Approval and marketing tend to have a relatively close relationship in science. They are often in separate offices, have competing visions, and compete for attention and resources. After more than 25 years in the housing registry, I have just started a new position bringing together these often absent partners.
Usually the marketing office is part of the PhD or academic affairs. But in most organizations, subscriptions are the marketing bureau's biggest customer. If tuition is your institution's primary source of income, you should focus your promotional resources on recruiting students. As in the business world, marketing and college admissions for students are steps along the same path, not separate experiences. Strong marketing makes recruiting students much easier.
Therefore, it makes sense to place marketing and communication in the same area as the listings. And mergers like this seem to be growing in popularity from what I've heard and seen from people in both fields. While I am excited to take on this new role and to integrate these two areas into one strong team, I know that bringing people together across historical boundaries will not be easy.
Step 1: Dive into campus marketing. I began by taking stock of the resources and skills of our communications staff. I've made some observations—from a perspective outside of the profession—on the challenges marketing teams face in this competitive era of higher education.
Everyone comes from somewhere else. As with any college career, no one grew up thinking, "I'm going to work in a college marketing office." People almost always come across communications elsewhere. The marketing office consists of experienced journalists, news photographers, non-profit writers and IT staff. Different backgrounds can affect the way a marketing team does its job. When there is a skills mismatch, your college may not be able to provide communications services and you may end up in jobs for which you were not trained.
Different backgrounds can also lead to disagreements about the exact role of the marketing team:
- Are we a service bureau focused on interior components?
- Are we a design agency that only produces creative products?
- Is it our job to take the lead in building the university's brand and focus on building external markets?
Oddly enough, I think the answer to all three questions is yes. We are all of those things. The challenge is not to choose one identity over another, but to align different communication functions and organize the team to fulfill them.
Marketing is a rapidly evolving field and employees need to keep up with and be open to continuous professional development. And the administration must commit to putting together a full team. By acknowledging the diverse backgrounds of your employees and helping them identify their strengths and gaps in experience, you can build a team that can handle anything.
Everyone thinks they can do your job. This is one of the biggest challenges for the campus communications team: everyone is a marketing “expert”. We receive hundreds, if not thousands, of marketing messages every day, which means we're all familiarizing ourselves with basic marketing ideas and practices.
This can easily make us feel like we know more about marketing than we do. Teachers, recruiters, or fundraisers might think, I'm an expert in my field. Who better to tell this story than me? And there is a grain of truth in that. But marketing communication is a two-way conversation where you not only need to know the product, but also the relevant audience and the best way to reach them. And that second element is something that none of us outside of marketing fully understand.
In some cases, you get caught in a vicious circle where the marketing team feels undervalued and undervalued in their job, while the subject matter experts feel like they are getting in the way of the marketing team trying to run the show.
Not long ago, I spoke to a colleague, Eric Maguire, vice president of enrollment at Wake Forest University, who built the enrollment and marketing teams while a student at Ithaca College. "One of the most important things we did when I took over the marketing office was to visit the campus, which included other offices," he says. "We're trying to emphasize that while we're willing to help with all kinds of projects, we prefer areas where we don't offer a complete solution where we need to customize or customize them." Share concerns with us and allow us to work with them to find the best solution.”
Art versus business. Sales offices often attract artists—people with creative eyes and high standards, but who need the salaries and benefits that art rarely offers. Desiring more financial security, they often find it in marketing offices. This can be overwhelming as it creates a high quality visual product.
It can also be a source of friction. Most campus clients want their marketing team to function more like a company and less like an art studio. When professionals want to promote their latest project, they care more about getting it done quickly than being smart or creative (they think their work is the star, not the pitch). For employees who are artists at heart, this can be a real challenge. You take a job in marketing hoping that others will really appreciate the effort and thought you put into it.
Strong project management is important here. The best project managers help employees identify which projects require the true artistic touch and which need to be completed as quickly as possible. Your marketing leadership should recognize the work and design strengths of different employees and seek to align them with the campus customers who value and benefit most from their skills. Even highly qualified, experienced and independent employees can benefit from a clear project management structure and system that uses their strengths.
Proactive versus reactive. Based on past and current conversations, I get the impression that in many marketing bureaus, people feel like they're constantly reacting rather than moving in a specific direction. Videographers have a long list of requests they will never receive. Designers juggle a series of poorly prioritized projects and unclear deadlines. As a crisis hits universities, social media executives are constantly reacting to developments and marketing teams are scrambling to keep up.
Of course, some backlash is inevitable in a fast-paced, more agile environment, but I think some of that codified panic is due to a lack of proactive leadership. One of the biggest challenges in the competitive higher education market is finding an institutional narrative that is authentic and resonates with students. Yes, Professor A is doing great work in a particular area, Professor B has had great academic experience for students, and the university has received national recognition for C, but what do they all have in common? What are the common themes that shape the history of the organization?
That missing narrative is the marketing agency's greatest opportunity. Of course, it takes a lot of time and effort to find and fix the problem, but the marketing team is the team that can best spread this message. The marketing staff sees all the stories and has the best perspective to identify the real themes in the student experience.
Maguire, Vice President of Wake Forest, stated, “At my previous facility we had early enrollment successes, but things really took off when we developed a concept that encapsulated our personality and the desires of the market. . When we heard about the idea, we immediately knew it would transform the way we do business. "By marketing the concept, it has really expanded our pool of applicants."
Identifying the narrative allows the marketing department to prioritize and plan consistently. What videos do we need? What releases should we make? The one that supports the narrative the most. Focusing on the narrative also allows the team to say no to side projects. Without a story, you reject someone's idea. By doing so, you are urging voters to understand how something they want fits into the overall story of the organization before moving on.
How can we integrate marketing and registration? It's not enough to share an office space or an organizational chart. Whether you're considering a merger or already have marketing and offerings under one roof, the goal is to get the most out of a true integration. Instead of working in parallel, both groups can learn to work together. Here are some of our first steps toward that goal:
- One tactic we're trying is to break the enrollment and marketing teams into smaller workgroups dedicated to topics like story finding, customer experiences, and communication flow. The team includes members from marketing, sales and financial support, and has started meetings to improve communication and the exchange of ideas.
- We're also looking at physically replacing employees so they can work more smoothly in teams for the different audiences we serve. For example, our student ambassadors provide weekly video content to our social media managers. Does it make sense to produce more organic content together?
- We talk about how we can help people in this once divided world to also socialize through sharing traditions and celebrations in the workplace.
- It is important to ensure that each group's goals are everyone's goals. Everyone should share the credit and responsibility for achieving a goal, whether it's an enrollment goal, a successful grant assessment and net income goal, or a broad social media campaign. It's time to change the mindset of competing for resources and paying attention to celebrating the achievement of common goals.
We still have a long way to go, but we've made a good start. Already after the first month I noticed that both groups communicated more openly with each other and developed a relationship "in the hallway". We've made some structural changes that I know can make people nervous, but I've seen new leadership emerge and employees gain more say. I see that both teams are more looking forward to some big projects that we will create, for example a new viewbook design. It felt like the moment and the beginning of something new.
These offices can be each other's best allies on campus. By working together, we can capture the incredible creativity and passion of these two professions and use that spark to drive the organization forward and tell its story in a compelling way.
