The Three C's of Content Marketing in Education: Creation, Curation and Crowdsourcing
Location: Colorado B
As content continues to grow as a core component of digital marketing efforts in education, learn how you can create new content efficiently, re-purpose existing content and empower your students, faculty and alumni to fuel your content marketing initiatives. In this session, we’ll discuss the opportunities and challenges of executing a content marketing strategy, the changes in audience content expectations and the critical importance of understanding the role that context plays in placement and distribution.
Data Visualization: UnGeeked
Location: Colorado D
Data visualization is equal parts storytelling, clear design, and math. Building and reading data visualizations is no more complicated. This “unGeeked” session provides a non-threatening plain-language overview of construction and useful tools. The session wraps up with inspiring case studies and resource sharing toward participants finding their own solutions.
Strategic Enrollment Management Practices from Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology
Location: Colorado G
Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) offers a comprehensive portfolio of associate, bachelor and master of professional studies degrees via Penn State World Campus, a student-centered support unit responsible for serving adult learners through online learning. IST’s graduate and undergraduate degrees have been consistently ranked as top online programs. However, our annual enrollment growth continues to challenge and nearly out-pace our resources as industry demand rises. How can we maintain quality and academic excellence while meeting the demand for more courses and degree options? This session will focus on key collaborative enrollment management strategies such as innovative approaches to faculty depth and enrollment distribution tactics that have been critical to our success.
Leveraging Facebook Advertising to Engage Students and Increase Enrollment
Location: Colorado I
Facebook was once an effective and free way of reaching audiences. But it’s increasingly moving toward a “pay-to-play” model that requires marketers to commit portions of their budget to ensure their messages are seen. This session will explore four of the Facebook ad objective types: click-to-website, boosted posts, new page likes, and event attendance. Attendees will learn how to build these ads and leverage Facebook’s robust targeting options to reach current and prospective students.
Reinventing the Summer Term: Marketing and Branding Lessons from a Successful Turnaround
Location: Colorado B
The Summer term is a unique option that can bring in new enrollments from additional sources, but comes with its own unique challenges. In 2012, the SEM team at Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education was faced with the challenge of reinvigorating declining enrollments in Summer Sessions. Hear how segmentation strategy and a “story view" of prospects’ experiences was central to this project’s success. See how the marketing strategy was developed, executed, and has unfolded over time through a unique brand identity, integrated website design, broad marketing tactics and careful data mining. And learn how these lessons are applied beyond the Summer term.
Crossing the Digital Divide: Integrating Digital into Your Continuing Education Marketing
Location: Colorado D
Research indicates that 89% of individuals seeking information on higher education seek it first online. But for continuing and online education marketers that means more than just a website. For your website to be even marginally effective for recruitment and registration, you need to drive traffic through search engine optimization, paid search, and email marketing. Optimizing your landing page – with the right content and the right navigational structure – is also key. Of course, once you’ve taken steps to enhance your digital marketing, you need to consider the role digital marketing plays in your overall marketing strategy and the evaluation of results. This session will help continuing and online education marketers effectively integrate digital marketing into their overall marketing mix.
Vertical Storytelling: Creating Responsive and Effective Digital Content
Location: Colorado G
Today’s continuing and online education audiences are different from yesterday’s. They expect content to look right on any device. They become impatient with tiny text, links too small to click, and cumbersome column structures. And they’re perfectly happy to bounce from a web page or delete an email if it fails to meet these expectations. This session explores Vertical Storytelling, a method of creating digital content that meets current audience expectations, produces higher conversion rates, works equally effectively for web and email and, surprisingly, is easier for communication designers to produce. Drawing on narrative theory, neuroscience, and UX design best practices, this session recommends expert tips, tools and techniques for producing Vertical Storytelling content.
Team-Based Approaches to Attract, Recruit, and Successfully Retain Adult Learners
Location: Colorado I
Adult learners are a unique undergraduate student segment and college marketers are realigning academic and recruitment practices to support this demographic. Research shows that relationships with faculty and advisors are key to nurturing adult-student leads from the information-gathering process to enrollment. In this workshop, a team including a recruiter, an academic advisor, and a faculty member will share a newly implemented student-based model of recruiting that incorporates multiple roles in the recruitment process for adult students. Attend this interactive session to learn about the specific needs, lifestyles, and barriers adult students encounter, and how colleges can tailor recruitment and academic practices to attract and retain this group.
Thursday, November 5
Omnichannel Marketing: Driving Consumer Behavior across Channels and Platforms
Location: Colorado B
In today’s world of globalization, brand saturation, and media fragmentation, there is a rising demand for communicators to effectively connect with consumers through a continuous, user-centric approach. To deliver this personalized consumer experience, the Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies (SCS) employs omnichannel marketing tactics, which are designed to deliver consistent and compelling brand messages to target audiences at multiple touch points across various platforms. Unlike the traditional multichannel marketing approaches of the recent past, omnichannel marketing takes a holistic approach that focuses less on silos and more on the overall consumer experience. Session attendees will learn how to employ omnichannel marketing tactics, in order to create awareness and drive engagement, ultimately guiding prospective students through the customer journey.
Evolve Your Dashboard: Design and Develop an Executive Dashboard
Location: Colorado D
Many UPCEA members are expressing interest in analytics, data, and dashboards. The Marketing director and Enrollment Management director at the University of Richmond School of Professional and Continuing Studies recently collaborated to develop a bi-monthly reporting dashboard to provide regular, meaningful data points to senior leadership to enable and encourage data-driven decision making. This session will share the process of selecting key performance metrics to report, the procedure for collecting data, reception of the dashboard by senior leadership, and preliminary results. Three members of our marketing and communications team will address their collaborative roles in and approach to the project. Attendees will be able to apply the principles of our experience to their own metrics and procedures.
“But what does it look like on the phone?” Developing a Responsive Web Design Strategy
Location: Colorado G
“Mobile-first,” “viewport,” “responsive design.” What does it all mean? In this session, we’ll discuss current trends in mobile web development, key concepts of responsive web design, and why it’s important that your site is responsive. We’ll show you how you can start building a responsive web design strategy that considers prospect engagement, user experience, and the diverse internal and external audiences with which continuing and online education professionals work.
Numbers are Worth 1,000 Words: Lessons Learned on the Path to Reaching Adult Learners
Location: Colorado I
Are you satisfied with the number of prospective adult students generated by your current communications strategies? The NIU Outreach promotions team was not. We had implemented several credit-program communications campaigns that generated strong initial inquiries. But, the true story was in the data: inquiries were not always converting to robust numbers of qualified prospects. The promotions team decided to try several new approaches. Learn which tools and strategies generated the right adult students for the University’s programs and how the team used data to drive strategic decisions.
Beating the “Silent Funnel” with Conversion-Centered Website Design and Content
Location: Colorado B
With the world’s information at their fingertips, millennials and gen-next have the ability to curate their online experiences based on time, location, mood, and interaction. Research shows that websites are the most used and most useful sources for prospective students as they research programs. Your program’s website, and the story you tell on it, are critical to your overall marketing success in reaching (and converting) prospective students. This session will share insights from both the Georgetown School of Continuing Studies and the University of Wisconsin-Extension about improving audience engagement through the creation of compelling user-centered content. Attendees will learn how to leverage their institution’s unique assets to connect with prospective students, communicate the story behind their brand, and build a website that delivers conversions.
Becoming an Experience Driven Organization
Location: Colorado D
The experience you provide a prospective student, current student and past student is now a key differentiator in a marketplace that is getting more and more crowded. In this session you will hear from two schools, one who has been operating as an experience driven organization for a year and another who is just starting the journey. It's been one year since California State East Bay launched a new, human-centered user experience. University of Houston is six months into an initiative to do the same. The marketing directors at each of these institutions are joining forces, along with Guy Felder of Story+Structure, to give you a 360-degree view of the process of becoming an experience driven organization and the results that follow the transformation.
Growing Global: Strategic Advancement in International Online Enrollment
Location: Colorado G
Online learning is a growing strategic enrollment component in today's landscape of higher education. Future success entails international growth, which requires significant research and planning to ensure effective management of marketing resources. Concomitantly, entering the international marketplace necessitates institutional buy-in, pedagogical quality, and cultural inclusiveness. This session will provide a high-level overview of current trends in international online recruitment, enrollment, and marketing.
Promoted Tweets - How to Use Paid Ads on Twitter for Engagement and Lead Generation
Location: Colorado I
With more than 300 million active users, most of which are tech-savvy and aged 18 to 45, Twitter is a tantalizing marketing channel for adult and online education. And Twitter’s advertising platform (similar to Facebook and LinkedIn) makes it effective for reaching specialized audiences. Attendees will gain an understanding of what to expect when advertising on Twitter and how it differs from other paid online marketing channels. Using this information, we’ll compare Twitter’s platform with competing platforms and discuss when Twitter makes sense for your programs. Finally, we’ll explore how to build paid ad campaigns on Twitter. This will include best practices for creating effective ads and guidelines for choosing targeting techniques for specific types of programs. Participants are encouraged to bring their laptop or tablet and build a simple campaign during the seminar.
Friday, November 6
Meaningful Marketing for MOOCs
Location: Colorado B
In 2013, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered its first slate of massive open online courses (MOOCs) via Coursera, featuring topics of general interest such as human evolution and financial markets. Although these courses reached a wide, global audience, we found that most participants gave the credit to Coursera. For the second slate of MOOCs in 2015-16, the university took ownership of marketing, and we also oriented the courses toward Wisconsin. This session will cover the effort to create partnerships with libraries, theater troupes, environmental organizations, government agencies, and other institutions throughout the state to create meaningful experiences; the use of metrics to shape the pedagogical approach and measure outcomes; the attempt to target Wisconsin audiences while on a limited budget; and the possibilities for using the MOOCs to generate leads for UW-Madison’s credit courses.
Risk Management in Planning CRM Implementation – A Cautionary Tale
Location: Colorado D
What do you do when after nearly a year of planning and training your lead CRM administrator has a baby on the day that you roll out your new CRM, and the expertise she brings to the table is now out of the office for 14 weeks? While our rollout at Colorado State University Online was not without a unique set of challenges, it has been an overall success. This session will highlight our recent CRM transition from Hobsons to Salesforce. Attendees will explore ways to mitigate risk and prepare for the challenges that you know are coming and respond to those you do not.
The Impact of Marketing on Enrollment and Student Retention
Location: Colorado G
According to research conducted by the National Student Clearinghouse, over the past 20 years, more than 31 million students have enrolled in college and left without receiving a degree or certificate. Almost one-third had only a minimal interaction with the higher education system, having enrolled for just a single term at a single institution. Improving completion rates, affordability, and effectiveness often starts with marketing. This session will address marketing now and later along the student lifecycle. We will explore the role of student centered marketing (including the kinds of campaigns and messages that are most relevant) in creating motivation for each individual student to start, motivation to stay, and if necessary, motivation to re-engage.
Social Storytelling: Using Social Media to
Connect with your Students at the Next Level
Location: Colorado I
If you want to connect with your audience at the next level, you need to go where they are: the world of social media. Building an effective brand presence on social media today is about more than having a presence on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You need to tell your brand story in creative ways that encourage engagement - which means letting your students and supporters take over part of your story. This session will cover how to tell your story effectively on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube; ways to optimize your content for each platform; tips on involving staff, students and community partners to enhance your story and help it reach a wider audience; and will provide a toolbox of free resources for improving your social media content marketing.
Introduction to Marketing Automation
Location: Colorado B
Learn how sophisticated marketing automation tools can help you and your team generate results that matter. This session will help participants understand what marketing automation is, and the reasons for implementing a marketing automation tool. Participants will learn how to select the best tool for your needs, what is required to properly implement a marketing automation tool, how implementation will change your team’s workflow, and what type of results you can expect.
Optimizing High-Touch Outreach after CRM Implementation
Location: Colorado D
In April of 2013, Oregon State University Ecampus opted to use Hobsons Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to create and implement high-touch outreach to prospective students. This session will provide an overview of the creation process and the factors to consider when implementing communication plans through a CRM and how it might be used to improve marketing and enrollment strategies. Implementing a high-touch plan outreach necessitates an accessible platform for Enrollment Specialists as well as prospective students. After having the CRM for over two years, Ecampus has been able to collect data to see the impact this high-touch outreach is having, and is excited to share with you their insights and recommendations.
Navigating Enrollment in a New Era: Designing an Exceptional .edu Exploration Experience
Location: Colorado G
This session will walk through the complex competitive environment of enrollment and marketing in a new era of higher education. A process for developing and leveraging a Customer Journey Design will serve as guidance for navigating the challenges faced by institutions in this space. Opportunities for prospect profile information to be captured and leveraged for personalization and enhanced engagement will be central to the purpose of the session. Participants will leave with an understanding of the context of the competitive environment in higher education moving forward, and tools they can apply at their own institutions to drive constructive change in their enrollment and marketing operation.
“Interested-Engaged-Committed”: Redefining and Streamlining your Enrollment Marketing Funnel
Location: Colorado I
The typical college or university enrollment funnel includes a large segmentation of activities and measures which education marketers obsess and labor over. In 2014, Regis University overhauled its marketing and messaging approach to better resonate with the hard-to-impress adult learner market. Immediate and measurable gains have been seen, however the long-term view found a large number of prospective students did not move through the funnel in the same manner as traditional undergraduates. In response, Regis redefined the approach by streamlining the funnel into three primary stages: Interested-Engaged-Committed. This presentation will demonstrate how Regis University challenged convention and changed the view of the typical enrollment marketing funnel often used with the adult learner market.