3 Simple Steps to Improve Academic Marketing
What is Academic Marketing?
Academic marketing is different from college marketing. College marketing communicates to a very narrow audience. Communications are targeted to pre-college students through promotional materials, word-of-mouth, buzz marketing, and giveaways. Academic marketing, on the other hand, communicates to a much broader audience: donors, parents, students, academics, the media, etc. It is also known as university marketing.
The Current State of Academic Marketing
Academic marketing takes on several forms. There is the US News & World Report’s famous report on colleges and universities. It’s well known that schools try to get into this report to help market themselves. More directly, after the PSAT or SAT, schools send promotional materials to the test-takers.
Universities and colleges also spend some time on branding as seen in logos and mission statements. They usually have a Web site. There is also a fair amount of public relations work at large institutions. They appear in journals, newspapers, and speak as experts on NPR. And there is the plea for alumni donations that always seems to be accompanied by high-level brand-awareness material.
While this does market a university or college, this is a very limited set of marketing tactics. Are these tactics as effective as they could be?
What’s Missing?
When looking at the current state of academic marketing, their general strategies, and basic tactics, we can see that the industry in general, and individual institutions in particular, are not achieving their full potential. Simply by following basic marketing rules, academic marketers will see much better results.
Three crucial pieces of marketing are missing in academic marketing.
- The first is an understanding of the audience.
- The second is an understanding of motivation to action.
- And the third is directness.
The academic world doesn’t do a good job of communicating directly to their (proper) audience segments and motivating them to action. When done correctly, academic marketers will see an immediate improvement in their marketing results.
Step 1: Define the Target Audience
Defining the audience is crucial to the success of any communication. While this is the most basic concept in marketing, academic marketers have failed to understand their audience. The biggest mistake is communicating to a very broad audience in general terms rather than a narrow audience in specific terms.
For instance, a university might be interested in improving recruitment. Careful thought then needs to be applied to figure out who is the audience for this goal. In this case the audience is likely parents, potential students, alumni, and high school counselors. The world of recruitment is very narrow, yet schools almost always adopt a broad communication strategy, opting for very general messages to a large audience. Instead, universities should consider how to reach individual audiences for more effective communication.
Audience construction starts with a university or department identifying people affected by its interest. Audience analysis is understanding those persons to make sure that the communication relates to their real needs and desires to motivate them to action. Thinking about the audience in this way leads to creating better messages. And better messages leads to action.
Step 2: Understand the Desired Action and How to Get It
Motivation to action is at the heart of all marketing. Marketing is a process of communicating clearly with an audience to motivate them to take some action. Academic marketing fails to understand what it wants its audience to do or how to motivate the audience to do it.
Donor relations, especially with alumni, is the exception. There, clear calls to action abound. Outside this area, universities often don’t seem to understand what they want their audience to do. Consider a department newsletter. Often an academic department sends a yearly communication. It’s apparently designed to keep everyone informed about the department. But, no one asks “Why?”. To communicate effectively, there needs to be a reason for it. There needs to be something that will be different in the world because of the newsletter. Information might certainly be good to have, but we need to understand what will be done with the information. What need will it fill?
Once we know what action we are trying to influence, we then need to understand how to motivate the audience to take this action. Why is it beneficial? Why should they do it? What do they get out of it? This is obviously closely related to an understanding of the audience.
Step 3: Use Directness
Academic marketing is often too subtle. It speaks to an audience that is too broad with communications that are too general. General communication cannot be personal. And since it can’t be personal, it can’t address the true needs and concerns of the audience. Thus, general communication is necessarily indirect.
Indirect communication is not compelling or efficient. Because the communication is indirect, either you ask the audience to take some general action, which likely doesn’t apply to them. Or, you ask the audience to figure out which action to take. Either way, the audience immediately feels the impersonal nature of the communication.
The better approach is to follow the first two rules: audience and motivation. When combined, this leads to a clear understanding of precisely what needs to be communicated. And this leads to directness.
Directness is good because it’s much more likely to produce action. Think about a central feature of CPR training. When you need someone to call 911, you don’t say ‘Someone call 911!’. Instead, you point at someone (anyone), and say ‘YOU call 911!’. Direct communication that speaks to that person is much more likely to produce results.
Academic Marketing Can Work
Until now, three crucial pieces of marketing have been missing in academic marketing. However, if done correctly, Academic Marketing can work well. Always define the target audience, understand what you want them to do, learn what motivates them, and speak to them directly. This is the easiest way to dramatically increase results and maximize long-term effectiveness of academic marketing.