How Promoting Your University Marketing Can Help You Predict the Future

Every institution has the challenge of sharing their success in university marketing. But, by letting everyone know your success and promoting it internally, you can help guide the future discussions and understanding of your department’s work and capabilities…thus predicting your own future.

As you start to consider budgets and preparing for the start of the new year of university marketing, it is always good to consider how to better inform the internal audiences to the success you have had this year.

As such, we recently participated in an online conversation. The initial conversation was started with the following question:

We are looking for ways to promote what our university marketing office does and get our on-campus folks engaged in helping promote the university as a whole.  We are thinking about establishing some vehicle for regularly communicating with the administration (and possibly faculty and staff).  What should we do?

Here are a few ideas we provided.

[Infographic] University Marketing Year in Review

Take the data from the year (top press, media coverage, social media growth, etc.) and have an infographic created to reflect those key metrics. You can go as far as a year over year comparison, but more than anything else, you want to provide a quick read and a “data dashboard” for leadership to understand your work. By leveraging the university marketing report in the form of an infographic, you can be assured it will be read and distributed in key places (executive staff, board reports, etc.)

Incentive/Contest to Encourage Promotion

Another idea we posed was engaging the campus community through an incentive or contest tied to a metric that you hope to promote your university marketing. For instance, you could use a game or contest to encourage faculty and staff to promote news on social media. Here are some reference articles that we found and provided:

• How to Get Your Employees and Customers to Market for You
• Four Tips for Structuring Employee Incentive Programs
• Here’s Why Your Employee Referral Program Isn’t Working

A couple metrics you might use to measure the incentives:

• New Followers to Admissions/Alumni/Development from retweets and/or other social media.
• A simple quiz or survey to measure their knowledge and awareness of your work.
• Have the campus participate in a measured way for enrollment and development leads.
• Chipotle held an “Adventurrito” contest. It was essentially daily tests to get individuals to learn more about the brand and what they were doing in their marketing. Brilliant campaign. Lessons could be applied to a smaller scale in your situation.

Be sure to consider using gamification in your incentives and promotions. Gamification is a new marketing technique to measure and educate by leveraging gaming systems: badges, high-scores, competition. There are several tools available. Here are a couple:

• Bunchball.com
• Mindspace.net

Either of these sites will allow you to build the tools and select the objectives that will help you put the program together.

Strategy and Tools

Overall, you’ll need clear objectives and a strategy to get the participation from your community and then possible tools to measure and reward that engagement with your campus. Be sure to think through the process and plan accordingly to assure that letting others know about your university marketing will create future success.

If you need help with any of your marketing strategies, feel free to reach out.

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Featured Image by pixel2013 via Pixabay