Higher Education Digital Marketing

Higher Education = Higher Expectations

Marketers and communications professionals in higher education are facing significant new challenges. Among them: the “enrollment cliff”; declining parent/student/alum engagement; and the need to stay on top of marketing best practices in an environment that is often slow to adopt new technologies.

We work with many iconic higher education institutions to assess, analyze, improve, and optimize their marketing and communications initiatives to meet the ever-escalating expectations of parents and alums, and reach the ever-elusive student and prospective student cohort.

Everything You Need and Nothing You Don’t

We’re not another one of those “higher education agencies” that want to take over your marketing from soup to nuts, including branding, design, tactics, and execution. At Convince & Convert, we’ve worked with enough higher education marketers to know that you and your team are likely to be smart, progressive, motivated, and at least a little bit frustrated. You know you CAN succeed, and take your marketing and comms to the next level. We know it as well.

We’re here to help, by creating a roadmap of success that YOU can implement, not one that we will execute on your behalf.

We are a strategy and operations planning consultancy that works with universities to create and codify 18-month digital communications overhauls, with corresponding playbooks that you can use to guide your work.

Problems We Help You Solve

• Declining student inquiry rates
• Declining yield
• Declining time spent on website
• Declining engagement with social media and digital content
• Declining ability to reach alums and donors via email, social media
• Questions about new social channels like Snapchat, TikTok
• Challenges of how to create impactful campus-wide social media editorial calendar
• Uncertainty about which marketing technologies are worth the spend
• Uncertainty about percentage of content that should be video/audio
• How to successfully staff digital marketing
• How to effectively measure digital communications
• How to create separate digital marketing approaches for parents, students, alums, and beyond
• How to integrate alumni magazine into digital content, and vice-versa

We’ve Helped These Higher Education Marketers

Our clients and case studies speak for themselves, but in the past 24 months we’ve helped these organizations boost the effectiveness and impact of their digital communications programs:

• Arizona State University – Campus Wide
• Central New Mexico Community College – Campus Wide
• Indiana University Alumni Association
• Indiana University Eskenazi Art Museum
• Indiana University Foundation
• Oregon State University eCampus
• Purdue University – Campus Wide
• University of Arizona College of Social & Behavioral Sciences
• University of California-San Diego Extension
• University of Minnesota – System
• University of Texas Alumni Association

What We Deliver

Many of our best programs for higher education are rooted in deep audience analysis and journey mapping, to help you see which stories, channels, and calls-to-action most deeply resonate with your key constituencies.

Specific strategic plan and operations roadmap programs for universities include:

Digital Marketing Audit and Strategy

Content Marketing Audit and Strategy

Social Media Audit and Strategy

Email/Messaging Audit and Strategy

Website(s) Audit and Strategy

Customer Experience Audit and Strategy (especially good for campus tour optimization)

How can we help you? We’re delighted to create a custom program to propel your campus forward.

You Might Like These Insights

As part of our extensive work in higher education marketing, our team has created several research reports and position papers you may appreciate:

White Paper: 5 Ways Alumni Associations Can Boost Member Engagement

White Paper: Is Your Social Media + Content Strategy Keeping Up With the Pace of Change?

White Paper: 6 Reasons to Bring in an Outside Consultant

Research Report: Best Websites Among America’s Top Universities

Webinar (43 minutes): How Alumni Associations & Foundations Can Engage Members with Relevant Content

Webinar (13 minutes): How Alumni Associations & University Foundations can Boost Social Media Effectiveness

Webinar (14 minutes): The Key Social Media & Content Metrics for Higher Ed