offers the perfect environment to test your promise's authenticity.
Key Integration Points
Social media can be integrated with several current marketing tactics, among them:
Search
You can and should integrate your social and search platforms. This will allow you to target audiences more likely to search for you or click on your banner ads. An October 2009 study by GroupM Search, M80, ComScore revealed that consumers exposed to a brand’s social media are 2.8 times more likely to search on that brand’s terms and 1.7 times more likely to search with the intention of making a purchase. The best way to integrate is to start by creating social platforms that are searchable—that is tagged and indexed with metadata with your top keywords. You can also create key ads on social sites or develop social media search campaigns by developing keywords based on discussion topics and trends on your social platforms.
E-mail
In spite of the pundits, e-mail isn't dead—if anything, it's still a highly effective online tool. Social media works well with e-mail—so well, in fact, it was a key combination in the Obama campaign, combining the push tactics of e-mail with the pull content of social networks. You can create more accurately targeted content by basing it on platform conversation topics and trends. You could also use your Facebook page as a targeted landing page for an e-mail campaign—and quite possibly find new subscribers for your e-mail newsletter.
Advertising
Because traditional advertising can still drive results, it's wise to integrate offline and online ads with your social platforms through icons and buttons—URLs in print collateral for example and on banner ads. Some institutions are exploring Facebook advertising, such as Wartburg College’s recent successful campaign. Advertisements can also be placed on influencer sites such as bloggers and content aggregator sites focused on higher education, such as Unigo.
Media, PR, Direct Marketing
We are just beginning to explore the role social media can play in media, public relations, and direct marketing tactics as well—so far, incorporating alternative media such as webisodes, tracking mentions on social platforms and press releases optimized for social media, and capturing social data for direct campaigns have all proven to be effective approaches.
The Web
There are excellent models for how to integrate social media with your website, ranging from Colgate to Ohio State and beyond. Generally, social media is a strong traffic driver (which hopefully is adding rather than siphoning off traffic). It can reinforce and extend messages and themes from the site while also maintaining a visible presence on it through tweetstream displays and Facebook Connect. Other social tools have been integrated as well, such as RSS feeds and cloud tags.
Your Marketing Schedule
Given social media's ongoing nature, it’s important to integrate with your marketing or publishing schedule (and a publishing schedule for your social media content seeding is a very good idea). When is the optimal time to tweet or post new content on your Facebook page? You can determine this by scheduling in relation to your other marketing tactics and executions, key points in your recruiting funnel, and audience demographics.
Social Media as Hub
In many ways, social media might provide the strongest point of integration in your campaign. It is an element that is working all the time, a constant center of communication inflow and outflow. The day will come when the gap between social media and websites closes. Then we’ll see websites that function like social media platforms while retaining core functional elements—we can see this happening with the merging of blogs and sites into one holistic platform.
In today's piece, I focused on integrating tactics. In part III of this article, I'll talk about how to incorporate social media into your market planning.
Campus Visits and Tour Guides – What You Need to Address Right Now
By Chuck Reed, Vice President, Client Services
Today I'd like to review one element that, in my mind, is the most important and yet abused aspect of the all-important visit—the tour guide.
Research is clear that the campus visit is the most influential activity in the decision process, and that the tour is the most important activity of the campus visit… so, how is it that the most critical element of the most influential recruiting activity is too often ill equipped or taken for granted?
I was a tour guide for four years at my university, and I was an admissions officer overseeing guides for another four years at a smaller school. Now after 20 years at Stamats and countless campus tours, I find myself far less tolerant of poor tour guides. Even more so, I am critical of those who hire and "train" them—many offices simply aren't doing their job.
I've come to believe that tour guide issues aren't usually the fault of the students, but of the expectations you do or don't instill in them.
Here's a quick overview of what you need to address right now:
How does every guide stack up against this list:
- The most important single attribute of guides is being astute readers of verbal and nonverbal communication. Listen and adapt, engage and customize.
- Being smart, attractive, and/or campus politically "right" will not hide the fact that guides don’t listen and therefore don’t make the visit about the students. It is about them.
- Tour guides do not have to be the best students, the most involved students (more often than not, that's a bad thing), or the president's children. It's about presentation, not politics.
- They need to be real, be themselves. This is not the time for community theater wannabes—it is a conversation with substance and an honest relationship, not a floor show. False enthusiasm won't cut it.
- They need to be knowledgeable about your institution and competitors. Never should guides say anything negative about another school, but they should able to differentiate you from your competition in meaningful ways where appropriate in the conversation. Benefits, not features.
- They need to be motivated. Guides should never just go through the motions, but must really care about the tour, the visitors, and the whole experience, even the larger impersonal-by-default special-event tours.
- Do they know how important they are? Do you share the statistics about success rates of good visits, enrollment goals, comments/feedback from visitors?
How do you and/or the staff responsible for the guides stack up against this list:
- Ask yourself—did I hire the right people? Now's a great time to "adjust."
- Have you truly trained them to listen, customize, and react?
- A script is only a foundation for a conversation, not the conversation. Right?
- Inform them about your current competitors, marketplace, and challenges. Then know how they'll use that information.
- Educate guides on their role in the admissions process. They need to understand how important they are.
- Is it cool to be a guide? Beyond a polo shirt or pizza parties, how have you made the most important job in the most important activity seem like it?
Final notes:
- Pay them if possible. In their world of choices, the best guides are likely the most sought after by many on and off campus. While they might love tours, odds aren't good they'll stay with you when their lives require compensation be considered.
- If you can't pay them now, how can you change the system? The most important job on campus and your administration won't budge? Wow. Start crusading now.
- Minimum wage is common, while others do stipends or "leadership" awards.
- Let them walk backwards. It’s about their content and ability to engage, not their walking. Any argument/discussion about walking backwards or not is superficial and ultimately degrades one of the best jobs a student can have.
- Survey visitors and use the data. They'll tell you in a short survey before leaving campus if the tour was good or not (especially parents), and you can likely debrief before they leave.
- Address the guide's work (good and bad) immediately—use what you learn to make next time better.
- If a visitor doesn’t love your school, but you were 100% honest and presented the institutional brand to the best of your ability, don’t lose sleep—it means the visitor wasn't a good fit in the first place. Visits are about "fit"—and that means both ways.
I hope this helps you to think through your own office and situation. I'd love to hear from you.
|
