marketing – teamsiems

Kevin Lavelle
Coordinator of Web Services, Xavier University

Maggie Ridder
Director of e-Marketing, Xavier University

October 5

Project “Road to Xavier” is a recruitment campaign.

Cost, time, fixed content were the constraints.

Decided to move away from big budget because it wouldn’t have the best impact – timing and audience wasn’t ready.

Their real plan:

Division of labor:

They had 8 key target programs and after brainstorming they came up with “I Am…” (role, service, )

Print pieces told a story. And they told what is the input component and what is the result.

Landing pages complemented the print page brand/content and were listed on the print pieces. This enabled easy stats of hits and emails.

Follow up emails of print.

Phoning: faculty calling students, student calling students

alums calling students

they each had guides

website with contact reports

weekly email bulletin

The result was 70% of students that attended an event enrolled. That was 20% of admitted enrolled at Xavier. Goal was 940 they got 1174.

Lessons:

Now what:

The success of last year lead to more input from their team.

Road to Xavier is a portal like howdy.tamu.edu

They do a lot of their business there: housing, accounts, profile/directory information.

My interest in Special Interest Groups @HighEdWeb 2009 and why:

Marketing and Communications: I work for a group called Communications and Marketing; we need to market the dry topic of information technology. But seriously, I think it is a delicate subject in higher education. We don’t have the budget that Sapient has, and we have to be more tactful than corporate America.

Leveraging Social Media/Networking tools: using social media is the norm today. Students coming to college use (some forms) of social media without batting an eye. We need to be comfortable with it. We need to use it as a marketing tool just like we used older forms of communication.

Accessibility: I’ve heard it summarized best this way, “Making anything accessible to the disabled makes it more accessible to the abled.” We need to make our communications accessible to the challenged not just because it’s the law, but because it makes it more accessible to the masses.

Usability and Usability testing: Like accessibility, usable design is universal. If it is good for a few chances are it’s good for the many. We need to make the web usable the first time or it wont get used and other aspects of our business will suffer – marketing, accessibility, management, etc.

Content Management: When we manage content well it makes life a whole lot easier. A Content Management System (CMS) can take care of a lot of above e.g. accessible, usable blogs with links to twitter/facebook/myspace.

Tag: marketing